Ebook: Watchfiends and Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period

This is the first new English language anthology of Artaud's writing in nearly twenty years, and reflects an increased interest in his late work (a show of Artaud's visual art from this period was on view at MOMA throughout 19961). Clayton Eshleman's translations have won widespread acclaim, including a National Book Award. Now in its second printing.

Clayton Eshleman's translations are the finest and most authentic which have yet been made from Artaud's writing. Artaud's final work is his strongest and most enduring, and this collection has been wisely selected and magnificently realized. Artaud is being taken into the 21st century. —Stephen Barber~Among Antonin Artaud's most brilliant works are the scatological glossolalia composed in the final three years of his life (1945-1948), during and after his incarceration in an asylum at Rodez. These represent some of the most powerful outpourings ever recorded, a torrent of speech from the other side of sanity and the occult. In this collection, the most complete representation of this period of Artaud's work ever presented in English, and the first new anthology of Artaud published in the U.S. since Helen Weaver's 1976 Selected Writings, cogent statements of theory are paired with the raving poetry of such pieces as Artaud the Momo, Here Lies, and To Have Done with the Judgment of God. These are translated with drama and accuracy by Clayton Eshleman, whose renditions of Vallejo and Césaire have won widespread acclaim, including a National Book Award.


These eleven pieces represent the first English translations of work from what Eshleman calls Artaud's "second" period (1946-48), the two years between his seven-year confinement in various mental institutions and his death. After his brush with surrealism, Artaud rejected membership in modernism's various movements, but continued to work with its theme of merging art and life in both his writings (The Theatre and its Double) and performances (including an appearance in The Passion of Joan of Arc). As documented in Eshleman's worthwhile biographical introduction, Artaud's quixotic theatrical crusades proved shattering. In this collection, readers witness Artaud's re-birth: in the poem "Artaud the Momo," one of several texts presented in both French and English, Artaud takes on the ironic persona of the village idiot, pathologically sexualized, "burst dead at the foot of a bound." Bodily and linguistic preoccupations merge, as Artaud continues his fascination with "doubleness"-of persons, places, gods, language and himself. In "Here Lies" and "Interjections," he explores what he sees as the inherent duplicity of identity: "This is how/ daddy and mommy were/ pulled out of me." The aborted radio broadcast "To Have Done with the Judgement of God" concludes that after we have disposed of belief in God, "it is man that we must now decide to emasculate." Artaud intersperses his often cogent social critique with Dada-esque ravings of pure sound, creating a one-man carnival of voices. The result holds up remarkably well; his "Fragmentations" of the poetic voice prove prophetic to today's fractured poetic state of affairs.