Woman in the Plural

by Vítězslav Nezval, Tereza Novická (Translator), Stephan Delbos (Translator)

Verse, Diary Entries, Poetry for the Stage, Surrealist Experiments

The first English translation of one of the most innovative works of the interwar avant-garde, Woman in the Plural displays Nezval’s prodigious talents in a variety of forms, styles, and genres as he spins images of the female form like a zoetrope to create novel and hallucinatory ways of conceiving woman’s mythical, divine, and creative power. It is an eclectic collection that blends profound free verse, at times reading like a cascade of automatic writing, with pages from Nezval’s dream journal, an exuberant set of Surrealist exercises, and a full-length play of chance encounters with “a woman like any other,” all the while addressing the social and political uncertainties of the 1930s. Led off by Karel Teige’s original collages from the first edition, Woman in the Plural is a vibrant and volatile tour de force from one of the greatest European artists of the 20th century.

Genres: Poetry, Czech Literature

198 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1936

About the author

One of the most prolific avant-garde Czech writers in the first half of the twentieth century and a co-founder of the Surrealist movement in Czechoslovakia.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published in 1936, Woman in the Plural is a collection of surrealist poems and prose by Vítezslav Nezval, a founding member of surrealism in Czechoslovakia, which perhaps is second only to France in its embrace and production of surrealist works in all media. Thus, Woman in the Plural, translated now for the first time in English, is a key contribution to the development of European surrealism.

Fans of surrealism enjoy its effects on readers’ imaginations by juxtaposing concrete words that don’t usually appear together, as in Nezval’s poem “Shopwindows”:

O women the shape of tobacco pipes
Slim robust the gently curving back
Women with the mechanism of the most delicate instruments
With the chattering tongue of a watch
With breasts of magnifying glasses
Poised like pince-nez
With eyes giving the opaque impression of moonstones with the tongue of a baby bottle. . .

Woman in the Plural collects a range of surrealist expression in writing: A play, poetry, automatic writing, and diary entries, many focused on a woman or women in general. The play “The Bird of Doom” is a nonstop, absurdist romp that amount a tour-de-farce exemplum of surrealism. But the poem “Merlin” deviates from the book’s overall devotion to surrealism by being fantasy-based (a musing on King Arthur’s magician, Merlin, who haunts the town squares of contemporary Europe), and much of “Between the Teeth of Days” sounds like a premonition of Alan Ginsberg’s verses (“I see a generation coming that will act on no timetable / But according to the color of the sky / Like I write my poems”).

Highly recommended for devotees of surrealism.

[Colin Clay · Rating 5 out of 5]

The maestro, the godfather of czech poetic surrealism. Easily my favorite czech poet, with imagination and verses far ahead of his (not very pleasant) time. Especially "Most kolotoče" is a must read, as a poem and as a collection itself.