Selected Poems

by André Breton, Kenneth White (Translator)

From the dust jacket flap:

"This selection of his poems, based on Breton's own choice in the volume Poemes (1948), is translated by Kenneth White and published with the French text. It is the only edition of Breton's poetry available in the English language."

Genres: Poetry, France, French Literature, 20th Century, Literature, Anthologies, Fiction

112 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1969

About the author

After World War I, French poet and literary theorist André Breton began to link at first with Dadaism but broke with that movement to write the first manifesto of surrealism in 1924.

People best know this theorist as the principal founder. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme), in which he defined this "pure psychic automatism."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3...

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Paris the tower of Saint-Jacques swaying
Like a sunflower
Sometimes runs its brow against the Seine and its shadow
glides imperceptibly among the tugs
At that moment on tiptoe in my sleep
I head for the room where I am lying
And set fire to it
So that nothing will remain of the consent wrung from me
The furniture then makes way for animals of the same size
looking at me fraternally
Lions in whose manes the chairs are now burning out
Sharks whose white bellies absorb the last quivering of the
sheets
At the hour of love and of blue eyelids
I see myself burning in turn I see that solemn hiding place of
nothings

****

The Marquis de Sade has gone back inside the erupting
volcano
From which he had come
With his lovely hands still fringed
His young girl's eyes
And that rationality on the edge of hurry-scurry which was
His alone
But from the phosphorescent salon with viscera lamps
He has not stopped letting fly those mysterious commands
That break through the moral light
Through that breach I can see
The great cracking shadows the old undermined bark
Dissolving
To permit my loving you
As the first man loved the first woman
In total freedom
That freedom
For which fire itself became man
For which the Marquis de Sade defied the centuries with his
great abstract trees
Of tragic acrobats
Clutching the gossamer of desire

****

With one wave of the wand it had been flowers
And blood
The ray of light settled on the frozen window
No one
Puff it became clear that space was spilling out
Then the air pillow slipped under the sainfoin
The avalanches perked up their heads
And inside the stones shoulders rose up
Eyes were still closed in the mistrustful water
From the depths arose the triple collar
That was to become the pride of the wardrobe
And the cicadas' song picked up its ticket
At the station still wrapped in all its strings
The woman was biting into a steam apple
On the knees of a large white beast
In the workshops on the silent benches
The moon's plane smoothed out the cutting sheets
And the millstone spit out its butterflies

[Eadweard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woman of mine with the back of a bird in vertical flight With a quicksilver back
A back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and moist chalk
And the drop of a glass just drained
Woman of mine with nacelle hips
With chandelier and arrow-feather hips
Like scapes of white peacock plumes
Of imperceptible sway
Woman of mine with buttocks of sandstone and amianthus
Woman of mine with swan’s-back buttocks
Woman of mine with springtime buttocks
With the gladiolus sex
Woman of mine with the placer and platypus sex
Woman of mine with the sex of seaweed and oldtime sweets
Woman of mine with the mirror-like sex
Woman of mine with eyes full of tears
With violet-panoplied and magnetic-needle eyes
Woman of mine with savannah eyes
Woman of mine with eyes of water to be drunk in prison Woman of mine with eyes of wood always under the axe With water-level eyes the level of air earth and fire
-




I know despair in its broad outlines. Despair has no wings, it is not necessarily found at a cleared table upon a terrace, in the evening by the seaside. It is despair and it is not the return of a quantity of little facts like seeds leaving one furrow for another at nightfall. It is not moss upon a stone or a drinking glass. It is a boat riddled with snow, if you please, like birds falling, and their blood has not the slightest thickness. I know despair in its broad outlines. A very small form, fringed by jewels of hair. It is despair. A necklace of pearls for which a clasp can never be found and whose existence does not hold even by a thread, that is despair.'As for the rest, let’s not speak of it. We haven’t finished despairing if we begin. I myself despair of the lampshade around four o’clock, I despair of the fan around midnight, I despair of the condemned man’s last cigarette. I know despair in its broad outlines. Despair has no heart, the hand always remains in despair out of breath, in despair whose death we are never told about by mirrors. I live off this despair which so enchants me. I love that blue fly streaking in the sky at the hour when the stars hum their song. I know in its broad outlines despair with its long, slim breaches, the despair of pride, the despair of anger. I rise every day like everyone and I stretch out my arms on a flowered wall paper, I remember nothing and it is always with despair that I discover the lovely uprooted trees of the night. The air of the room is lovely like drumsticks. It is time weather. I know despair in its broad outlines. It is like the curtain wind giving me a helping hand. Can you imagine such despair: Fire, fire! Ah they are still going to come . . . Help! There they are falling down the stairs . . . And the newspaper advertisements, and the illuminated signs along the canal. Sandpile, go on with you, you old sandpile! In its broad outlines despair has no importance. It is a drudgery of trees that is going to make a forest again, a drudgery of stars that is going to make one less day again, a drudgery of days fewer which will again make up my life.
-




Patient and curved the lovely shadow walks round the paving stones
The Venetian windows open and close upon the square Where beasts move freely fires trailing
Wet streetlamps rustle in a frame of swarming blue eyes That cover the landscape upstream from the town
This morning prow of the sun how you steep yourself in the
superb songs sighed in a traditional mode behind the curtains by the naked women keeping watch
While the giant arum lilies turn about their waist
The bloody mannequin hopping on all three feet in the attic
He’s coming they say arching their necks where the bounce of braids sets free faintly pink glaciers
That split under the weight of a ray of light falling from the torn-off blinds
He’s coming it’s the glass-toothed wolf
Who eats up time in little round boxes
Who blows the overpungent fragrances of herbs
Who smokes little guide fires in the turnips at evening The columns of the great apartments of marble and vetiver cry out
They cry caught in those to-and-fro motions which until then enlivened only certain colossal castings in factories The motionless women on turntables will see
There is daylight on the left but night has completely fallen on the right
There are branches still full of birds that darken the gap in the casement window as they speed by
White birds laying black eggs
Where are those birds replaced now by stars edged with twin strands of pearls
-





There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the very first time
-





The benches of the outer boulevards bend down in time under the embrace of vines that light up softly in a spangle of beautiful eyes and lips. While they appear vacant to us, around them those ardent flowers continue to flutter and infuse each other. They are to translate in concrete terms the adage of mythographers according to which the gravitational pull of heavenly bodies is allegedly a characteristic of space and carnal desire the daughter of that characteristic but which altogether forgets to specify that it is up to the daughter, for the ball, to adorn the mother. A single breath is sufficient to set free those myriads of egrets bearing achenes. Between their upward and their downward flight along the endless curve of desire all the signs encompassed by the celestial score are set down in harmony.
.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine example of the critical notion that Dada destroys for the sake of rejecting, while Surrealism destroys in order to reconstruct. Like so many pieces gathered from the shattered fragments of the 1920s, these poems are structured around intelligible and even accessible themes, often with striking images and beauty in both language and concept. While there are forays into the excessive or nonsensical, Breton grounds these moments in universal poetic tropes: endless descriptions of bodies, landscapes, and the natural world, all of which stand in contrast to the poet’s drive to see the traditional with new eyes. Like the lost letter in the mail of “Last Post,” Breton largely succeeds in ensuring the clarity of his expression does not “get lost among the grains of poison.”

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

When the windows like the jackal’s eye and desire pierce the dawn, silken windlasses lift me up to suburban footbridges. I summon a girl who is dreaming in the little gilded house; she meets me on the piles of black moss and offers me her lips which are stones in the rapid river depths. Veiled forebodings descend the buildings’ steps. The best thing is to flee from the great feather cylinders when the hunters limp into the sodden lands. If you take a bath in the watery patterns of the streets, childhood returns to the country like a greyhound. Man seeks his prey in the breezes and the fruits are drying on the screens of pink paper, in the shadow of the names overgrown by forgetfulness. Joys and sorrows spread in the town. Gold and eucalyptus, similarly scented, attack dreams. Among the bridles and the dark edelweiss subterranean forms are resting like perfumers’ corks.
*
I caress all that you were
In all that must still be you
*
In your voice trills of lost birds give themselves a lift

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surrealism most directly captures what I look for in poetry, surprising language and unexpected combinations. You might think it's mostly about being weird and different with no deeper meaning, but surrealism is more about being faithful to dream logic than being odd for oddity's sake. Breton is the central figure of the movement and no one's done it better. I underlined a lot more in this collection than anything I've read recently, as nearly every poem has something amazing in it. There's no meter, little form, some prose poems, but plenty of great images and phrases. Topically, there were a surprising number of love poems. Dreams, after all, are related to our desires and Breton's work is not some dull artifact like Duchamp's fountain, they're emotive.

One technique I loved, most evident in the Soluble Fish (which, what a name) poems, was a simile or metaphor subsequently becoming present as a character later in a poem. E.g. "the port was illuminated in its entirety by an arc lamp the size of a child going to school...the child saw the tophat and, being hungry, undertook to empty it of its contents...". Also, "the size of a child going to school" is wonderful in its own right, extending the simile too far (what the child is doing doesn't matter for the size comparison). These sorts of inventive literary techniques are characteristic of surrealism at its best. They create strange connections between concepts and are also very funny.

The downside is also clear; often lacking a recognizable narrative or topic, the poems blend into a series of unrelated lines that are interesting on their own but do not cohere to a greater whole. Even when there are distinct subjects, the incredibly imagistic and abstract way of writing tends to collapse into a series of vaguely related but not truly unified fragments. Despite striking language, this causes the poems to all feel sort of the same, defeating their uniqueness somewhat. This book being a collection spanning several of Breton's publications helps to break up the monotony because his work is quite different across books.

[EIJANDOLUM]

A poetic embrace like a lovers’ embrace
As long as it lasts
Shuts out all the woes of the world.

When they make sense, they make the absolute sense. When they don't, well, he's still Breton. I'll always love and tolerate him.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

i have a push-pull relationship with surrealism. some of it grabs me and some of it i find unbearably dull. breton tends to be on the better end of the spectrum for me. i don't have any french, so i cannot compare the translation to the original (included here, which i prefer even when i can't read it). the english versions generally hold up well to my ear, although they don't always provide the element of linguistic surprise that i expected.

"No Grounds" ("Non-lieu") was a favorite of mine, including the gorgeous line "Take even the threads holding up the steps of the ropewalkers and the drops of water"

Also:

"There is
that leaning over the precipice
of the hopeless fusion of your presence and absence
I have found the secret
of loving you
always for the first time"
-from the book AIRWATER

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are very good. I'm deeply engaged right now with surrealist poetry; obviously, Breton, as the movement's founder and philosopher is a must read.

In terms of the content and effect of the poems, not what they DO, I enjoyed Paul Eluard's work a bit more. It may be my difficulty in still holding on to SOME sort of traditional hand hold on meaning; but, I think it's also something else. While Breton is certainly more "wild" and what Robert Bly would call "leaping" than Eluard, Eluard's poems have a spiritual longing and sweetness that I find at TIMES in Breton, but not as often or as deeply. As surrealist poets, they are both obviously interested in the poem as performance-so I'll put it this way. Breton may be a better actor than Eluard, but I like Eluard's roles more.

[Hallie Lauinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

i am out of breath. i began crying upon beginning this book and was dumbfounded as i felt i could understand none of it. then i read bretons first manifesto of surrealism and it all made sense. he merges “reality” with dreams. this writing is completely new to me - images and sparks of unintentional beauty previously unobtained - images attesting to the fact that the mind is ripe for something other than the benign joys it allows itself in general.

[Charlie Mansfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

These wonderful translations make Breton’s verse accessible for the Anglophone. The opening few lines of his, ‘The Verb To Be’ I found particularly powerful:

- ‘I know despair in its broad outlines.
Despair has no wings, it is not necessarily found at a cleared table upon a terrace, in the evening by the seaside.
It is despair and it is not the return of a quantity of little facts like seeds leaving one furrow for another at nightfall. It is not moss upon a stone or a drinking glass.”

[Maggie Searle · Rating 4 out of 5]

In translation this book became slightly too surrealist and to understand many of the puns it was necessary to read the footnotes, but, disregarding that I thoroughly enjoyed much of Breton’s writing. I was drawn to read Breton from a single poem of his entitled “They tell me.” I was incredibly impressed by the beauty encompassed in this poem which was aided greatly by the surrealist aspect of it, “so what is this far off land…it trembles very real at the tips of your lashes. Sweet to your carnation like an intangible linen. freshly pulled from the half open trunk of the ages…the earth of the lost paradise.” I grasped this awe when immersing myself in many more of his poems, particularly those about either love or themes on life and the natural world. Yet at the same time many felt clunky and complicated and lacked that jubilant climax that surrealist poetry is all about. These poems were still well written and by no means bad poems, most of them containing at least one segment that I felt worth underlining, I just felt that others emulated the essence and mystery of surrealist poetry a little bit better. So, not a perfect read but definitely a good one.

[nsgna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology

260 pages of nonsense
Not holding up frail space-like time
Yet a gold pale blooded, full savage. According to so many
so affected.

[Eleni Pagidas · Rating 5 out of 5]

About to get his words tattooed so it seemed fitting ♥️
‘J’ai trouvé le secret / De t’aimer / Toujours pour la première fois’

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surprisingly not very interesting, considering it's Breton we're talking about here. About half the poems are tedious and one gets the sense that at some points in his literary career as the vanguard of Surrealism Breton was either trying too hard or not trying enough. That said, some of the pieces here are really, really, really good, and the ones that aren't might just be due to the translations. The few poems included in this volume that I've read by other translators read completely differently under the brain of another, so that might account for the uneven nature of this collection.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another fine title from Black Widow Press, casting a wide net across the waters of Breton's work.

[Jamie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Forgive me or at least my lack of culture, but I just don't appreciate surrealism. Words are powerful and beautiful on their own, but sentences need some cogency.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

A large collection of Brenton's work some interesting lines. I wish I could get my hands on a copy of these two collections as stand alones.

*Clair De Terre

*Le Revolver Á Cheveux Blancs

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

me likey the surrealism