FRANCE

Born in Tinchebray, France in 1896, Andre Breton studied medicine and psychiatry, and was highly influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud.  In the First World War, he served in the medical corps.      Upon returning to Paris, Breton became friends with Paul Valery and Guillaume Apollinaire, and from 1919 to 1923 associated himself with the Dadaist movement.  In that same year, he founded the  review Litterature with Philippe Soupault an Louis Aragon, and he later collaborated with Soupault on Les Champs magnetiques (The Magnetic Fields), the first example of automatic writing in France.      By 1924 Breton and others broke from Tristan Tzara's Dadaism and founded their own Surrealist movement, heralded by the publication of the Manifeste du surrealisme (Manifesto of Surrealism).  The same year Breton published another "automatically" written work, Poisson soluble ("Soluble Fish").      In 1928 he published the autobiographical and poetic "fiction," Nadja (the title of which is the beginning of the Russian word for hope).  The work recounts the "mad love" and search for the subjective other which would be the hallmarks of several surrealist works.  Through this work and others, such as The Second Manifesto of Surrealism (published in 1930) and L'amour fou (1937; Mad Love), Breton's name became synonymous with Surrealism, and he became recognized as the major theoretician and leader of the movement.      During this same period Breton became involved with Communism, in part through his admiration for Leon Trotsky.  Because of Breton's interest in occultism and experimental art, his ties with the official Communist Party were brief and tenuous.        In the late 1930s Breton traveled to Mexico, where he met Diego Rivera and Trotsky.  He visited New York in 1941 and founded the magazine VVV with Marcel Durchamp, Max Ernst, and David Hare.  In 1942 he delivered a lecture at Yale on Surrealism, and two years later, upon a visit to Gaspe Peninsula in Canada, produced Arcanum 17. He continued to produce poetry and theoretical statements until the time of his death in Paris in 1966.

 André Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement, was one of 
the most important figures in 20th century art. This selection includes 
two parts of his cycle of love poems, The Air of the Water.

"In the beautiful half-light of 1934"

The air was a splendid pink the color of red mullet
And the forest when I prepared to enter it
Began with a tree with cigarette paper leaves
Because I was waiting for you
And if you come for a walk with me
No matter where
Your mouth is the incredible all-spice
From which the blue wheel diffuse and broken endlessly sets out and rises
Turning pale in the rut
All the marvels hurried to meet me
A squirrel had come to press its white belly against my heart
I don't know how he made himself do it
But the earth was filled with reflections deeper than those in water
As if metal had finally shaken off its shell
And you lying on the frightening ocean of precious gems
Were turning
Naked
In a huge sun of fireworks
I saw you slowly evolving from the radiolarians
Even the shells of the sea urchins I was there
Wait a minute I wasn't there any more
I had raised my head because the living jewel box of white velvet had left me
And I was sad 
The sky between the leaves was shining haggard and hard like a dragonfly
I was going to shut my eyes
When two wooden booms which had suddenly swung apart came crashing down
Without a sound
Like the two center leaves of an immense lily-of-the-valley
Of a flower capable of containing the whole night
I was where you see me now
In the set-all-the-bells-a-ringing perfume
Before they could return as they do each day to fickle life
I just had time to place my lips
On your glass thighs

"I dream I see you endlessly superimposed upon yourself"

You're sitting on the high coral stool
In front of your mirror always in its first quarter
Two fingers on the water wing of your comb
And at the same time
You're returning from a journey you're lingering the last one left in the grotto
Streaming with lightning
You don't recognize me
You're stretched out on the bed you wake up or you fall asleep   
You wake up where you went to sleep or somewhere else
You're naked the elderberry ball bounces again
A thousand elderberry balls hum above you
So light that at each instant you're unaware of them
Your breath your blood saved from the crazy juggling of the air
You cross the street the cars hurled at you are nothing but their shadows
And as a
Little girl
Caught in a bellows of sparkles
You jump rope
Long enough so that the one green butterfly which haunts the peaks of Asia
Can appear at the top of the invisible stairway
I caress everything that was you 
In everything that's yet to be you
I hear the melodious hissing
Of your limitless limbs
The one serpent in all the trees
Your arms at whose center the crystal of the compass rose turns    
My living fountain of Shivas

Two sections from The Air of the Water by André Breton, 
translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow, excerpted from 
Earthlight by André Breton, recently reissued by Sun and Moon Press. 
Translation © 1993 by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow. 
Poems © 1966 Editions Gallimard.

About the translators:      

                             ZACK ROGOW

Zack Rogow was awarded the 1933 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his co-translation of Earthlight by Andre Breton.  He also translated Horace  by George Sand, which won the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Association Award.  His most recent book of poems is The Selfsame Planet, published by Mayapple Press.  He has worked as a production coordinator of a commercial translation agency and as the Managing Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.  He now teaches in the Master of Arts in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Academic Talent Development Program at UC Berkeley.http://www.twolines.com/bios/rogow.html

                             BILL ZAVATSKY

Bill Zavatsky is a poet who has translated Robert Desnos, Valery Larbaud, Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ramon Gomez de la Serna and other writers.  He has published many articles on creative writing as well as a collection of poetry, Theories of Rain and Other Poems. For this translation of Earthlight he shared the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for 1993 with Zack Rogow.  He teaches at the Trinity School in New York City.

This biography appears in Earthlight by André Breton, winner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, translated from the French by  Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow, and is printed with permission. The poems are copyright 1966 by Editions Gallimard. Earthlight is available from Sun and  Moon Classics in a recently revised edition. http://www.sunmoon.com/classics/breton_earth.html