Background
Paul Colinet was born on May 2, 1898, in Arquennes, Seneffe, Belgium.
Paul Colinet was born on May 2, 1898, in Arquennes, Seneffe, Belgium.
Colinet was a part of the Belgian surrealist movement. He was both influential and on friendly terms with others in the movement, including the well- known painter, René Magritte. Like other authors in that distinctive grouplet, Colinet's work was little published in his lifetime and outside Belgium, he's still little known.
He participated in the Group's activities and publications from then on, all while working his day job as a mid-level functionary in the communal administration of a Brussels suburb. After World War II, he founded several key Belgian avant-garde journals and published two books of poems and prose poems "Les histoires de la lampe" and "La manivelle du château" before his early death.
Since his death, Colinet's works have been translated into several other languages, including English. In 1975, Rochelle Ratner translated a number of his poems and published them in a collection titled "Paul Colinet: Selected Prose Poems." The book contains more than thirty of Colinet's poems, including "Fable," "The Clouds," "The Winter Cuckoo," "The Misfortune," "The Absence of Color," and "Thin Man's Game." The poem "Thin Man's Game" was also translated by Paul Bowles and appeared in the 1953 collection "New Directions in Prose and Poetry."