Poetry. Bilingual edition translated from the French by David Rattray. 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 Rene 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.

Author City: Paris FRA

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte (May 18, 1907 in Reims, France-December 31, 1943 in Paris) was a French avant-garde poet and co-founder (with Rene Daumal, Roger Vailland, and Josef Sima) of the artistic group and magazine Le Grand Jeu. The group, associated with surrealists, was "excommunicated" from the movement by Andre Breton. Gilbert-Lecomte experimented with drugs, in particular morphine, for both artistic and sociological reasons. As was predicted in his poetry, the writer's death was the result of an infection caused from dirty hypodermic needles.