Coma Crossing: Collected Poems

by Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, David Ball (Translator)

"In France, the poetry of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte has long received the major press attention it deserves. Now, thanks to David Ball’s fine translation, English readers can experience its fractured eloquence in full, from wry early sketches and experiments with prose poetry, to the stark, skeletal verse for which he is best known. Gilbert-Lecomte’s adult life was spent gazing, wilfully, into the abyss. In his poetry, the voice that dominates is cold, ancient, and inhuman. It is the hum of the abyss gazing back."

—Dennis Duncan, University College London, Author of Theory of the Great Game and The Oulipo and Modern Thought

"While a handful of other translations of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte’s poetry exist, David Ball’s Coma Crossing is likely to be the one whose pages we’ll be absorbed in for some time to come. Gilbert-Lecomte was one of those peripheral poets who went against the Surrealist tide to carve his own psychic path; René Daumal was one of his comrades in their effort called Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game). Now, because of Ball’s expertise as a thinker and translator, we will have to pay attention to Gilbert-Lecomte at last."

—Bill Zavatsky, author of Theories of Rain and Other Poems, and co-translator of Earthlight: Poems of André Breton

Genres: Poetry

286 pages, Paperback

First published November 22, 2019

About the author

Poet and co-founder (with René Daumal, Roger Vailland and Josef Šíma) of the artistic group and magazine Le Grand Jeu. The group, associated with surrealists, was "excommunicated" from the movement by André 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.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Gi...)

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte was a founding member of the Surrealist-adjacent group Le Grand Jeu, which also produced a magazine by the same name. In 1943 Gilbert-Lecomte met an untimely end, indirectly due to his morphine addiction—it was certainly the most lonely and tragic death of the Grand Jeu membership (although René Daumal’s premature passing from tuberculosis was also quite tragic). Prior to the publication of this collected volume, English readers had only the option of reading Gilbert-Lecomte’s poetry as (controversially) translated by David Rattray in the selected volume Black Mirror. Here is how Rattray describes his approach in his translator’s note in that book: 'my general rule is that the translation must sound the way the original poet would sound if he or she were me.' Seriously? Now, five years ago when I read Black Mirror I’m sure I must have read that…unless I somehow glossed over it. Either way, despite the fact that the book was also a bilingual edition (as Coma Crossing is), I would not have known enough French to determine what exactly was amiss. As it was also my first encounter with Gilbert-Lecomte, I surely didn’t possess the insight provided by Coma Crossing translator David Ball (who also translated the Henri Michaux anthology Darkness Moves) in his introduction regarding Rattray’s numerous transgressions against the spirit and even, at times, the obvious intent of Gilbert-Lecomte’s poetry. (And, while I don’t own a copy of Black Mirror so can’t revisit it and compare, I did copy down enough quotes to conclude that not all of Rattray’s work was that questionable, at least to me at the time). All that being said, Black Mirror is now out of print and, given the revelations Ball offers up, probably likely to stay that way.

Much of Gilbert-Lecomte’s work ties into his cosmological inquiries. Central to his philosophy is the idea of the punctum stans (fixed point). Ball explains this in a note as 'the vision of a fixed point in a series of orphic circles—not God, but a spiritual principle, the essence of reality, out of time and fixed.' The perpetually out-of-reach goal of reaching this state drives the poet forward through multiple attempts to erase his self. An early poem—'Renaitre Prénatal' ('Reborn Prenatal')—describes this first-person transformation in three discrete phases, ending with the equilibrium reached at ‘the dead center, the absolute’. Another one, from which the book draws its title, observes it from a different perspective—at a remove, but no less affecting:

COMA CROSSING
Hey, you anxious man there, dying, when you see
The sky: a golden dome all specked with black
Dots—the stars—and the moon a black pastille
On a giant belly of light, your time
Has come: this is your last death
This is your first birth

This volume brings all of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte’s poetry into English, without the intrusion of a compromised intercessor. It is a most welcome companion to the other works in translation of Le Grand Jeu members that have appeared in recent years.