Pomegranate and the Rose: Hermetic Verses –– by Irène Hillel-Erlanger

The inexplicably neglected writer, filmmaker, and alchemist Irène Hillel-Erlanger is long overdue recognition of her important role in the cultural underground of the early 20^th Century. An innovative queer Jewish poet and co-founder of the first female-owned film studio with her partner Germaine Dulac, she also funded much of Paris Dada’s activity and published a hermetically-coded dadalchemical novel which remains a legend in occult circles today.

Hillel-Erlanger, who published for most of her life under the male pseudonym Claude Lorrey, remained at the forefront of poetic evolution throughout her short life, from her early Symbolist poems, through her Cubist-Imagist poems, to her Dada masterpiece ‘For Love’. Notwithstanding, her contributions to poetry, film, and avant-garde culture remain virtually unknown, particularly in the anglophone world.

This sampling of never-before-translated texts by Irène Hillel-Erlanger/Claude Lorrey represents most of her poetry published in avant-garde magazines during her life. They reveal a project of modern hermetic literature that is at once deeply traditional and, particularly in her later poems, audaciously revolutionary; yet they remain, perhaps appropriately, tantalizing clues to an occult world of thought and experience shrouded in impenetrable mystery.

Translated & w/Introduction by Olchar E. Lindsann
Cover image by Shelly Smith, Studio Cornix

36 pgs on folded 8.5”x11”. Nov., 2024/A.Da. 108/A.H. 194
$1.75 + s/h