ABSTRACT
The poet Lorand Gaspar shows that the French language can be fashioned into a sharp lens for perceiving the desert—its wind, sand, rocks and light. His first collection, Le Quatrieme Etat de la matiere (1966), announced his intention to explore "the bright side of night". "Brightness", "clarity", "luminosity", "light"—these are the key terms of his entire oeuvre. As a boy, Gaspar was educated in three languages (Hungarian, Romanian, and German), later briefly studied physics at the Polytechnic in Budapest, was deported to a Nazi work camp in 1944, managed to escape in March 1945, and finally joined up with French soldiers near Pfullendorf, Germany. He thus revives the dichotomy haunting ancient Greek scientist-philosophers, who necessarily wondered whether anything surpassed the facts of the natural world that they were so meticulously scrutinizing and categorizing. His poetry indicates paths leading upwards from the debasement of the human condition.
