Georges Bataille and Divinus Deus

Abstract

This paper presents a translation of a text by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, in a preface format, written in 1970, about two literary works by the French author Georges Bataille. In the preface, Mishima appraises Bataille's essays, highlighting the aspect of eroticism and the value of transgressing religious aspects - eminently Western Christianity - in literature. For Mishima, the experience of reading Bataille, when considering God in the form of a lustful prostitute and manifested in an episode of incest between mother and child, sentenced Bataille's writing beyond the classic narrative so common in the 20th century. Due to begin a rare and extremely important text, both for literary studies and for the critical acclaim of both authors, we undertake the translation gesture as a way of providing (long-term-)life to the writing that, itself, has already demonstrated its irrefutable historical, literary and cultural relevance.