I greet you, O vast and indifferent Ocean—not because you are beautiful, for beauty is a lie told by the weak, but because you are a boiling cauldron of salt and silence. You swallow the armadas of men as easily as a toad gulps a fly, and in your "aquatic entrails," the fish laugh at the drowning sailors who once claimed to be your masters.
The book, originally published in 1868, is famous for its "black humor," blasphemy, and the iconic imagery of Maldoror's rebellion against God and humanity. The Hymn of the Carrion-Sky
I have seen the female shark in the wake of the shipwreck, her fins cutting the water like a guillotine through silk, and I have found in her the only embrace that does not taste of betrayal. We shall couple beneath the foam, a union of scales and scars, while the stars above—those "hypocritical eyes" of the firmament—watch in frozen horror.
Let the dogs bark at the moon until their tongues hang like limp rags of red velvet; let them tear each other into "thousands of pieces" in a frenzy of infinite thirst. I shall join them. I shall take the beak of a giant vulture and stitch it to my face so that I may better appreciate the stench of the "lumpy blennorrhagic pus" that constitutes the soul of the Creator.
Translator R.J. Dent: "You Don't Find Maldoror—It ... - LitReactor