The Impossible is an important text by the French thinker and novelist Georges Bataille centered on the issue of "poetry." The book consists of three mutually echoing "heterogeneous" texts: "The Story of the Rat," "Dianus," and "The Oresteia." They are interwoven from different genres—diary, narrative, poetry, and literary criticism—with threads that connect openly or covertly, making the work difficult to assign to any established genre. In the book Bataille wants to "depict the real" yet refuses the usual realist methods: he pushes characters into extreme situations of eroticism, disappearance, death, and destruction, and pushes poetry into a "state of violence," thereby obtaining meaning and awakening subjective consciousness. The book unfolds around the core concept of "the impossible": only the extremity of desire and death can bring one close to truth; only hatred can reach true poetry; and the purpose of poetry is not to know oneself nor to experience some distant possibility, but to summon through words those unattainable possibilities. The title itself is a trace of self-explanation—Bataille once published the book under the title The Hatred of Poetry, and changed it to The Impossible because no one understood it. This change precisely captures the book's temperament: poetry is a detour escaping from the world of discourse, an infinite possibility born where the logical world dies. For readers encountering Bataille for the first time, the book is short yet concentrates his way of thinking about transgression, expenditure, death, and poetic experience; it is a key to understanding the origins of his postmodern thought.
Nanjing University Press is a comprehensive university publisher known for its translations and academic works in the humanities and social sciences, covering literature, world history, biography and social issues. Judging from the books in our database, it publishes poetry classics such as the complete poems of Tomas Tranströmer in The Sorrow Gondola and the Station of Fire, world history titles including Orlando Figes's The Crimean War, biographical works such as Milan Kundera: A Writer's Life, and a personal history of Eastern Europe and the secret police in the M Translation Series. Its contributors include translators Li Li, Liu Yunhong and Xu Jun, reflecting an emphasis on translation quality and textual depth. Given limited public information, its full publishing scope and series system remain to be further supplemented.
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