Nationality French Name Rene Daumal | Role Writer | |
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Books Mount Analogue, A Night of Serious Drinking, Le Contre‑Ciel, The Powers of the Word, Rasa - or - Knowledge of the self | ||
Ren daumal
René Daumal ([domal]; 16 March 1908 – 21 May 1944) was a French spiritual para-surrealist writer and poet, best known for his posthumously published novel Mount Analogue (1952) as well as for being an early, outspoken practitioner of 'pataphysics.
Contents
- Ren daumal
- RARE Ren DAUMAL Une Vie une uvre La traverse des apparences France Culture 1992
- Biography
- Legacy
- References
[RARE] René DAUMAL – Une Vie, une Œuvre : La traversée des apparences (France Culture, 1992)
Biography
He was born in Boulzicourt, Ardennes, France. In his late teens his avant-garde poetry was published in France's leading journals, and in his early twenties, although courted by André Breton co-founded, as a counter to Surrealism and Dada, a literary journal, "Le Grand Jeu" with three friends, collectively known as the Simplists, including poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte . 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.
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.
He married Vera Milanova, the former wife of the poet Hendrik Kramer; after Daumal's death, she married the landscape architect Russell Page.
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.
Legacy
The motion picture The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is based largely on Daumal's Mount Analogue.