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

[Malcolm]

The inter-war European avant-garde was a broad church, but a fractious church, in many respects with its origins in the horrors and excesses of the 1914-18 war, and some of the cultural movements associated with it. Of all its strands, the best known are the surrealists, whose work at times seems ridiculous, at times dream-like, and always slightly absurd and often disconnected. They are seen by many as key figures in 20th century European cultural trends – to the extent that Griel Marcus, in his wonderful Lipstick Traces draws a line from the surrealists through situationism to punk, with a few other stops along the way.

And yet, this is distinctly France-centric view of surrealism. As is so often the case, there are other strands, in particular across eastern and central Europe where in the wake of that same war and among the defeated that search for meaning played itself out. Nezval, a leading light in the Czech avant-garde worked across a set of surrealist genre (including the impressive Valerie and her Week of Wonders filmed in unsettling ways in the mid-1960s), yet with slightly different emphases and inflections than the French, despite his association with Breton and Éluard as that strand's leading lights.

Here, mainly in verse but also in prose and a play script Nezval engages, in ways we’d expect of the surrealistic avant-garde, cities and spaces he inhabits – mainly Prague, with a diversion to Paris, and primarily, as the title suggests, women – or rather the multiplicity of woman. It is here that the avant-garde becomes pronounced: woman (in the singular) is approached, seen, and looked at in the plural, from many angles and forms, many ways of being and being treated – the fleeting sexism verging in places on misogyny is disturbing, but much less so and less frequently than Breton’s. Woman is a disturbance, she unsettles, but is also loved and adored, venerated in her naturalistic power, in ways that I tend to read as Nezval’s observation and commentaries rather than his manifesto. Part of my reason for that reading is the do with the literary form of Valerie but also the ways pieces in this collection that don’t centre on woman – his ferocious critique of working class alienation, exploitation and dispossession in ‘The Fight for the Seeing Man’ – adopt a similar tone. But, as is the case with much of the avant-garde, and the surrealists in particular, this collection also lends itself to multiple interpretations – which is, in terms of the surrealist form, entirely appropriate.

That said, I can’t help but delight in the closing lines of the closing piece in the book – ‘The Spirit of Corruption’ – which read:

“This world in which man rues over man disgusts me
And a humanity that does not want the world’s day of reckoning disgusts me even more
But what disgusts me most of the fool who laughs at this desperate poem of mine
Which is how I should end all my books”

And here, a little of Nezval’s engagement with the Communist Party peeks out.

I’m sure next time I pick it up, it’ll be a different book.

[Tom]

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]

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.

[Ania Marci]

4,5⭐️