Warning: contains rude words. Excuse my French. The Marquis de Sade’s earliest work of fiction, The 120 Days of Sodom, is also his most extreme. More Marquis De Sade Justine Illustrations images.

Warning: contains rude words. Excuse my French. The Marquis de Sade’s earliest work of fiction, The 120 Days of Sodom, is also his most extreme.

It tells the story of four libertines – a duke, a bishop, a judge and a banker – who lock themselves away in a castle with an entourage that includes two harems of teenage boys and girls. Sonny Clark Trio 1957 Rar. Four ageing prostitutes, appointed as storytellers, each tell of 150 “passions” or perversions over the course of a month. The libertines enact the passions they hear described, and as these become more violent, the narrative builds to a murderous climax. Though Sade never finished his novel, and the last three parts are in note form only, it remains a uniquely disturbing work.

And therefore uniquely challenging to translate. Perhaps this was the reason no one had attempted a new translation since the one first published by Austryn Wainhouse in 1954 (and revised with Richard Seaver in 1966). In any case, Thomas Wynn and I felt a new version was long overdue, and, much to our surprise, Penguin Classics agreed. Portrait of the Marquis de Sade, 1760 Translating obscenity into your own language takes some getting used to. However familiar one becomes with another language, a trace of otherness always remains.

Sometimes this can add to the beauty of the language, or to its mystique, but when it comes to obscenity there is a distinct softening effect. Rude words in other languages never have quite the same force, so translating them into one’s own language brings the obscenity home in more ways than one. English reserve probably plays a part in the process, too. When we started translating 120 Days I soon realised I was instinctively toning the original down, avoiding words that I found jarringly ugly. I may not have overcome that entirely (no dicks or cocks for me, thank you very much!) but I realised pretty quickly that a watered-down version of Sade’s novel would be the worst possible outcome. Ahmed Faraz Poetry In Urdu Pdf.

The last thing we wanted to produce was a text that was any less shocking – and therefore potentially appealing – than the original. We had a duty to be just as rude, crude, and revolting as Sade. Ultimately, we decided on “to frig” even though we were aware that this use of the word would be unfamiliar to many readers – particularly those too young to remember the Sex Pistols’ version of Friggin’ in the Riggin’ (1979). When we canvassed our students, most thought “frig” was a euphemism for “fuck”; and indeed most dictionaries now give “have sexual intercourse with” as the first definition, and “to masturbate” as the second. But “to frig” works in a way that the alternatives do not – it is compact, and usable reflexively or non-reflexively, and transitively or intransitively. We think – or hope – its general unfamiliarity might work in its favour for many readers, as this will mean it won’t have strong associations of one particular form of English. In any case, as it occurs so frequently in our translation, we hope readers will soon get used to it and that its initial strangeness will soon be forgotten.