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Poets for the Millennium

by André Breton, نیلوفر آقاابراهیمی (Translator), Mark Polizzotti (Editor)

Founder of the Surrealist movement, André Breton has also come to be recognized as one of the twentieth century's most innovative and influential poets. The inaugural volume in the Poets for the Millennium series, André Breton offers the most comprehensive selection available in English of Breton's poetry, along with a selection of his major prose writings. The translations, a number of which are published here for the first time, are by some of the most notable poets in our language, including David Antin, Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Michael Benedikt, Robert Duncan, David Gascoyne, and Charles Simic. This volume also includes an extensive biographical and thematic introduction by Mark Polizzotti, which sets the poems in the context of Breton's life and overall career.

Genres: Poetry, Art, France, Nonfiction, Classics

227 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2003

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

[D. J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful, wonderful book! For too long Breton's poems have been forgotten or essentially unknown to English readers. This should elevate him above the negative image often attributed to him as some sort of malevolent dictator of surrealism.

One of my favorite books of 2007.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The essays are better than the poems here, by and large. This one had just enough to clear the hurdle for me. Good intro provides historical context. Alas, Surrealism is more a visual art.

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up at random off the library shelves and enjoyed it. I've been disappointed in the past by supposedly great French poets (Baudelaire, Rimbaud) who are said to be iconoclastic and unique but felt tame. Translation is an issue. Translating poetry is difficult, as one needs to maintain not only meaning but also sound (rhyme, meter, consonance/assonance). But Breton's focus is largely imagistic so losing the sonic elements is almost unnoticeable. His writing does one of my favorite things—clashing unexpected words together—often. The early poems were too tame. Some are truly awful, e.g. the phonebook poem or the experiments with typography, perhaps innovative at the time but they look childish and uninteresting now. Many of the later poems, once Breton sticks to a specific style (long lines, no white space usage, imagery focused) were excellent. His use of color words is a particular strong point. I'd read the Manifesto before and it is clearly excellent, his best work.

Favorites:

- both Surrealism Manifesto excerpts (obviously)
- A Forest in the Axe
-The Magnetic Fields and Soluble Fish excerpts, both automatic writing texts. I want to read these books now!
- Counterfeit Coin
- I Still Listen to Myself Talking (the line "Animals in my traps decay where they're caught" is incredible)

Then some poems, while they cannot keep up the momentum, have tremendous starts, like War ("I watch the Beast as it licks itself") or "Make it so daylight does not yet enter". Also, the title "Lethal Relief" is wonderful, though the poem itself not so much. I wonder if it sounds as amazing en français.

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a huge fan of André Breton. There are some great poems in here; I like these a bit more than the stuff in the Surrealist Manifesto(es).