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The Alchemist, v.1, issue 3, Summer 1940
Page 38
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Page 38 THE ALCHEMIST translation into English would be a Herculean task for even an excellent German scholar with nerves of iron. Von Junzt spares the reader nothing: every detail is minutely depicted, vividly, in a mode of realism that transcends all imagination..... even then, I'll be damned if he still, with all his super-Zolaesque and [Huysmanic?] realism and vigour of expression, dosn't hint far more than he tells. Revolting as his story is, what he hints is far more so. What a well of inspiration this would have been to Aubrey Beardsley.... who was certainly an unimaginative enough person not to be driven mad by Von Junzt. Here Beardsley's innate consumptive's delight in obscenity and sexulia magnopere would have found its boundless sourse: if anyone could have illustrated 'Unaussprechlichen Kulten', he could have done it. To those interested, however, I say: read the Golden Goblin edition first, the 'Black Book' as it is called. (I haven't read it, but being, as it is the vehicle of a group of would-be aesthetes, and offered for public consumption, it cannot contain anything that is within a light-year of the depravity of the original. But, I warn you, between the Bridewell edition and the original, there is thrice the agnitude of amplification and horror and sheer revulsion that there is between the precious little 'Black Book' and the Bridewell distortion. In the same class as Von Junzt is Tyr Jalnaak's "Things of Eville", Pere Ereville's "Dissertation Upon that Which Stalks in the Night", and the "Night-Book" of Jacques Mosquea. However it is to be suspected that Von Junzt's last work, the one upon which he was engaged at the time of his death, the circumstances of which were so horrifying to all those who had read "Unaussprechlichen Kulten", is of the same cosmic tone as the "Song of Yste", "Book of Eibon", "Mysteries of the Worm", and the dread "Necronomicon".
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Page 38 THE ALCHEMIST translation into English would be a Herculean task for even an excellent German scholar with nerves of iron. Von Junzt spares the reader nothing: every detail is minutely depicted, vividly, in a mode of realism that transcends all imagination..... even then, I'll be damned if he still, with all his super-Zolaesque and [Huysmanic?] realism and vigour of expression, dosn't hint far more than he tells. Revolting as his story is, what he hints is far more so. What a well of inspiration this would have been to Aubrey Beardsley.... who was certainly an unimaginative enough person not to be driven mad by Von Junzt. Here Beardsley's innate consumptive's delight in obscenity and sexulia magnopere would have found its boundless sourse: if anyone could have illustrated 'Unaussprechlichen Kulten', he could have done it. To those interested, however, I say: read the Golden Goblin edition first, the 'Black Book' as it is called. (I haven't read it, but being, as it is the vehicle of a group of would-be aesthetes, and offered for public consumption, it cannot contain anything that is within a light-year of the depravity of the original. But, I warn you, between the Bridewell edition and the original, there is thrice the agnitude of amplification and horror and sheer revulsion that there is between the precious little 'Black Book' and the Bridewell distortion. In the same class as Von Junzt is Tyr Jalnaak's "Things of Eville", Pere Ereville's "Dissertation Upon that Which Stalks in the Night", and the "Night-Book" of Jacques Mosquea. However it is to be suspected that Von Junzt's last work, the one upon which he was engaged at the time of his death, the circumstances of which were so horrifying to all those who had read "Unaussprechlichen Kulten", is of the same cosmic tone as the "Song of Yste", "Book of Eibon", "Mysteries of the Worm", and the dread "Necronomicon".
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