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René Daumal | |
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Born | Boulzicourt, Ardennes, France | 16 March 1908
Died | 21 May 1944 36) Paris, France | (aged
Nationality | French |
Occupation(s) | Para-surrealist writer, poet |
Known for | Mount Analogue (1952) |
Signature | |
René Daumal (French: [domal] ; 16 March 1908 – 21 May 1944) was a French spiritual para-surrealist writer, critic and poet, best known for his posthumously published novel Mount Analogue (1952) as well as for being an early, outspoken practitioner of pataphysics. [1]
Daumal was born in Boulzicourt, Ardennes, France. [2] In his late teens his avant-garde poetry was published in France's leading journals. [3] As an adolescent, Daumal co-founded the art group Les Phrères Simplistes with the poets Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and Roger Vailland. [4] They would later co-found the literary journal Le Grand Jeu, which published three issues between 1928 and 1930. [5] Although courted by André Breton, the journal was founded as a counter to Surrealism and Dada; [6] the Surrealists reacted to its publication with some hostility. [5]
He is best known in the English-speaking world for two novels: A Night of Serious Drinking , and the allegorical novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing , both based upon his friendship with Alexander de Salzmann, a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff. [7]
Daumal was self-taught in the Sanskrit language and translated some of the Tripitaka Buddhist canon into the French language, as well as translating the literature of the Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki into French. [8]
He married the Bulgarian émigré Vera Milanova, the former wife of the poet Hendrik Kramer; after Daumal's death, she married the landscape architect Russell Page. [9]
Daumal's sudden and premature death from tuberculosis on 21 May 1944 in Paris may have been hastened by youthful experiments with drugs and psychoactive chemicals, including carbon tetrachloride. He died leaving his novel Mount Analogue unfinished, having worked on it until the day of his death. [3]
He is buried at Cimetière parisien de Pantin in Pantin, a municipality just outside Paris.[ citation needed ]
The motion picture The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is based largely on Daumal's Mount Analogue. [10]
Alfred Jarry was a French symbolist writer who is best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), often cited as a forerunner of the Dada, Surrealist, and Futurist movements of the 1920s and 1930s and later the Theatre of the absurd In the 1950s and 1960s He also coined the term and philosophical concept of 'pataphysics.
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was a Greek–Armenian philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, composer, and movements teacher. Gurdjieff taught that people are not conscious of themselves and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and serve our purpose as human beings. The practice of his teaching has become known as "The Work" and is additional to the ways of the Fakirs (Sufis), Monks and Yogis, so that his student P. D. Ouspensky referred to it as the "Fourth Way".
A Night of Serious Drinking is an allegorical novel, published 1938, by the French surrealist writer René Daumal. It was translated into English in 1979 by David Coward and E.A. Lovatt. In 2003 Overlook press published a new edition with an index and a scholarly introduction.
Mount Analogue is a novel by René Daumal, posthumously published in 1952 in French and 1959 in English.
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'Pataphysics or Pataphysics is a sardonic "philosophy of science" invented by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) intended to be a parody of science. Difficult to be simply defined or pinned down, it has been described as the "science of imaginary solutions".
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Montague Russell Page OBE was a British gardener, garden designer and landscape architect. He worked in the UK, western Europe and the United States of America.
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Roger Gilbert-Lecomte was a French avant-garde poet and co-founder of the artistic group and magazine Le Grand Jeu. The group, associated with surrealists, was "excommunicated" from the movement by André Breton. Gilbert-Lecomte used drugs, in particular morphine, for both artistic and sociological reasons. As was predicted in his poetry, his death was the result of an infection caused by the use of dirty hypodermic needles. "Coma Crossing: Collected Poems", Schism Books, 2019, is the most comprehensive bilingual anthology of his poetry and "Theory of the Great Game" gives a hefty selection of his prose, along with that of René Daumal and other members of "Le Grand Jeu."
Marcel Lecomte was a Belgian writer, member of the Belgian surrealist movement. In 1918 he was introduced to dadaism and Eastern philosophy by Clément Pansaers. He also started to study literature and philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles that year, but he left the studies in 1920.
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Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing is a classic allegorical adventure novel by the early 20th-century French novelist René Daumal. The novel describes an expedition undertaken by a group of mountaineers to travel to and climb the titular Mount Analogue, an enormous mountain on a surreal continent which is invisible and inaccessible to the outside world, and which can only be perceived by the application of obscure knowledge. The central theme of mountaineering is extensively explored through literary and philosophical lenses.
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