Pybrac

by Pierre Louÿs

By turns amusing and offensive, Pierre Louÿs' "Pybrac" is possibly the filthiest collection of poetry ever published, and offers a taste of what the Marquis de Sade might have produced if he had ever turned his hand to verse. First published posthumously in 1927, "Pybrac" was, with "The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners," one of the first of Louÿs' secret erotic manuscripts to see clandestine publication. Composed of 313 rhymed alexandrine quatrains, the majority of them starting with the phrase "I do not like to see," "Pybrac" is in form a mockery of sixteenth-century chancellor poet Guy Du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac, whose moralizing quatrains were common literary fare for young French readers until the nineteenth century. Louÿs spent his life coming up with his own ever-growing collection of rhymed moral precepts (suitable only for adult readers): a dizzying litany describing everything he "disliked" witnessing, from lesbianism, sodomy, incest and prostitution to perversions extreme enough to give even a modern reader pause. With the rest of his erotic manuscripts, the original collection of over 2,000 quatrains was auctioned off and scattered throughout private collections; but like everything erotic, what remains, collected here, conveys an impression of unending absurdity and near-hypnotic obsession.

Genres: Poetry, France

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Pierre Louÿs was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who sought to "express pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection". He was made first a Chevalier and then an Officer of the Légion d'honneur for his contributions to French literature.

Born in Belgium, in 1870, but moved to France where he would spend the rest of his life. He was a friend of authors André Gide and Oscar Wilde, and of composer Claude Debussy.

Reviews

[B. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Still obscene by modern standards, and a few amusing moments because of the subversive absurdity, but I just felt that it grew tiresome fairly quickly. Not just in terms of content, but also because of the invariability of the form.

Wakefield Press did a good job on this, however. It’s a bilingual edition and includes several erotic drawings by the great surrealist Toyen whom I adore.



Oh well, at least my French vocab is now good enough to tackle Bataille and De Sade in the original.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

No-holes-barred debauchery described across 300+ quatrains (of an original 2,000), for which Louÿs provides endless permutations of place, manner, and means, limited only by the number of serviceable orifices in the human body. (The remaining quatrains unpublished here were auctioned off in 1936, and haven't been seen since.) Not for the squeamish or self-righteous. Brilliantly devoid of redeeming social value.

[V · Rating 2 out of 5]

A cross between a book of basely-thematically related poetry and the kind of cumpendium found wedged beneath the floorboards of a rickety treehouse long-abandoned about a twenty-minutes' walk heartwards into the forest of some east-coast suburban backyard.

You want to wait on each poem a moment because it is an isolated experience and it deserves your meditation, but really, it's pornish, so you're flicking through looking for "a good one". In the end: Pybrac more resembles the latter (re: above (cumpendium))- or one of those softcore photo sets I used to look at in the early teen years before I figured out that there were videos out there. (WOW) Maybe you save a couple shots to your "Physics Homework" folder; maybe you reread a coupl'a the quatrains, but the bulk you sorta gloss over because they're not really that titillating.

Anyhow here's a colorful one:

I do not like Irma, who answers her granny:
"Do I like buggery? Of course, don't be absurd!
I'll shit come in your face: spread open my fanny
And you'll see lots of sauce drizzled over my turd."

[Leo · Rating 3 out of 5]

i mean. yeah. there’s no real way to rate this. funny and obscene even by today’s standards. and the wakefield press edition is absolutely GORGEOUS

[Kirsten · Rating 2 out of 5]

It had it's moments.