The man of Jasmine & other texts / Unica Zurn ; translated and introduced by Malcolm Green.

"In recent decades Unica Zürn has come to be recognised as a great artist at least the equal of her partner, the Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Yet her work is barely comprehensible without the texts which are printed here, in a comprehensively revised translation. Zürn shows how her familiarity with Surrealist conceptions of the psyche allowed her to welcome the most alarming experiences as offering her access to an inner existence that was the vital source for her artistic output. Malcolm Green's introduction was the first study to consider her life and work from this perpective. Zürn's initial mental collapse was initiated when she encountered in the real world a fantasy figure from her childhood — "the man of Jasmine" - in the person of the writer Henri Michaux. Her meeting with 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, and her description of these episodes reveals how language itself formed a part of the "divinatory" method that could aid her recovery or predict a new crisis. Her compulsion for composing anagrams allowed her to dissect everyday language and release an astonishing flood of messages, threats and evocations. This method, if such it can be called, and Zürn's eloquent yet direct style make this book a literary masterpiece as well as providing an acute firsthand insight into extreme psychological states. It stands alongside equivalent works by Leonora Carrington and Gérard de Nerval, among others... In 1970 Unica Zürn committed suicide by throwing herself from a window of the sixth-floor apartment that she shared with Bellmer."--Provided by publisher.