UPDATES!

A quick survey of what's in the works right now, and a more detailed update-package on the first fruits (or germs) of the Bouzingo project. Firstly:

• Prepare yourselves for the Exquisite Crypt #2--More Post-Neo Exquisite corpses. This volume is a single, 20-page long exquisite corpse poem, which traveled all over the world to be written. It was begun by Warren Fry and I when we were in the UK to visit the British PNAs & other Dartingtonians; it was vaastly expanded over the course of the week by David Beris Edwards, Eleanor Francis Waterfowl, and Amy Oliver, as well as Rhiannon Chaloner and possibly a few people I"m forgetting. Then a breather of a couple months, and it was pulled out again in New Jersey by Warren, Tomislav Butkovic and I, upon the occasion of a visit by Brad Chriss and Megan Blafas. Upcoming Exquisite Crypts will include Surrealist games etc. played by various PNA communities as well, and will/may focus on NJ Post-Neo, a long-withheld typewritten Exquisite Opus from Columbus PNA, the Lennard family, Crypts made in the workplace, etc.

• The printed version will be officially printed up next month, but the free pdf is available now as part of the new issue of the online journal word for/word, along with other texts and video footage and a delightfully and densely fractal interview by Michael Peters (who put the feature together) of Chriss, Fry, Edwards, and myself.

• I am slowly getting contributors' copies of Synapse out, bear with me.

Otherwise, probably no new publications for a month or two, everything's in the works. But by late summertime look for (possibly):

• The Adventures of Jackalope Caesar (CD). An exquisite corpse story made by the international Post-Neo community back in the early days of facebook, recorded by Lindsann & Fry, and presented with a full soundtrack composed by Chris Lennard.
• The Adventures of Mr. Squibbles, Vol. I (DVD). An underground Post-Neo classic (does such a thing exist?) for nearly a decade, the Mr. Squibbles films finally made officially available sometime this year along with audio commentary tracks and maybe other things.
• Also sometime this year, Deluxe re-issue of the full-length film of Ubu Roi--brought to you by those responsible for Squibbles. On a SINGLE disc, also with audio commentary, production stills, etc.

THE BOUZINGO UPDATE

• Translation has begun! Below I've posted one complete translation and several in-progress ones (more on that later). Anything else is up for grabs, either for those of you who have not yet given it a go or if you want to try another one. This is what is currently being worked on (or completed):

Aloysius Bertrand, The Dead Horse: John M. Bennett
Petrus Borel, Preface to Rhapsodies: Joseph Carter
Petrus Borel, Fate and Fatality: Tomislav Butkovic & Olchar Lindsann
Théophile Gautier, A Verse From Wordsworth: Olchar Lindsann
Gerard de Nerval, Gothic Song: Tomislav Butkovic & Olchar Lindsann
Philothée O'Neddy, Forward to Fire & Flame: Joseph Carter

And Warren Fry is taking on the research for the Devéria brothers, Achille and Eugéne, both primarily visual artists.

I know there are a few people who will work on some texts etc eventually but are in the midst of other things at the moment.

• I've posted two unfinished poems below which I am currently attempting to work into English verse, according to the plan I've already described. The Nerval I am versifying from Tomislav's translation, the Gautier I am working directly from Google Translate, so It's especially murky. This is an exceedingly interesting and maniacally frustrating endeavour, which I am enjoying immensely. However, I have no idea ultimately whether my texts bear any meaningful relationship with the originals. I'm not reading the French, since I can't, but am rather looking at various transliterations, half-transliterations, potential cognates and latinate roots, and scattered fragments of context and inferring what the text ought probably to be (before fitting it into iambs...). I'm thinking of it as Forensic Translation. These attempts are primarily tests, to figure out whether this will be a feasible way of going about things or if I'm helpless to assist in the translation; and if it DOES seem feasible, I need to know how to go about it better, so if you read French PLEASE do not hesitate to let me know how these look, and what kinds of things I seem to be missing.
  

• Research is going pretty swimmingly, all considered. I'm finding more than I have time to read just yet (given that it's all in French), let alone make sense of and blog about; but I'll try to intermittently post regarding people/subjects/themes that have been turning up or resolving themselves as a sift and uncover, as well as posting sources so that the curious can take a look themselves and/or strike out on their own research if they desire. I'll hopefully post the first of these next weekend.

• I have received pseudonymous communications indicating that the elusive Kohoutenberg Institute for Study and Application is interested in undertaking a parallel Bouzingo project, instigating the re-injection of the Bouzingo into the contemporary avant discourse in a way that reflects the 175 years of development in the community since they were active. This will probably take the form of a potentially vaast number of transductions, homeophonic translations, cut-ups and text-collage, google-translate sequences, etc. Through this activity, the texts, names, and recognition of the Bouzingo as such will inevitably seep into the Eternal Network in myriad forms, as such things do, and when the straight-up translations, histories, and bios begin to appear an interesting dialogue should result, the foundations having been laid in such an unusual fashion... More on this project as it develops...

• One personal effect of this project on me has been a re-approaching of closed-form verse, which I'd not written for many years. On my personal blog, I've posted the lecture notes of a lecture I gave in Roanoke, VA last month on the development from poetic recitation to performance poetry during the 19th Century. While I had too little information to discuss the Bouzingo in this context yet, the notes serve at the same time as an indication of the radicalized use or employment of verse (its relation to the body, to memory, and to cognition) that characterized poets of the 19th century avant-garde. I've also posted a closed-form poem in progress, in indication of how I approach writing such texts when I'm not translating them from google.
  

Finally, here are the primary research sources so far for the Bouzingo that have been translated into English. I'll be posting links etc. to more as the weeks go by:

• Starkey, Enid . Petrus Borel, The Lycanthrope: His Life and Times. (1954). Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions. This was my primary (i.e. only) source for the Bouzingo group during the writing of The Ecstatic Nerve. While frustratingly (for the researcher) under-cited and involving the somewhat sloppy scholarship typical of the mid-20th Century (several quotes attributed to the wrong people, vague sweeping generalizations, failure to translate quotations, etc), overall a good read and a pretty facinating book; Starkey is a staunch partisan of Borel (and O'Neddy) and this book is her successful bid not only to ressurect Borel himself, but to give a good sense of the cultural context in which the group worked. Out of print for nearly 50 years, but you can still get some used copies on Amazon for $10-15 (I've got it linked).

• Gautier, Théophile & Sumichrast, F.C., trans. A History of Romanticism: The Progress of French Poetry Since 1830. (1908). New York: George D. Sproul. First published in 1874, this is a history of French Romanticism by one of the Bouzingo, about 35 years after the group dissolved. It hasn't been translated or annotated in over a century, but fortunately you can get a facsimile edition cheaply on Amazon or read it from a computer screen. I've just started it and it is a ROLICKING good time. Highly recommended--as engaging, generous, down to earth, and as energizing as Hans Richter's history of Dada.

• Houssaye, Arséne & Knepler, Henry. (1970). Man About Paris: The Confessions of Arséne Houssaye. New York: William Morrow & Co. I've just begun this one too; Houssaye was a member of the Bohême du Doyenné group that included many of the Bouzingo after that group folded: Gautier, Nanteuil, Nerval, MacKeat, etc and there's a fair amount of relevant information and description, plus a good deal of contextualizing material. It's edited down from a few thousand pages to 350, so a whole lot's missing, particularly stuff relating to 'forgotten nobodies' like those we are so interested in... Again, it's been out of print for decades, but amazon has used copies for $10-20.

Aloysius Bertrand, The Dead Horse, translated by John M. Bennett

Unlike many of the Bouzingo, Bertrand has been less utterly forgotten in French than in English; Baudelaire positions his collection Paris Spleen as a continuation of the project suggested by Bertrand in the Gaspard de Nuit (1836), the collection from which this poem comes, the Symbolists discussed him as a key developer of the prose-poem, and Breton cites him as a precursor of Surrealism. All of which makes sense after reading this piece...

The beginning is presumably an epigraph from something which I am in the process of tracking down.

Sadly blogger keeps fucking up the formatting for the epigraph, I don't know...

the French:

Le Cheval mort

Le fossoyeur: — Je vous vendrai

de l'os pour fabriquer des boutons. Le pialey: — Je vous vendrai de l'os pour garnir le manche de vos poignards. La Boutique de l'Armurier.

La voirie ! et à gauche, sous un gazon de trèfle et de luzerne, les sépultures d'un cimetière; à droite, un gibet suspendu qui demande aux passants l'aumône comme un manchot.

*

* *

Celui-là, tué d'hier, les loups lui on déchiqueté la chair sur le col en si longues aiguillettes qu'on le dirait paré encore pour la cavalcade d'une touffe de rubans rouges.

Chaque nuit, dès que la lumière blémira le ciel, cette carcasse s'envolera, enfourchée par une sorcière qui l'éperonnera de l'os pointu de son talon, la bise soufflant dans l'orgue de ses flancs caverneux.

Et s'il était à cette heure taciturne un oeil sans sommeil, ouvert dans quelque fosse du champ de repos, il se fermerait soudain, de peur de voir un spectre dans les étoiles.

Déjà la lune elle-même, clignant un oeil, ne luit plus de l'autre que pour éclairer comme une chandelle flottante ce chien, maigre vagabond, qui lape l'eau d'un étang.

and the English:

The Dead Horse

The gravedigger: -- I’ll come to you from the bone to make buttons.

The squawker: -- I’ll come to you from the bone to decorate the stain on your daggers.

The Gunsmith’s Boutique.

The garbage dump! and on the left, under a lawn of clover and alfalfa, the tombs of a cemetery; on the right, a hanging gallows which demands of passers-by some alms like a one-armed beggar.

*
**

Him there, killed yesterday; the wolves have shredded his flesh down his collar in such long strips that one might say he was still ready for the parade with a tuft of red ribbons.

Every night, when the light pales in the sky, this carcass will be flown, mounted by a sorcerer who will spur it on with the sharp bone of his heel, the wind blowing through the organ of his cavernous sides.

And if there were at that taciturn hour any sleepless eye, open in that pit of the field in repose, it closed suddenly, in fear of seeing a specter in the stars.

Already the moon itself, blinking an eye, doesn’t shine the other except to illumine like a floating candle that dog, thin and stray, which laps the water from a pond.


.

Gerard de Nerval, Gothic Song; translated by Tomislav Butkovic and Olchar Lindsann (in progress)

My first attempt to render a poem into English verse, this is still in draft form, missing a couple of lines; and if one rhyme, tense, etc. changes, it tends to send ripples through all the rest of the system so it may be far from finished.

I'm working from a transliteration by Tomislav Butkovic, supplemented by a google translation and a couple dictionaries. This poem's main challenge to my part of the process is in its extremely short lines--four syllables per line!--which leaves very little elbow-room for the inevitable jostlings that affect sentence structure, rhythm, and their relationships with the metric scheme, not to speak of accommodating rhyme or at least slant and near-rhyme.

The poem itself, IF I have managed to reconstruct it aright, is a properly sadistic turning-of-the-knife song addressed to a woman abandoned at the alter. The title, Gothic Song, would seem to contextualize this scenerio in relation to the Gothic subculture (which consisted of both an intellectual element engaged with the re-approaching of medieval culture, and a popular subculture which bore the embryos of later horror, heavy metal, etc subcultures) which was a defining element of the Bouzingo as a group (as it had been for the British 'Satanic' Romantics typified by Byron as well). And indeed the bride left at the alter is a recurrent figure in Gothic fiction (with about equal chances that her beloved either has fallen into the hands of a band of Brigands sent by his as-yet-unidentifiable archenemy, or is about to reveal himself as the agent or avatar of the Devil, or some thing cast out by God).

There are a number of points in the translation that I recognise as potential trouble-spots, and undoubtedly some I do not even suspect. I need to fill an empty syllable in the first line (first word) in order to set the rhythmic journey of the poem off with an intuitively recognizable (and therefore precise) iambic rhythm, though I don't know how best to inflect the line with whatever word I put there; the end of the second stanza seems to involve linguistic subtleties that I do not apprehend, her tears 'suiting' or 'becoming' the flowers; I'm uncertain whether to use 'strew' or the more direct (I think) 'sow' in the second stanza; and 'pleasure' is a hell of a thing to rhyme in such short lines, not to mention forcing me to add a bastard syllable to the iambic meter that seems to be the best suited to the original--while at the same time it seems of paramount relevance that the the poem terminate on this word, impaled upon it as if upon a spike, and that moreover it must be 'pleasure' properly, with the ambiguity that the anglophone face of the word also carries with it, not withstanding google's translation to the more innocuous 'joy'--and then there is so little room in which to arrange the content of the second line around such a rhyme in an elegant manner. I am still rather unsatisfied with my use of 'treasure' because it introduces a metaphor (albeit an idiomatic one) which is not in the original text; but so far have been unable, withing the grammatical conditions imposed by the form, to switch to the verb form of this word whose sensory associations are less direct. Etc etc.

I am extraordinarily open to advice and criticism; in fact this is largely a test to begin figuring out what role/s I can or cannot play on the translation side of the project. So--

the French:

Chanson gothique

Belle épousée,
J’aime tes pleurs !
C’est la rosée
Qui sied aux fleurs.

Les belles choses
N’ont qu’un printemps,
Semons de roses
Les pas du Temps !

Soit brune ou blonde,
Faut-il choisir ?
Le Dieu du monde,
C’est le Plaisir.

...and the English:

Gothic Song

A XXX lovely bride,

B Your tears XXXXXX !

A Like dew they slide

B Into the flowers.

A That lovely pair,

B Whilst Spring is prime,

A Strews roses there

B In the wake of Time!

A Brunette, or blonde:

B Why split his treasure?

A For this world's God

B Is surely Pleasure.

Théophile Gautier, Un Vers de Wordsworth; translated by Olchar Lindsann (in progress)

This is a particularly rough one, not only because I'm working exclusively from Google Translate and a couple dictionaries, but because it involves a dense web of literary allusions that has necessitated a good deal of specific research. This research, like the filling out of the verses themselves, is in an incomplete state; the Wordsworth quote is indeed easily tracible (and included in Bartlet's Familiar Quotations, published a couple decades previous to the novels mentioned). The novel it is drawn from is Louisa, ou les doulours d'un fille de joie. I'm still tracking this book down, but expect little trouble in that direction. Google translates the title as 'Louisa- A Prostitute's Pain' but the last word is evidently the translation of a euphomism, I think 'daughter of joy/pleasure'...? And as Gautier informs us, this book's author draws his pseudonym (if I'm inferring correctly from Google's garbled transliteration) from a third book (Gautier does not quote the complete title), which turns out to be the 1829 book L'Ane Mort et la Femme guillotinée (The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman) by one Jules Janin, a subversive novelist eventually forced into exile. I've obtained the text of this novel (in the French, of course) but haven't had an opportunity to peruse it yet.

(Of course, all of this is conveyed via inflexible units of vocabulary singularly ill-suited for easy versification, so that I get to ineptly grab at the shadow of Gautier's virtuosic rhythm and scansion.)

And I've not yet even begun to start addressing the reference to Shakespeare's Tempest...

I suspect this research is precisely the point of Gautier's writing this poem; especially when one considers that he implies that he is not only directing you toward these other texts, but has at the same time avoided other authors in response to similar textual embeddings, in this case the universal condemnation of Wordsworth's political and poetic apostasy by the second generation of Romantics--Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hazlitt, Hunt, etc.

This historiographic function is why this poem seems to me like a good candidate for the introductory volume of the project; not to mention of course that it partakes of the same tradition of excoriation continued not only by Gautier but by Fast Sedan Nellson and myself. To which is added the extent to which the poem is about translation and readership: Byron and Shakespeare were both being translated for the first time into French, the latter specifically by one of the Bouzingo group, translator/theorist/architect Jules Vabre (more on this fascinating character in a couple weeks--I'll be putting together a post focusing on the practice and role of translation within the group), and were defining influences on the Bouzingo both poetically and in self-presentation. And the ready availability of the line at hand in Bartlett's opens the possibility that the writer of the novel in which Gautier found the line had not read Wordsworth in his entirety either. AND, Gautier quotes the line in English as his own epigraph (doubly quoted), then repeats it in French in the poem's body, paraphrasing it again in the final line. This poses interesting questions to the translator rendering the poem back into English, especially as even the Google translation of Gautier's translation makes a smoother and more grammatically correct iambic pentameter line than Wordsworth's original (in which the plural subject and singular verb do not agree). I decided to add my bit to the ongoing intergenerational smearing of Wordsworth's face in the mud, and use the re-translated line (especially as the rhyme is easier as well, Wordsworth's requiring a double-rhyme; the original, of course, is in blank verse...)

la rime boite-- Google translates as 'the rhyme box' and my dictionaries bear this out. Eh? My current hypothesis is that this may be French technical terminology--or literary slang--for a poetic stanza... anyone know?

The translation so far is no doubt full of holes:

the French:

Un Vers de Wordsworth
Spires whose silent finger points to heaven.

Je n’ai jamais rien lu de Wordsworth, le poète
Dont parle lord Byron d’un ton si plein de fiel,
Qu’un seul vers ; le voici, car je l’ai dans la tête :
— Clochers silencieux montrant du doigt le ciel. —

Il servait d’épigraphe, et c’était bien étrange,
Au chapitre premier d’un roman : — Louisa, —
Les douleurs d’une fille, œuvre toute de fange
Qu’un pseudonyme auteur dans L’Ane mort puisa.

Ce vers frais et pieux, perdu dans ce volume
De lubriques amours, me fit du bien à voir :
C’était comme une fleur des champs, comme une plume
De colombe, tombée au cœur d’un bourbier noir.

Aussi depuis ce temps, lorsque la rime boite,
Que Prospéro n’est pas obéi d’Ariel,
Aux marges du papier je jette, à gauche, à droite,
Des dessins de clochers montrant du doigt le ciel.


...and the English so far:

A Line From Wordsworth

Spires whose silent finger points to heaven.¹

A I've never read the poet Wordsworth, he
B Against whom Byron let such venom fly,
A Except one line; its voice comes back to me:
B -The silent steeples pointing to the sky--

A It served as epigraph, a freakish ruse,
B For the initial chapter of -Louisa,-²
A A Hooker's Pain, a sludgy novel whose
B [ pseudonym drawn from] The Dead Ass XXX³

A This pious verse, abandoned in this book
B of lewd XXXXXX , was XXXXXX to my eyes:
A It was a XXXXXX bloom, XXXXXXXXX [took [shook [looked
B XXX fallen] XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX [lies

A And since that time, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
B
A Across the paper's margins, left and right,
B I XXXXXX steeples pointing to the sky.

1from The Excursion, Book VI, line 19.

2Louisa, ou les doulours d'un fille de joie (Louisa: or, the Pain of a Daughter of Pleasure[?]), by Abbé Tiberge [Regnier Destourbet].

3L'Ane Mort et la Femme guillotinée (The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman), by Jules Janin, 1829.

Petrus Borel, Isolement--Anti-translation from the Kohoutenberg Institute

An initial exercise for the Kohoutenberg Institute's parallel Bouzingo translation project: Petrus Borel's Isolement, translated via google from French to Croatian to Catalan to Danish to French to English again, The dedication is to fellow Bouzingo Gérard Nerval:

Insulation

Gerard, poet

General forest restoration
Osama in the valleys
Clos d'Effroy all!

Ronsard

Under the scorching sun in beautiful rural Creole
How bamboo bow African English,
Towards Hurricane withers Palm
In the hands of wine in units of dense forest.

In our old tree, mistletoe, parasitic St.
The return of oaks and feel and dream;
The combination of grass suffer a kind of fragile and
Trunk monasteries in southerly winds.

GUI! Liane! cake! would my soul!
My heart, like ivy and the cover.
Ford spent a little of this life
Wonder Woman, the support friend!

- Angel on Earth? ... Flower, a woman? ...
Bard, and just chose this playful swarm
Rondo rounded meal instead. --
No, my heart to a heart that understands his soul.

This is not theater, festivals, daughter
Who can lay life is happiness:
This field at night, wrapped in shawl,
Werther hand fainting.

It is a brunette with dark eyelashes, air Moorish;
It is a lazy goose, blue-eyed Ondine
Also a large almond and death, anxiety,
As noted in Germanic coast.

When this magic? - When my voice call? --
Bring spring in my heart, I do.
But even he would be faithful to Cypress!
On the beach when I'm alone?

Sparrow in my ceiling of the room with his girlfriend;
My mare had a foal love.
Let me in this forum and others accompanying
The torrent of fire, I did spend my days.

Reconstructing the Bouzingo

Here's a massive update/overview of the proposed project to uncover and explore the Bouzingo, an almost entirely forgotten (and I suspect very important and certainly instructive) early French avant-garde group operating in the early 1830s. Very, very little of their work has been translated into English, and it is my hope that by working together, the extended community that mOnocle-Lash touches on can make this whole body of work, and the community from which it sprang and for which it was designed to function, available and comprehensible for the first time in over 150 years.

TRANSLATION BEGINS THIS WEEKEND. While the project itself is undoubtedly ambitious, I think that if gone about in the right way (and with patience) it can be accomplished without requiring a great deal of concentrated time from anybody. I hope you can be a part of it.

I have tried to make this post comprehensive, something that can provide a foundation for updates to come as the project develops over the coming months and years. That said, and granting my propensity for over-elucidation, I'll outline the project below.

If you'd like to be involved in the translation process, the practical info is at the bottom, if you want to go straight for that first. For any other ideas, question, or ways of being a part of it, leave a comment or email me at monoclelash@gmail.com or olindsann@gmail.com.

THE BOUZINGO
The Bouzingo insofar as we understand it so far has been described to most of you already, and I am attaching the passage from my Ecstatic Nerve relating to them, which contains the bulk of I know of them so far. Briefly, the group emerged from the constantly merging, splitting and name-changing that has apparently characterised avant-garde culture since at least the 1820s. It grew essentially out of the Petit-Cenacle and Jeunes France groups, this third name signaling a plunge into a kind of politically motivated group social-experiment: living collectively in voluntary destitution, their house devoid of furniture but the walls filled with Bouzingo murals of both Classical and erotic traditions, writing and spreading seditious drinking-songs at working-class pubs, plotting and carrying out various provocations of the bourgeoisie in the streets, experimenting with opium and hashish, orchestrating orgiastic parties involving dances requiring pistols fired into the ceiling, holding philosophical debates nude in their back yard, hurling fake corpses from their windows into the street, engaging in various occult and alchemical practices, and carefully cultivating an elaborate gothic mythology about themselves, in which they drank wine from their parents' skulls, stocked their otherwise bare rooms with exotic weaponry, and kept human foetuses in jars on their mantelpiece.
At the same time they were producing a very wide array of work in a number of different media, often collaboratively--from gothic horror novels to classical sculpture to politicized plays and operas to translations from French and German to erotic prints to buildings (I've yet to find any examples by the Bouzingo architect Jules Vabre) to history paintings to Byronic poetry to opaque prose poems. What seems to make the Bouzingos work cohere in sometimes unexpected ways (insofar, again, as I can tell via google translate) is that all seem to share a similar and very heterogeneous set of cultural contexts and resources--various forms of Post-Robespierre, pre-Marxist socialism, popular gothic fiction, the dark Romanticism personified first by Byron (to whom the group's main organiser, Borel, was often compared), both literary and graphic erotica and libertinism, an element of genuine alchemical and occult investigation, the adventure novels of Scott and Cooper, French comedy, and satirical and polemic song.
In all of the printed work that I have unearthed and scanned, it is evident that there are numerous conversations being played out in these poems, and that both writing and publishing (as well as not publishing) were being conceived of not only (or even primarily) as outward products for a public, but as gestures within the social context of the group, as well as its relationship to the broader communities that intersected with it and with its own history and future.
It is also quite clear that future (as well as past) avant-garde communities were considered part of this more intimate audience; frankly it's rather uncanny to dig up these texts (more than once) and find an exhortation or reference to the future reader who will have rediscovered one's existence after having been forgotten to history for generations. More uncanny yet when Aloysius Bertrand even relates to me fairly accurately what the historical trail was that I followed to his discovery. There is a whole social poetics of epigraphs to be read in the literary work of this group. (especially when they can be read.)
These inferences, again, are based on my quasi-readings of material as I find it, and on widely scattered and isolated atoms of information. If you want to know in more detail what it is that I'm looking at in cobbling together this reconstruction of their activity, or investigate beyond the links I'll include below, just email me.

A LIST OF BOUZINGO
Up to a few weeks ago I was still discovering new people so this may not be comprehensive. Nearly everyone used pseudonyms, most of them Anglicized and some of them brilliantly funny:

Aloysius Bertrand--writer
Petrus Borel--writer/organizer/translator/painter/architect
Joseph Bouchardy--playwright/engraver
Louis Boulanger--painter, scenographer
Alphonse Brot--playwright (no complete texts so far)
Achille Devéria--painter/lithographer/eroticist

Eugène Devéria--painter & possibly writer, Achille's brother
Xavier Forneret--writer
Théodor Gautier--writer/painter/organizer
Augustus MacKeat--writer (no texts yet)
Gerard de Nerval--writer/translator/organizer
Philothée O'Neddy--writer/organizer/publisher
Célestin Nanteuil--engraver/possibly writer
Jehan de Seigneur--sculptor & possibly painter
Napoléon Thom--painter
Jules Vabre--translator/architect/theorist
XXXX Vigneron--no first name or other information yet

Léon--I don't even have his full name; is this his first or last? What did he do...?

WHAT I'VE BEEN DOING
I do not read or speak French; hence my insistence that this work be translated! In addition to working on the English-language side of the translation process (more on that below), my role is to locate texts and co-ordinate the translation and other elements of the project; to carry out the bulk of the historical research and make sense of it, eventually writing the grounding essay/s for the contextualizing material; to coordinate whatever other material is written by people in the community with regard to the project; researching and writing explanatory and contextual footnotes etc. for the texts; compiling the various appendices and bibliographies that will be called for as the project progresses; and of course editing, publishing, and distributing the books.
The past few months have been spent (among many other things...) gradually tracking down texts online and following or taking note of every possible lead that I can find to give us a broader historical picture of the milieu in which the group operated. Of course this is still in the early stages, and much of the material will only emerge as texts begin to be translated and speak to each other, as it were. Naturally, not only all of these texts, but most everything is in French, so I've become fairly adept at scanning the Google translation of a text to gain the general gist and cobble together some hypotheses about what was being done; it is through this process that I've come up with the specific texts that I'm attaching for provisional inclusion in the initial book, highlighting those aspects of what seems most intriguing about the group.

THE LONG-TERM PLAN
I do not have a definite time-table for the project; I, like most of you, am busy with far more things than I really ought to be doing, and consider it a given that things must move along at a pace that is manageable for everyone involved, and which does not require a definite commitment in terms of quantity or time. I hope to keep the chapbooks coming out at a steady enough pace to feel a momentum--at least one or two a year--but I doubt that that the project as a whole will see completion in less than five years (at the least). We'll see.
We start with this first chapbook, which opens the series with a kind of overview of the group--a bit of work by everyone involved (if I can find it...), and a general introduction/history of the group.
After this, one chapbook at a time, each dedicated to one member of the group. Each book will have up to 50 pages, depending on how much work has survived, and will include a critical biography, translations of texts / reproductions of images with both translators' and historical notes, bibliography, and possibly dedications/responses/illustrations by people working in the contemporary avant/PNA etc. community.
When everyone involved directly with the Bouzingo has been treated, work will begin (mostly my work...) on a massive, perfect-bound volume which will compile all of the translations, images, bios, etc and add more, with expanded histories, notes and bibliographies, a number of essays examining various aspects of the group's structure, dynamics, strategies, and legacy, and whatever responses, essays, transductions, etc. any of us living people want to add. By this time, after all, we ought to be pretty familiar with these dudes.

EDITORIAL ORIENTATION
The basic editorial position from which I am approaching the project, that is in fact at the root of why I (specifically) am attempting to make it happen and asking the mOnocle-Lash community (specifically) to be a part of it, can be conveniently expressed by an observation about the way that the group itself seems to have approached historiography (one of their major concerns, like many avant-gardes):

It appears that the shift in the Bouzingos' activity and deepening of their radicality (and name) coincided with the phenomenon of one of their circle of friends--Victor Hugo--becoming rather suddenly a household name, with a genuine chance to greatly affect the direction of culture, and the relationship of intellectual to mainstream culture as Democracy and Capitalism set the paths they would be following for centuries. They had themselves masterfully planned and executed this virtual coup (which ended, sadly, like most coups) of the on-and-off republic's cultural mechanism through a complex campaign of mythic and journalistic memes and the complex spectacular phenomenon that they mounted at the opening of Hugo's play Hernani. But in the wake of this victory, he (probably inevitably) drifted away from the group. (this would later recur as Gautier, who would become Baudelaire's mentor, gradually moved into a certain amount of public consciousness; Nerval would become canonized within the avant-garde shortly after his death and more widely by the end of the century.) Much of the Bouzingos' work (especially that which addresses Hugo, none with straightforward bitterness) address the obscurity to which they have willingly consigned themselves, and their adherence to a small and intense community and an obscure and disreputable tradition. They began to see radicalized poetics in terms of the cultivation of an experimental utopian community that is marginal on principle, rather than the struggle to become the dominant official ideology or cultural model.
It seems likely, in light of a number of declarations (especially by Borel, O'Neddy, and Bertrand) that much or most of the group would have preferred that the rediscovery they had so cunningly engineered take place in micropress, among the tiny and mingling radical communities that are their direct descendants, perpetrated collectively by people connected through direct human friendships, than that they appear in a university edition, translated by a bourgeois academic, professionally produced and appropriately de-fanged and made respectable for the Literature (or worse, art) departments and the shelves at Barnes & Noble. Thus the importance of this project being taken on in the current form before academia renders it 'merely literature'.
When a group or individual, like the Bouzingo, is active both in the realm of political subversion/psychosocial experimentation/public performance/intervention on the one hand, and in the production of texts, paintings, etc and the discourse surrounding them, there is a tendency for only one aspect (if that) to be seriously investigated. Either the texts are published and discussed as if created and disseminated in a social and personal vacuum, with only vague and secondary reference to their contexts ('oh, and when he was young he hung around with some forgotten bohemians'); or their exploits are told in conversational style and with complete disregard for the theoretical, political, and traditional underpinnings and corollaries to their behaviour. It is my hope not only to avoid both of these pitfalls, but to discover and tease out how these apparently disparate realms of activity related to and inhered within one another.
This has been my primary prerogative in selecting the texts for this first book; I am more than open to changing or adding to these selections however, if translators or others in the community find pieces that strike them as particularly interesting or engaging. The same will go for future chapbooks; I'll likely find a certain number that I would like to ensure are included, and otherwise encourage those translating to work on whatever they find most engaging.

BOOK #1
The plan is to begin with this first chapbook, which will at least give a general indication of what the group was and provide a groundwork for fuller understanding of the group as it emerges from the process of translation and research. It will include one or two texts or images from each member of the group, a fairly concise critical description and history of the group, possibly some bios, and a bibliography.

FOR PROSPECTIVE TRANSLATIONS
To the extent that it's possible (and of course that extent is limited), I think we ought to strive at least to approximate the rhythm, meter, and scansion of the poems; ideally, to preserve or translate the rhyme and sound as well. The physical form and linguistic constraints that these represent--the semiotic rhythms they appealed to, the subtle counter-communications playing out through them, and the force of effort required to confront and utilize them--were constitutive of what verse was, and therefore inevitably vital to why they were writing verse in the midst of all their other activity.
Easy for me to say, I know. And many of you have indicated that while you can transliterate meaning and basic grammatical structure, you might not be down for then attempting to rewrite that result in rhymed dactylic hexameter or whatever. Never fear. I spent most of my poetic apprenticeship writing closed-form verse, and would actively enjoy taking on this latter-task: translation by tag-team.
So if this is the case, simply make an accurate semantic translation, and send that to me, accompanied by notes that let me know about anything unusual, striking, or important that you were unable to translate: puns, plays with word gender or other word permutations that don't exist in English, noticeable concurrences of sound, onomatopoeia, archaic or formal vocabulary, odd syntax, etc. It may be worth looking out for intentional misspellings and grammatical errors--the very name of the group is reputedly an intentional misspelling. I'll take it up from there, working side by side with the French, and make as good an English poem out of it as is possible. If we run into problems, we'll figure it out.
I understand that due to differences in how the languages are structured, and their relationships to what is considered one 'breath's worth' of air, that the standard French alexandrine line (seven metric feet of two to three syllables each) is usually translated into the English pentameter line (five feet). However the Bouzingo do often seem to have preferred the shorter line.
If you too will enjoy the challenge of dealing with these kinds of things, carry on; please include a similar set of notes however, as I'd like each poem to be published with translators' notes as well as editorial notes (which I can do) tracking down various cultural and historical references. If you too would like to help with the English 'poeticization' of the texts, let me know.

WHAT YOU CAN DO (if you'd like)

1: Take a look at the 'bouzingo preview texts for translation' and see what you'd like to try your hand at. Let me know. Whomever tells me first that they want to work on a certain text gets it. (Tomislav Butkovic has already started work on Nerval's Gothic Song.) And/or if you'd like, follow the links below to find other work that you like.

2: Put together a working english transliteration in whatever way seems best to you.

3: Annotate anything unusual, striking, or potentially important that you were unable to translate: puns, plays with word gender or other word permutations that don't exist in English, noticeable concurrences of sound, onomatopoeia, archaic or in/formal vocabulary, odd syntax, intentional misspellings or variant forms, etc.

4: Either play around with it to shape it into an appropriate rhythmic pattern etc., OR simply go ahead and

5: send it along to me.

LINKS
These are the best sources I have found for Bouzingo texts (even project Gutenberg isn't particularly helpful); there are others but the material in them is very scattered and piecemeal. I am trying to concentrate on work of the Bouzingo period specifically, or shortly before and after, let's say 1825-1840 at the outside; particularly in the cases of Gautier and Nerval, who have not themselves been terribly neglected but whose social context and even early work itself has been to a large extent swept under the historical rug. I have yet to find complete usable material by MacKeat, Brot, or Bouchardy, though the latter has some stuff scanned online (i.e., no text files yet; one way or the other we can get him taken care of).

http://www.florilege.free.fr/florilege/
http://poesie.webnet.fr/lesgrandsclassiques/poemes/liste_auteurs_a.html
http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Index_des_auteurs
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

As the project progresses, I'll expand this bibliography and post periodic updates on research and freshly translated texts.