Armel Guerne was a poet and translator of
French-speaking Swiss origin, born in Morges (Switzerland) in 1911.
His parents returned to France when he was nine. He continued his studies at the
college of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, before being cut off by his
father. Aided by the family of his best friend Munir
Hafez, he can continue his studies. At the Sorbonne he, together with Roger
Frétigny, founded the Psychological Study Group. His first book Oral is published by the Attic in
1934.
During the Second
World War, he stops all literary activity to devote himself to the
resistance: he enters a network of British Intelligence,
the Special Operations Executive and the Prosper network. With the
collapse of the network at the end of June 1943, he was arrested by the Gestapo. He was then interned at the Fresnes prison and later the Royallieu Camp near Compiegne from where he was sent to Buchenwald. Guerne managed to escape on the way before the train arrived in Charleville and managed to get himself to London.
After the war, he
translated numerous writers, including Novalis, Rilke, Hölderlin, the brothers Grimm,Melville, Virginia Woolf, Dürrenmatt, Elias
Canetti, Lao Tzu and Kawabata, while pursuing his own work.
In 1960, Armel Guerne retires to the
windmill in Tourtrès (Lot-et-Garonne). He
died on 9 October 1980 at the hospital in Marmande.
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