Roger Gilbert-Lecomte ↠ 4 review
I wish I could have given this book a good rating, because I love Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, but sadly, this translation left something to be desired... Even I, with my limited understanding of the French language, could spot some quite disturbing discrepancies between the original and the translation... I hope someone else will have a go at translating these poems, as monsieur Gilbert-Lecomte deserves better than this. 188644918X
Roger Gilbert-Lecomte:
• Co-founder with Rene Daumal of Le Grand Jeu literary and artistic movement (and magazine), which refused to merge with the Surrealists, thus rankling them
• Addicted to opiates from a young age
• In and out of jails and hospitals for much of adult life
• Concerned with the Void, Wind, Death, Metaphysics
• Delivered lecture on The Metamorphoses of Poetry at the Sorbonne
• At age 26 published only full-length book, Life Love Death Void and Wind—largely ignored, though favorably reviewed by Antonin Artaud, who had also attended the Sorbonne lecture
• Forbidden to marry Ruth Kronenberg by her father; seven years later Ruth is deported to Auschwitz from which she never returns
• Dead at age 36 from tetanus contracted while shooting up morphine through his dirty pant leg
• Reminds me of Georg Trakl, another drug-fueled purveyor of poetic darkness and emptiness, who also had a wind fixation
• Would have made a good post-punk singer
Vacancy in Glass188644918X The poems, in French, are marvelous. The translations are frustrating. I don’t quite read French well enough to trust my own interpretations 100% but I know enough to find some of the translator’s choices to be highly dubious and irritating. Words like batmobile and bimbo are completely out of place for this time period and subject matter. But I loved the poems in French and appreciated some of the more straightforward translations that helped to cover up my own shortcomings in the language. 188644918X Let's give this 4 stars because I love the guy. He's got some great lines and a few great poems, and that was enough for me since a lot of the others are talk about wind and death and rats.
To a palace made
Of wind
To a palace whose towers
Are pillars of fire by day
To an opal palace
In the sky’s zenith heart
The bird of pale air
Flies
In a swift white line
On black space
A brushstroke
Signifying absence
Favorite poems included Cartesian Driver, Dance Night.
The translation seems looser than my sweat pants in the back. 188644918X Roger Gilbert-Lecomte was haunted by a single idea – the primordial wind – which he worshipped like a mother figure, a mother figure both terribly comforting and terribly threatening. This Wind, as I interpret it, represented the first stirrings of activity, the first life (though profoundly impersonal), in the original void. This wind was the first step toward a fully populated cosmos, but also the last step back into an undifferentiated nothingness. Gilbert-Lecomte met this wind coming from both directions.
To experience it as it issued from the void must have brought with it some sense of comforting hope as it represented the pure unsullied beginning of all things; a kind of ascetic’s bliss. But to meet it as it disappeared back into the void must’ve brought with it one of the subtlest, but also one of the greatest, terrors a person can experience – the loss of Self. Depending on the state of one’s mind this loss of Self can be the profoundest bliss, or the profoundest horror. I suspect that Gilbert-Lecomte experienced both of these feelings.
As a teen he and Rene Daumal experimented with carbon tetrachloride (which from my cursory research seems like nothing you’d want to ingest, as it is an early refrigerant), and both experienced visions of the unity of everything. In G-L’s case this must have been his first contact with the Wind. He went on to develop a metaphysics of absence, and became obsessed with a pre-natal state of existence, which was identical to a post-mortem state of existence. He viewed this life, this embodied life on earth that was like a blip engulfed by surrounding “absent existence”, as not only false but unreal. Maintaining this sort of outlook day to day is fraught with dangers, especially as it was much more than just an “idea” to him, that is something encapsulated by a complex of thoughts and thus “cocooned” in a way from life at large; no, this absent existence is where he longed to live in not only his mind but in his body (or rather he wanted to ditch his body and go there). He did manage to live in this state with the help of poetry, but especially, and probably more effectively, with the help of morphine.
The title of this collection, Black Mirror, is a potent and mysterious image. A mirror implies gazing at oneself, so a black mirror is like a vampire’s mirror: a gaze at one’s self that sees nothing. But this is what he strived for, and in one of the poems in this collection he explores this very experience. He had developed his apprehension of this pre-natal state of existence to such an extent, and spent so much “time” there, that his life on the other side of the black mirror became an existence he was more familiar with; and so to gaze in a mirror was to see this “non-existent existence”, this impersonal self that mocked his physicality and had the power to consume him.
And consume him it did… in the form of Morphia.
He was an addict, and eventually died from tetanus as a result of injecting his thigh repeatedly through dirty pants. From what I can gather from his time-line of publication, his last poems were written at least five years before his death. These final five years were evidently consumed by drug addiction, but were also more than likely an apotheosis of his personal metaphysics, as day after day he entered the black mirror and became pre-natal.
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********** 188644918X l 188644918X By one of the leading figures of Le grand jeu, dark and beautiful 188644918X
Roger Gilbert-Lecomte (1907-1943) is considered one of the eminent poets of the Surrealist period. The visionary, sardonic, and often outrageous poems in this bilingual edition represent the first presentation of his work in English. With René Daumal he was the founder of the literary movement and magazine Le Grand Jeu, the essence of which he defined as the impersonal instant of eternity in emptiness. The glimpse of eternity in the void, writes Rattray in the Introduction, was to send Daumal to Hinduism, the study of Yoga philosophy, and Sanskrit. It sent Lecomte on an exploration of what he called a metaphysics of absence. Rattray, a poet acclaimed for his translations of Artaud, keeps intact the power and originality of Gilbert-Lecomte's work. Black Mirror: The Selected Poems