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O Contra-Céu
«Estava hesitante em publicar esta colectânea. Sei que não se aprende a nadar de um momento para o outro, que antes de se saber que há rios para atravessar, é preciso chapinhar, por pura diversão, para se conseguir avançar dentro de água. Mas não é preciso transformar num espectáculo essa nossa aprendizagem. Porém, algumas pessoas que estimo garantem-me que já se avistam costas reais nestes meus escritos, que eles já não me pertencem e podem ser úteis a outros. Acedo a publicá-los então, mas com algumas precauções. (…) Desaprender a sonhar acordado, aprender a pensar, desaprender a filosofar, aprender a dizer, não são coisas que se façam de um dia para o outro. No entanto, já só nos restam poucos dias para o fazer.»
René Daumal (1936), “Advertência” em O Contra-Céu
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René Daumal (Boulzicourt, 1908 – Paris, 1944) foi escritor, poeta, ensaísta e tradutor.
Aos 6 anos é assaltado pela ideia de morte e pela angústia do absolutamente nada. Estas preocupações não lhe oferecem tréguas, e no início da adolescência, vê-se diante de outro dos seus maiores terrores: o desconhecido. Durante esta época leva a cabo um variado número de experiências numa tentativa de compreender a morte, os estados do sono e os diferentes níveis de consciência. Com estas experiências intui um outro mundo onde o pensamento supera os limites da linguagem discursiva.
Em 1927 funda com Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Roger Vaillant e Robert Meyrat, o movimento de investigação literária e filosófica Le Grand Jeu. Deste movimento surge uma revista com o mesmo nome, e na qual Daumal edita os primeiros poemas e ensaios.
Daumal afasta-se do movimento Le Grand Jeu por volta de 1931, ao conhecer Alexandre de Salzmann, que lhe apresenta a escola do famoso «taumaturgo» e mestre espiritual Georgi Gurdjieff. O seu pensamento místico e modelo de conhecimento esotérico cativaram-no imediatamente.
Escrito aos 22 anos e editado em 1936, Le Contreciel (O Contra-Céu) é imediatamente aclamado pela crítica, levando-o a ganhar o Prémio Jacques Doucet, atribuído por André Gide, Paul Valéry e Jean Giraudoux.
x
René Daumal (1936), “Advertência” em O Contra-Céu
x
René Daumal (Boulzicourt, 1908 – Paris, 1944) foi escritor, poeta, ensaísta e tradutor.
Aos 6 anos é assaltado pela ideia de morte e pela angústia do absolutamente nada. Estas preocupações não lhe oferecem tréguas, e no início da adolescência, vê-se diante de outro dos seus maiores terrores: o desconhecido. Durante esta época leva a cabo um variado número de experiências numa tentativa de compreender a morte, os estados do sono e os diferentes níveis de consciência. Com estas experiências intui um outro mundo onde o pensamento supera os limites da linguagem discursiva.
Em 1927 funda com Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Roger Vaillant e Robert Meyrat, o movimento de investigação literária e filosófica Le Grand Jeu. Deste movimento surge uma revista com o mesmo nome, e na qual Daumal edita os primeiros poemas e ensaios.
Daumal afasta-se do movimento Le Grand Jeu por volta de 1931, ao conhecer Alexandre de Salzmann, que lhe apresenta a escola do famoso «taumaturgo» e mestre espiritual Georgi Gurdjieff. O seu pensamento místico e modelo de conhecimento esotérico cativaram-no imediatamente.
Escrito aos 22 anos e editado em 1936, Le Contreciel (O Contra-Céu) é imediatamente aclamado pela crítica, levando-o a ganhar o Prémio Jacques Doucet, atribuído por André Gide, Paul Valéry e Jean Giraudoux.
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160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1936
7 people are currently reading
203 people want to read
About the author
René Daumal
83 books188 followersRené Daumal was a French spiritual surrealist writer and poet. 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 known best in the U.S. 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 of 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.
The motion picture The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is based largely on Daumal's Mount Analogue.
William Walsh, an English poet, was a personal friend of Daumal and performed a radio presentation of Mount Analogue later in his life.
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 known best in the U.S. 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 of 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.
The motion picture The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is based largely on Daumal's Mount Analogue.
William Walsh, an English poet, was a personal friend of Daumal and performed a radio presentation of Mount Analogue later in his life.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 16, 2024
René Daumal I know largely because of him being a main influence on mystical multi-artist and overall Renaissance man Alejandro Jodorowsky, one of my great heroes. So it's a surprise it took so long for me to get around to reading him.
"Le Contre-Ciel", whose title is a difficult-to-translate French term that means "the one against the heaven" sometimes translated into "heaven-stormer", can best be described as a concentrated philosophical/religious/artistic theory-of-everything packed densely into poetry. It seems loopy at first but is presented with almost complete honesty, and is generally the kind of literary work that today only comes from obscure authors published on small independent presses. Once upon a time, though, books like this became literary classics.
Much of the actual philosophical content here comes across as vaguely Buddhist in its fixation on existence's fundamental ineffability and non-duality, as well as Daumal's fascination with everything in the universe being both impermanent and inseparable from each other. At the same time, Daumal puts a painstaking effort into creating a language of metaphor and symbolism that is genuinely unmoored from any existing religious tradition's iconography. I suspect this is what attracted Jodorowsky to Daumal.
Some of the poems here go more into stock gothic territory complete with ghosts, demons, abandoned temples and caves full of skulls. Other poetry here is more what you would expect from interwar-era surrealism and has fewer obvious religious undertones even if the overall metaphysical underpinnings are still there, but is still quite impressive to read. Daumal deserves a larger audience and to be known as more than "the man who gave Jodorowsky his ideas".
"Le Contre-Ciel", whose title is a difficult-to-translate French term that means "the one against the heaven" sometimes translated into "heaven-stormer", can best be described as a concentrated philosophical/religious/artistic theory-of-everything packed densely into poetry. It seems loopy at first but is presented with almost complete honesty, and is generally the kind of literary work that today only comes from obscure authors published on small independent presses. Once upon a time, though, books like this became literary classics.
Much of the actual philosophical content here comes across as vaguely Buddhist in its fixation on existence's fundamental ineffability and non-duality, as well as Daumal's fascination with everything in the universe being both impermanent and inseparable from each other. At the same time, Daumal puts a painstaking effort into creating a language of metaphor and symbolism that is genuinely unmoored from any existing religious tradition's iconography. I suspect this is what attracted Jodorowsky to Daumal.
Some of the poems here go more into stock gothic territory complete with ghosts, demons, abandoned temples and caves full of skulls. Other poetry here is more what you would expect from interwar-era surrealism and has fewer obvious religious undertones even if the overall metaphysical underpinnings are still there, but is still quite impressive to read. Daumal deserves a larger audience and to be known as more than "the man who gave Jodorowsky his ideas".
January 30, 2008
Along with Bataille, Daumal is in the distinctly French Surrealist tradition of negation as negative theology. Without exception, every one of these poems is an intimation of its authors death. This is much, much better than it sounds.
November 2, 2024
Drôle de façon d'appeler le plancher
March 19, 2012
Rene Daumal is one of my existential heroes. His books -- Mount Analogue and A Night of Serious Drinking -- are life-changing explorations of what it means to be human and how we experience reality. Daumal's project was to strip away the false and find the essence, and he ended up in a Buddhist-like renunciation of self. But before he got there he went through a period where he wrote violent poems about death and denial. These are those poems, and unfortunately, they don't have much of the grace and wonder of Mount Analogue. They were a stage in the journey, and frankly a rather dreary one. Mount Analogue is immeasurably a better book in my estimation.
February 20, 2013
Daumal's work centers on the idea of a "spiritual suicide", a Kirillov-esque world view which sees the annihilation of the self as the first step towards something-or-other. His poems reflect this and are odd and dark with a tolerable amount of skin-flaying.
October 17, 2023
I don't feel bedazzled or shocked in the sense that this work is the greatest epiphany. I lost the plot for this book, for it was highly inconvenient and might I add esoteric to read and understand, and to impart any amount of wisdom from this book. I totally recommend an annotated version or an extended version of this book, something that explains what's written more easily, in a medium that speaks to you beyond imagery or allegories. The first selection of chapters does allow you to make sense of the essential theory that is being employed, but anything after that is incredibly hard to digest and to cause curiosity to further the very pages that do not welcome or entertain my arduous perusal.
I had my fill with this book, with white men and surrealism, and them trying to make their life pleasant after committing war crimes. Whether Daumal committed war crimes or not, isn't necessarily the issue, but I can sense the opium that has wafted his work, which on top of it being translated from French makes it cruelly indecipherable. His jargon of ideas is cruel and redundant, though one may argue that this may be the case with most works under the shelves of poetry and/or philosophy, but it is best to my beliefs, rationals, and sanity that this work or at least a huge chunk of it should have been lost or forgotten, as is his name. Even my keyboard would rather not type out the accentuated 'e', which is the only reason why I have not used his first name. All I wish is for my summers to be given back, as this book took my spring, my summer, and my fall. And that's of great vexation to me; to I, and the part of me I negate, and the part of me that is socially disposed to be hidden, and the psychological part that demands an escape, for the physiological part that desires a cure, for I have too many parts that my identity lingers on. Blessed have been my times, never.
I had my fill with this book, with white men and surrealism, and them trying to make their life pleasant after committing war crimes. Whether Daumal committed war crimes or not, isn't necessarily the issue, but I can sense the opium that has wafted his work, which on top of it being translated from French makes it cruelly indecipherable. His jargon of ideas is cruel and redundant, though one may argue that this may be the case with most works under the shelves of poetry and/or philosophy, but it is best to my beliefs, rationals, and sanity that this work or at least a huge chunk of it should have been lost or forgotten, as is his name. Even my keyboard would rather not type out the accentuated 'e', which is the only reason why I have not used his first name. All I wish is for my summers to be given back, as this book took my spring, my summer, and my fall. And that's of great vexation to me; to I, and the part of me I negate, and the part of me that is socially disposed to be hidden, and the psychological part that demands an escape, for the physiological part that desires a cure, for I have too many parts that my identity lingers on. Blessed have been my times, never.
December 19, 2023
The first prose section was great. Unfortunately, I felt the poetry to be a little too hit and miss at times, but still well worth a read.
February 4, 2016
En lo personal, no me gustan los poemas de Daumal. El ritmo me parece molesto y las imágenes burdas. Pero lo que sí me encantó, y dejo marcado para futuras re-lecturas, fueron sus reflexiones entorno a la poesía y al acto creador. También sus ideas sobre La Negación como afirmación me parecen muy interesantes.
June 2, 2017
Been floating in Le Contre-Ciel for quite some time, not planning on ever coming down.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews