Neglected/Underrated Writers

It occurs to me that if anyone here wants to read my translation of the Quiroga story then do please PM me. It's not been published but I'd be glad to share it with interested readers.

Mark S.

Horacio Quiroga - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Horacio_Quiroga

[Uitarii]

Quote Originally Posted by mark_samuels

Leopoldo Lugones, I think. Well, at least outside of Latin America. He really paved the way for Borges. His book of weird tales Strange Forces is marvellous. Mark S.

Mark, indeed Leopoldo Lugones' "Las fuerzas extranas" ("The Strange Forces") is a great collection, he is one of the masters of the macabre, grotesque and strange.

I also think that he may be neglected or underrated these days, even (to a much lesser degree relatively to elsewhere) in Latin America, and agree he was not so with the relevant generation of writers that followed him. Borges' works for instance were, in a limited sense, a homage to Lugones, per Borges: "So in regard to Leopoldo Lugones, I recognise myself as a disciple and now that I write rather differently and profess a different aesthetic, I always suspect that I am writing something in secret for Lugones”.

As an aside, a modern day homage to Lugones or for that matter any of a number of other Spanish language authors (and that list is not short by any means) would be a delight.

[miguel1984]

The problem with Lugones was that he supported the first military coup ever in Argentina in 1930 and his son was an important police leader during that regime; some said his son was the first to use a cattle prod as a torture device. This kind of obscured his literary legacy.

Also, Lugones committed suicide in 1938, his son in 1971, his granddaughter was murdered during the last military dictatorship in the 1970s and his great-grandson also killed himself.

I did not read much of Lugones' work, but Quiroga's (who lived many years in Argentina and was a friend and admirer of Lugones) short stories are awesome; my favorite is El Almohadón de Plumas (The Feather Pillow). Juan Darien was adapted for the stage by Julie Taymor and the great Alberto Breccia adapted one as a comic, La Gallina Degollada (The Decapitated Chicken):

LA CANCIÓN DE TRISTAN.: Antología del comic breve (7) La gallina degollada.

[MTC]

The only Lugones collection I've read was La estatua de sal, edited by Borges, in a German translation from the '80s. It included the stories "Yzur", "La Iluvia de fuego", "La estatua de sal", "Los caballos de Abdera", "Un fenómeno inexplicable", "Francesca" and "Abuela Julieta". I am sorry to say that I found most of these stories pretty dull and I haven't felt like returning to him since then.

[Hieronimo]

Worth mentioning here - Vincent O’Sullivan’s 1907 novella ‘Verschoyle’s House’; a stylistic tour-de-force and a gem of supernatural fiction, but remains largely overlooked and unregarded.

[Doctor Dugald Eldritch]

In The Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith there is a reference to an artist-poet named John Allan, who is described in a footnote as being born in the Orkney Islands in 1875 and working in Canada and, in Smith's words, whose works captures ''the very essence of black magic and Satanry.'' He also translated Baudelaire and other French poets. His poem, L'Evocation de Scorphael, appears below:

The Spirit's profanation who would know:-
Behold, eclipsed are heaven's last rays, that light
Its sculptured fane, and in Cimmerian night
It shall lie desolate, a Mystery of Woe;
Archdemons of abandonment shall haunt
Its holiest shrine; nor death nor dread shall daunt
Their blood-wrought ritual, evoking so
A strange creation, shaped In Heaven's despite.

Convened by Death, who knows no exorcism,
Shall come the adepts of Abaddon and Baal,-
Ecstaticii whose trance unlocks the Abysm;
Then pale, resplendent, from the accursed travail,
Shall crawl Hate's sublimate, Hell's fairest microcosm,-
The Scorpion-seraph, demoness Scorphael!

[dr. locrian]

Dean Paschal, a New Orleanian and an ER Doctor Extraordinaire.

His

BY THE LIGHT OF THE JUKEBOX

 

BY THE LIGHT OF THE JUKEBOX

is filled with inventive, poignant weird tales ("Moriya" is a masterpiece involving a very unusual doll), and Paschal's gone on to write a novel,

THE FROG SURGEON

 

THE FROG SURGEON

, which is equally impressive.

Have I mentioned that I love this thread?

I love this thread.

[Doctor Dugald Eldritch]

Ben Hecht is best known nowadays as a highly-regarded Hollywood screenwriter, but he also wrote two decadent phantasies in the mould of Huysmans. Fantazius Mallare is very much Hecht's answer to A Rebours. Its phantasmagorical sequel, The Kingdom of Evil, has often been compared to the works of Lovecraft and Smith. Both were illustrated, respectively, by Wallace Smith (Fantazius Mallare) and Anthony Angarola (The Kingdom of Evil). My second-hand copy of Kingdom is extremely fragile and there are many tears as a result of trying to separate the pages that have stuck together over the decades. They will never attain the poetic, literary heights of other weird writers, but they offer the connoisseur of the morbid and the grotesque a ghoulish feast.


The grotesque Beardsley-inspired nightmares of Fantazius Mallare and The Kingdom of Evil, as illustrated by Wallace Smith and Anthony Angarola.



There is also the Scottish Surrealist poet Ruthven Todd, who authored that curious phantasy novel The Lost Traveller, which T.E.D. Klein mentions in his The Events at Poroth Farm as ''the narrative of a dream turned to nightmare,''.

[Hieronimo]

John Gray is best known as a prominent member Wilde's circle in the 1890s and was rumoured to be the original of Dorian Gray. He's best known for a classic of decadent poetry, Silverpoints, which includes a splendidly macabre poem, The Barber.

Gray survived into the 1930s and shortly before his death, his novel Park was published. Here's what a London Times reviewer said. 'When in the year 2000 the neglected masterpieces of the last century are published, among them will be Park. John Gray's fantastic story, a short and dreamlike novel in which the hero, Dr Mungo Park dies and reawakes and seems to find himself in a future inhabited by a new race of black Catholics who are technically tremendously sophisticated, while the rodent-like descendants of degenerate white Englishmen live underground in wonderfully excavated caverns.'

I'm embarrassed to confess that while I've had Park on a bookshelf for quite a few years, I haven't yet got round to reading it.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

http://www.fright.com/edge/FineWriting.htm

A piece about Ken Greenhall. Not sure I'd be into his work but it sounds interesting.