Pierre Albert-Birot

Pierre Albert-Birot, autoportrait, 1916
Dessin de couverture de L’Homme Coupe

Wikipedia: Pierre Albert-Birot (stub)

Short biography (French)

Sound recordings: Pierre Albert-Birot

Website devoted to Albert-Birot (very slow to load)

Les Soliloques Napolitains

Title page

(click here for enlargement of illustration)

Les Soliloques Napolitains, by Pierre Albert-Birot and Jean Lurçat, is a short book of illustrated poems. There are eight illustrations in total by Lurçat including the cover illustration, and sixteen poems by Albert-Birot, which really form one continuing phantasy of a woman as she stimulates herself - at first with her imagination and fingers, and then with her imagination and a dildo. Finally she comes - indicated by lines radiating from her vagina like the beams of light from the sun, or the sparkle of a jewel. The book bears the date 1822, but it makes no attempt to imitate the style of 1822. It was published in or around 1922.

Albert-Birot lived from 1876 to 1967 - hence I am frugal with the illustrations!

For a while there will be a photograph of another drawing from Les Soliloques Napolitains here.

The First Book of Grabinoulor

Dalkey Archive Press - Grabinoulor

There is little I can say about Grabinoulor that is not said in this review.

Here is a section of text from Grabinoulor (trans by Barbara Wright) from Review of Contemporary Fiction Spring 2007, Vol. 27 Issue 1, p93-95. The excerpt, from which this small part was taken, runs to around 1250 words.

On a shut-in November evening Grabinoulor’s feet were sploshing about in the Paris mud and that evening he distressed his shoes no end they were quite astonished at having to plough through such black mud when such white snow was falling for Grabinoulor’s shoes are full of logic even when his feet are inside them nevertheless although he was perfectly conscious–which is something that happens even to people who are not in the least conscientious–of how humiliating this state was for his shoes and indirectly for himself too he couldn’t do anything that evening other than place his feet on the ground as there was so little space between the earth and the sky and that was why even though he was Grabinoulor it took him a long time to reach the theatre which high-flown declamators were supposed to transport with all its listeners to the environs of the infinite but a gentleman with a nose a mouth round cheeks spectacles ears and a fine mirror-like pate simply by speaking brought the ceiling down on to the head of everybody sitting in the theatre and it was Grabinoulor who was the most inconvenienced by this…

ÇA NE SE FAIT PAS - IT ISN’T DONE

By Pierre Albert-Birot

This image is from Manifesto: A Century of Isms by Mary Ann Caws at Google Books. The image is at p144, but I have linked to p143 for another Albert-Birot work.

Tags: Albert-Birot, erotic