How I Became One of the Invisible

Put together by Chris Kraus just before David Rattray's sudden death and published in1992, How I Became One of the Invisible has since circulated as a secret history and guide book tothe mystical-poetic-outlaw tradition that runs throughout Western civilization from Pythagoras tothe prophetic polyphony of 16th century In Nomine music, to the gang of marijuana harvesters and carthieves of East St. Louis, 1961, who become Rattray's friends.Trained at Harvard and the Sorbonne,Rattray was a poet, translator and scholar, fluent in most Western languages, Sanskrit, Latin, andGreek. Living in Paris during the 1950s, Rattray re-traced the steps of Antonin Artaud and becameone of Artaud's first and best American translators. Published by City Lights Books in 1963,Rattray's Artaud translations burned through the aura of transgressive chic that surrounded the poetto reveal the core of his incisive scholarship, technological prophecies, and visionary rage. AsRattray later said of translating Artaud, "You have to identify with the man or the woman. You haveto identify with that person and their work. If you don't then you shouldn't be translating it. Whywould you translate something that you didn't think had an important message for other people? Iwanted to translate Artaud because I wanted to turn my friends on and pass on a message that hadrelevance to our lives. That's why I was doing it. Not to get a grant, or be hired by an Englishdepartment..."What Rattray did for Artaud, he went on to do for Friedrich Holderlin, Rene Crevel,and the In Nomine music of John Bull, becoming a concert-level pianist to better understand thelogic of baroque. He was, as Betsey Sussler wrote in Bomb after his death in 1993, "the mostgenerous of writers."