Ravings of a Madman
by Anaitre Tellsos
Ravings of a Madman by Anaitre Tellsos, originally published in 1797 in a limited printing of 1500 copies (of which perhaps 3 are believed to still exist), has been a much-misunderstood work.
Variously labeled as "occult gibberish," "blueprint for the dismantling of society" and "dangerous anti-church rhetoric" in its day,
Tellsos' bizarre combination of metaphysical theorizing, rambling poetic metaphors and subtle yet horrific tales of violence and power had
come to be regarded, by the beginning of this century, as somewhat of an underground classic, albeit a hard-to-find and largely inpenetrable
one.
Part of the difficulty in access to Tellsos' work, of course, stems from the obscure dialect of Mordvinian in which he insisted on writing.
Ravings... was only first translated into Hungarian in 1864, German and French in 1919, and English in 1953. It has not been published
in any language since 1964. Compounding the difficulty of translation is the esoteric runic language-within-the-tale created by Tellsos,
Msniwar , the ritual tongue of Miin, the tale's mysterious protagonist.
I first encountered excerpts from Tellsos' novel in a university class on Eastern European occultism in the late 1980s; it took years of
searching, however, before I was able to locate first a French, and then an English language copy of the book itself. Right away upon
reading it, I was moved to create a sonic interpretation of some of the more unusual and insightful aspects of the tale. It seemed to me that
due to the complex and unorthodox nature in which Tellsos characters' perceived the physical and spiritual world, it was only natural to
attempt to express some of the essenses of the tale in a multi-sensory or synaesthetic fashion; for me, the obvious medium to begin with
was sound.
To the Runes...