About this item
Highlights
- René Daumal (b. 1908) is best known for his novel Mt. Analogue, unfinished at his death, in 1944 (other works in English include A Night of Serious Drinking and The Power of the Word).
- 156 Pages
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
Description
About the Book
"Renâe Daumal was the first to realize that this text had a living message, a living energy for contemporary artists. The rasas are the aspects or varieties of aesthetic experience in the arts: the word is sometimes translated as "flavors" or "taste." LLL, fr. interview in B'Klyn Rail, Nov. 2019. For all practitioners of the sacred arts of India, Renee Daumal's RASA is required reading. Illuminated with insight and inspiration by translator Louise Landes Levi, RASA is a portal and a pathway to understanding the aesthetic theory underlying all Indian arts. As a musician, singer, poet, and writer, Levi has the unique affinity and experience to bring this work to light. Barbara Framm, dancer & teacher, Bharatya Natyam & Odissi dance. RASA appeared in 1982 and has not left my side for nearly forty years. It remains the only indispensible book in English on the poets of old India, their transformative poetry & their pioneer insights into language. Rene Daumal was the West's first heroic student of yoga and the arts, his essays a pinnacle of the 20th century's avant-garde. We're lucky to have Louise Landes Levi's translations back in print. -Andrew Schelling, poet & translator- Dropping the Bow: Poems of Ancient India., Old Tale Road. It's good to see this pioneering paradigmatic classic on Sanskrit and Indian culture in print again. Louise Landis Levi deserves a medal! -Peter Lamborn Wilson, author, Temporary Autonomous Zone, Opium Dens I have Known, Pirate Utopia Pandit Pran Nath taught SOUND IS GOD, NADA BRHAMA, the rasas & bhavas of Indian music qualify this but as Mirabai, the great bhakti whom Levi also translated said 'only the wounded know the wound'. Through his natural genius for the Sanskrit language & his experience w. the dance troop of Uday Shankar, the first to bring Indian music & dance to the West, Renâe Daumal conveys the way in which this transcendence is codified in the canonic system of Indian Sangeet. - Catherine Christer Hennix, Composer, electronic Harpsicord, Born of Six & writings: Poetry Matters and Other Matters. Renâe Daumal's Rasa is a transmission which reveals the first teachings on theatrical art, the Bhratya Natya Sastra. Rasa presents Daumal's views on poetry, Pataphysics, and Vedic texts in an inspiring and devotional manifesto. Louise Landes Levi is an ideal translator for this work, able to convey its meticulous analysis of the aesthetic and spiritual traditions of ancient India, through Daumal's brilliant and unique point of view. -Tony Torn, actor-director, Ubu Sings Ubu & acting teacher, MIT. Writing in the wake of Surrealism (& Jarry's Pataphysics ), and triggered by his toxic Dzogchen carbon tetrachloride illuminations, Renâe Daumal was one of the first Western intellectuals to approach Asian religions and aesthetics from the point of view of a practitioner rather than an academic or Orientalist. The essays collected in Rasa, sensitively translated by poet Louise Landes Levi, also a practitioner, still speak in a powerful way to what is powerful and profound in certain Asian religious and aesthetic traditions for transcendentally homeless yogis everywhere. - - MARCUS BOON, prof. of English, York University & editor of John Giorno's Subduing Demons in American: Selected Poems.1962-2007"--Book Synopsis
René Daumal (b. 1908) is best known for his novel Mt. Analogue, unfinished at his death, in 1944 (other works in English include A Night of Serious Drinking and The Power of the Word). Daumal was an autodidact, ie. a non-academic, Sanskritist. Following youthful explorations, with poet Gilbert Le Conte (Black Mirror) and initial instruction in Sanskrit from René Guernon, he embarked on a solitary study, surpassed his teacher and eventually formulated his own Sanskrit dictionary. He translated essential texts on Sanskrit composition, poetry in Sanskrit, including the famous hymn concerning SOMA and the first chapter of the Bharatya Natya
Sastra, the world's first treatise on the dramatic arts written circa 4th century. Writing numerous essays on Sanskrit poetics his deeply felt intention was to present these texts and the spiritual etymology of the sub-continent in a form accessible to the 'common man', the artists and new societies of the 20th century. As secretary to Uday Shankar, he wrote the first reviews of Indian music and dance in the West (Paris, circa 1935) and accompanied Uday Shankar's troupe, which included Ravi Shankar as a 12 year old dancer to NYC. During the 2nd. World War, exiled in the South of France, with his wife Vera who was Jewish, he furthered his literary work, completing essays, translations, reviews while maintaining, with others so exiled. a profound epistolary exchange (see Letters 1930-1944), until his death from tuberculosis, shortly before the alien landing. RASA, a 'cult classic' edited by Claudio Rugafori, secretary of the Daumal archives and translated by American poet and musician, Louise Landes Levi, has earned its reputation.This is its 3rd. edition, prior editions being New Directions, 1982 and Shivastan 2003 and 2006.