The Major Ordeals of the Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones

Michaux, Henri

Harcourt, Brace. Jovanovich

Text: English, French (translation)

Biographies & Memoirs

Harcourt

A travel classic about learning how to see other people, other forms of life, and other civilizations.

Ecuador: A Travel Journal

Science & Math

Univ of Washington Pr

Henri Michaux defies common critical definition. Critics have compared his work to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux genius,” and Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Michaux’s work is without equal in the literature of our time.” This anthology contains substantial selections from almost all of Michaux’s major works, most never before published in English, and allows readers to explore the haunting verbal and pictorial landscape of a twentieth-century visionary.

Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University of California Press

Henri Michaux defies common critical definition. Critics have compared his work to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux “genius,” and Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Michaux’s work “is without equal in the literature of our time.” This anthology contains substantial selections from almost all of Michaux’s major works, most never before published in English, and allows readers to explore the haunting verbal and pictorial landscape of a twentieth-century visionary.

Ball, David

Illustrations of michaux drawings. the author, a belgian-born artist and writer, writes of his experiences with hallucinogenics

Infinite Turbulence

Riverrun Pr

Poet Henri Michaux boarded a ship for Ecuador in 1927 as "a man who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal." The result is a work of pointed observation and sensual, even hallucinogenic, poetry and prose.

Ecuador: A Travel Journal (Marlboro Travel)

Travel

Reference

Marlboro Press

A collection from one of the great figures in modern French poetry. This selection is from L’Espace du Dedans, which collected eight books of prose poems, sketches and free verse. Brilliantly translated by Richard Ellmann, Michaux asks readers to join him in a fantastic world of the imagination. It is a world where wry humor plays against horror––where Chaplin meets Kafka––a world of pure and rare invention.

Selected Writings Michaux

Essays & Correspondence

New Directions

“It is superb in its swift illuminations and its wit... [Michaux has] a way of leading you to the unpredictable margins of his sensibility, as when he notes, apropos of the generality of psychic gifts in India, that it makes the distinction between imbeciles and non-imbeciles ' so unsatisfactory'....” ―Alfred Kazin, New Yorker Henri Michaux (1889-1984), the great French poet and painter, set out as a young man to see the Far East. His strange insights and ironic impressions comprise A Barbarian in Asia, presented here in its original version in the classic translation by Sylvia Beach, the famous Paris bookseller.

A Barbarian in Asia

Poetry

Previously available only as a limited editon, Henri Michaux's Ideograms in China is now available as a New Directions paperback. Peerlessly translated by the American poet Gustaf Sobin, this long, beautifully illustrated and annotated prose poem was originally written as an introduction to Leon Chang's La calligraphie chinoise (1971), a work that now stands as an important complement to Pound and Ernest Fenollosa's classic study, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.
Allen Ginsberg called Michaux a genius, and Jorge Luis Borges said that his work is without equal in the literature of our time. Henri Michaux (1899-1984) wrote Ideograms in China as an introduction to Leon Chang’s La calligraphie chinoise (1971), a work that now stands as an important complement to Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s classic study, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Previously available only as a limited edition, Ideograms in China is a long, gorgeously illustrated and annotated prose poem containing a very deep consideration of the world’s oldest living language. Poet Gustaf Sobin’s luminous English version beautifully captures the astounding and strange French original. For Michaux, the Chinese culture ranked as the world’s richest, a culture grounded in its written language, which bound China together through three millennia and across its enormous territories. Ideograms in China presents an oblique history of that culture through the changing variety and beauty of the ideograms: Michaux looks into a dozen scripts––from ancient bronze vessels bearing ku-wen script to running script to standard k’ai-shu characters––and the poem carries the rhythms of someone discovering the soul of a civilization in its impression of ink on paper.

Ideograms in China

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Michaux, Henri. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Michaux, Henri

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Michaux, Henri. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Major Ordeals of the Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones

The Major Ordeals of the Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones

Ecuador: A Travel Journal

Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984

Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984

Infinite Turbulence

Ecuador: A Travel Journal (Marlboro Travel)

Selected Writings Michaux

A Barbarian in Asia

Ideograms in China