Unica Zürn

Unica Zürn photographed by Man Ray in 1956. She was born in Berlin in 1917 and jumped out of the window in 1970 in Paris. She wrote a weird and beautiful novel, Der Mann im Jasmin. The Jasmin Man is in fact the Belgian writer Henri Michaux (see previous post) that she met in Paris. Michaux provided her pencils and papers to draw when she was locked in a psychiatric hospital. Her mother was part of the elite nazi society. She also had a long and painful love story with the surrealist drawer Hans Bellmer.

Paul-Jean Toulet

Paul-Jean Toulet wrote one of the most beautiful collections of poems in French, les Contrerimes. He had three passions: women, alcohol and landscapes. If I remember well the (great) classes of poetics of Marc Dominicy, he was also cocainomane. He was friend with Claude Debussy. His novels are quite boring, but his poems delicious. I didn’t find anything translated in German, weird if it’s true. La Contrerime is a rarely used poetic form. Toulet and Leconte de Lisle were among the few ones using it. A contrerime is a short poem with three to five strophes, which alternate octosyllabic and hexasyllabic verses. The first one rimes with the last one, and the internal ones rime together (ABBA):

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Dans le lit vaste et dévasté

J’ouvre les yeux près d’elle

Je l’effleure: un songe infidèle

l’embrasse à mon côté

PS: To learn how to count syllables in French verses, read eg Marc Dominicy, «Métrique accentuelle et métrique quantitative», Langue Française, numéro 99, 1993, 75-96.

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