A brilliant new translation of a classic work on violence and
revolution as seen through mythology and art
*
The Ruin of Kasch* takes up two subjects--"the first is Talleyrand, and
the second is everything else," wrote Italo Calvino when the book first
appeared in 1983. Hailed as one of those rare books that persuade us to
see our entire civilization in a new light, its guide is the French
statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who knew the secrets of the
ancien régime and all that came after, and was able to adapt the
notion of "legitimacy" to the modern age. Roberto Calasso follows him
through a vast gallery of scenes set immediately before and after the
French Revolution, making occasional forays backward and forward in
time, from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais-Royal and to the
killing fields of Pol Pot, with appearances by Goethe and Marie
Antoinette, Napoleon and Marx, Walter Benjamin and Chateaubriand. At the
center stands the story of the ruin of Kasch, a legendary kingdom based
on the ritual killing of the king and emblematic of the ruin of ancient
and modern regimes.
Offered here in a new translation by Richard Dixon, The Ruin of Kasch
is, as John Banville wrote, "a great fat jewel-box of a book, gleaming
with obscure treasures."
