Four Poems

Lorand Gaspar, poet, surgeon and traveller, was born in 1925 in Translyvania, with Hungarian as his native language. The war brought him (on foot) to Paris in 1945, where he stayed the next ten years, eventually studying medicine, and in 1950 took out French nationality. he then worked as a surgeon in Bethlehem, Jerusalem and finally, Tunis, where he now lives in retirement. he has travelled extensively, especially in the deserts of the Near East, Central Asia and North Africa, and in the Aegean. He began publishing poetry in his adoptive language in the mid-sixties, and has become a widely-respected poet with two volumes in Gallimard's popular "Poesie" series, as well as books of poetics, travel writing, and an important history of Palestine.