Unica Zürn

Dark Spring

This fierce fable of childbirth by German Surrealist Unica Z�rn was written after she had already given birth to two children and undergone the self-induced abortion of another in Berlin in the 1950s. Beginning in the relatively straightforward, if disturbing, narrative of a young woman in a tower (with a bat in her hair and ravens for company) engaged in a psychic war with the parasitic son in her belly, The Trumpets of Jerichodissolves into a beautiful nightmare of hypnotic obsession and mythical language, stitched together with anagrams and private ruminations. Arguably Z�rn's most extreme experiment in prose, and never before translated into English, this novella dramatizes the frontiers of the body—its defensive walls as well as its cavities and thresholds—animating a harrowing and painfully, twistedly honest depiction of motherhood as a breakdown in the distinction between self and other, transposed into the language of darkest fairy tales. Unica Z�rn(1916–70) was born in Gr�newald, Germany. Toward the end of World War II, she discovered the realities of the Nazi concentration camps—a revelation which was to haunt and unsettle her for the rest of her life. After meeting Hans Bellmer in 1953, she followed him to Paris, where she became acquainted with the Surrealists and developed the body of drawings and writings for which she is best remembered: a series of anagram poems, hallucinatory accounts and literary enactments of the mental breakdowns from which she would suffer until her suicide in 1970.

The Trumpets of Jericho

In 1970, Unica Zurn, the companion and lover of the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, threw herself from the sixth floor window of their apartment in Paris. Her suicide was the culmination of thirteen years of mental crises which are described with disarming lucidity in The Man Of Jasmine, subtitled Impressions from a Mental Illness. Zurn's mental collapse was initiated when she encountered in the real world her childhood fantasy figure "the man of jasmine": he was the writer Henri Michaux, and her meeting him plunged her into a world of hallucination in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. Her return to "reality" was constantly interrupted by alternate visionary and depressive periods. Zurn's compelling narrative also reveals her uneasy relationship with words and language, which she attempted to resolve by the compulsive writing of anagrams. Anagrams allowed her to dissect the language of everyday, to personalise it, and to make it reveal hidden at its core astonishing messages, threats and evocations. They formed the basis of her interpretation of the split between her inner & outer lives and underpin the texts included in this selection. The Man of Jasmine is certainly one of the greatest descriptions of mental collapse, but it is much more. Zurn's familiarity with Surrealist conceptions of the psyche, and her extraordinary self-possession during the most alarming experiences are allied to vivid descriptive powers which make this a literary as well as a psychological masterpiece.

The Man of Jasmine

A remarkable illustrated text produced by the author during one of her stays in a mental institution.

Stories and Pictures from a Case of Jaundice

The House of Illnesses

Mörk vår och Jasminmannen

och andra texter

Semester på Maison Blanche

Mørkt forår

Jerikos trompeter

Unica Zhurn

The House of Illnesses (Printed Head)

Kara Bahar

Trąby jerychońskie

Hans Bellmer

lettres de Hans Bellmer à Henri Michaux & autres documents

Pour Unica Zürn

Halle Saint-Pierre (Museum)

" Quand vient le printemps elle part avec son ami pour l'île de Ré. Elle se remet à travailler. A peine le croit-elle, mais elle réalise des dessins d'une certaine qualité. Et surtout elle retrouve la concentration qui lui est nécessaire pour faire des anagrammes. La proximité de la mer, le sentiment, quand elle nage, d'une grande profondeur sous les pieds lui donnent un vertige de liberté, une nouvelle sensation de bonheur. Depuis toujours obsédée par les visages, elle dessine des visages. Après un premier moment où la plume "nage" en hésitant sur le papier blanc, elle découvre la place dévolue au premier œil. Ce n'est que lorsqu'on la regarde du fond du papier qu'elle commence à s'orienter et que, sans peine, un motif s'ajoute à l'autre. " (L'Homme-Jasmin)

Unica Zürn

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