You truly must be a complete cretin or a madman to write a letter as incongruous and full of stupidities as yours of 5 January 1978. I will not seek to find out if it is one or the other. Don’t you see, you kitted-out ass, that you didn’t even mention in your letter that we previously disclosed, and in an explicit manner, the necessity of being in competition with another Spanish edition; it is not enough that you mentioned it, not at the moment that the contract was being signed, which would have been correct, but in one of your tirades[2] (and because we could not know, from this single mention, that the Spanish-language market was inundated with books of another edition). But one sees that, for you, a petite bourgeois raised in the shadows of Gaullism, the act of abandoning a publishing house with a refused edition in its arms, as you did with us, has only a secondary importance with respect to that which you attach to your refined sense of stardom.

You know very well, you pig, that the only serious thing in this affair is your incredible lack of consideration and your hysterical behavior [worthy] of a hopeless, small intellectual. You use any mainstay to justify the unjustifiable. You did not respond reasonably to the sincere and fundamental argument of my letter. Thus do not trouble yourself to respond again by kicking like the ass you are and who was intelligent in his time,[3] because your letter, without being opened, will go directly into the garbage, the only place that suits it.

Publish this letter and your flourishes as well; it seems good to me that people know how you behave!

Die by boiling in the juices of your own pseudo-intellectual ravings.

[1] Both the Spanish original and a translation into French are reproduced in the volume being translated here.

[2] Correcting “tirages,” which seems to be a typo.

[3] Awkward grammar in original.

(Published in Editions Champ Libre, Correspondance, Vol. 1, Editions Champ Libre, Paris, 1978. Translated from the French and footnoted by NOT BORED! June 2012.)