Journey To The Land Of The Real

”Victor Segalen (1878-1919) was a doctor and archaeologist who travelled extensively in Polynesia and China. He was also a great poet, and as befits an admirer of Gauguin and Rimbaud, the journey made in this, his last and most important work, is not so much between points on a map, as between the imagined and the real. Journey to the Land of the Real (Equipée in French) is “not a poem about a journey, nor is it the travel diary of a wanderer’s dream”. In fact, it is the summation of the author’s life as both traveller and poet, and a summation all the more surprising because he was to die in highly mysterious circumstances soon after it was written“, translated by Natasha Lehrer, text in English, hard cover, 136 pages, 19,5 x 17,5 cm, Atlas Anti-Classics 23, London 2016