The BURIED Book Club discussion

Surrealist writer and filmmaker, operating 1960s through present. Characterized by her dark playfulness, feminism, and interest in the erotic. Critically unread and untranslated.

Born of Russian parents in Buenos Aires (sometime between 1931 and 1936 -- no two sources print or web, can agree), Nelly Kaplan abandoned her economics studies to move to Paris in the early 50s, perhaps attracted by the (apocryphal?) ruins of a temple of Isis beneath the city, certainly more interested in pursuing film than economics. In Paris, she met legendary filmmaker Abel Gance, who she would work with for ten years as assistant and second unit director, and Andre Breton, who seems to have elicited contributions to surrealist journals like Le Surréalisme, Meme and Positif. In the early 60s she began directing a series of documentaries about artists, building to a jump to feature filmmaking with La Fiancée du Pirate (The Pirate's Fiancé / A Very Curious Girl) in 1969, with many further features, often from her own scripts, to follow.



In 1966, following a couple of collections of film essays, she pseudonymously published her first fiction, the story collection Le Réservoir des Sens ("The Well of the Senses"). This was followed numerous other works, including "a scandalous novel of feminine revolt", Memoirs of a Lady Sheet Diviner in 1974.

Though perhaps better known on film, very little of Kaplan's writing has seen translation from French. In fact, her only book in English is a study of Abel Gance's 1927 epic Napoleon, written in English by Kaplan for the British Film Institute.

Two stories from The Well of the Senses have been translated for Dedalus collections: "Beware the Panther" (whose punning title is lost in English) in the Dedalus Book of Surrealism and "Solitary Pleasures" in Surrealism 2. Surrealist Women includes an extremely enticing excerpt from Memoirs of a Lady Sheet Diviner, two excellent film theory essays, and an old and revealing interview translated and provided by Kaplan herself.

Complete writings:
-Manifeste d'un art nouveau : la Polyvision (film essays), Caractères, 1955.
-Le Sunlight d'Austerlitz (film essays), Plon, 1960.
-Le Réservoir des Sens ("The Well of the Senses", stories), La Jeune Parque, 1966.
-Le Collier de Ptyx (novel), J-J.Pauvert, 1971.
-Mémoires d’une liseuse de draps ("Memoirs of a Lady Sheet Diviner", novel), J-J.Pauvert, 1974.
-Napoleon (film study), British Film Institute, 1994.
-Aux Orchidées sauvages (novel), La Différence, 1998.
-Un manteau de fou rire (updated edition of Mémoires d’une liseuse de draps), La Différence, 1998.
-Ils furent une étrange comète (novel), Le Castor Astral, 2002.
-Cuisses de Grenouille (novel), Maren Sell Editeurs, janvier 2005
-Mon Cygne, mon Signe…(correspondance with Abel Gance), Editions du Rocher, 2008.
-Ecris-moi tes hauts faits et tes crimes… (correspondance with André Pieyre de Mandiargues), Tallandier, 2009.

Further useful biographical info on OTHERZINE.

Since she's excellent and woefully untranslated, I just picked up an old beautiful french first(?!) edition of Le Réservoir des Sens.



This must have been something of a Big Deal in France at the time of its release, as both Surrealist pioneer Philippe Soupault and André Pieyre de Mandiargues contributed notes on the mysterious "Belen" (Kaplan's nom de guerre here), and Andre Masson contributed a set of beautiful original illustrations. (Of course, though Masson's reputation is assured by the likes of the Museum of Modern Art, Soupault and especially Mandiargues, like nearly all surrealist writers, have been consigned to obscurity and could stand some unburying themselves. Though neither so much as Kaplan herself.)

In any event, this book is excellent and I am going to translate as much of it as I can, besides the couple cited above in Dedalus anthologies. You'll get first dibs here.

And here, for the first time ever in (albeit clumsy) English, Nelly Kaplan's "Je Vous Salue, Maris...":

I Salute You, Husbands

"And deliver us from the male. So be it."
--Ritual of the Matriarchy

For millennia already, we have lived under the new regime of the matriarchy.

The women won the game. And they earned it well. For their former serfdom, we are in the process of paying severely. We, the men. And this will go on for millennia.

However, I sometimes hope for change. Throughout history, the days pass without repeating. And it is to the history books that I look for a reason to hope. I am in fact a very rare man who still likes to read. During the long days that I pass in seclusion in the residence to which I have been consigned, I read the works of the ancestors. I even understand them. It seems that, despite my condition, my intelligence is above average. It is undoubtedly for this reason that they observe me with particular insistence. But this does not stop me from devouring the works which, by flashes, reveal to me the world of the distant past, well before the matriarchy. Which make me dream. In vain. Because we will never leave our state. Hope, in truth, can not be but an illusion. We cannot escape them. They are admirably positioned to provide us with the essentials: shelter, furnishings, and even comfort. A kind of anaesthesia in short, a mental ankylosis that holds us more surely than prison bars. We don't have any idea of attempting escape. And when, sometimes, I try to stir up revolt, my companions look at me terrified and make way in distrust. They don't understand. They denounce me, perhaps. This is the eternal male with his weakness and cunning. You can hardly trust the weaker sex.

Naturally, in this house of luxury and lust none of our whims go unprovided for. The days pass in the sweetness of doing nothing, the nights in joy. It is also true that we are well treated and never -- well, almost never -- chastised.

But I am not happy.

They know it. I can still hear them:
-- You will never be happy, they tell me. You think too much. What's the point? It is easier to resign yourself. Anyway, you can not change the state of mankind.
-- You cannot alter an established state of affairs. How can you explain that the great creators are women? they add with a softness tinged with annoyance.

They're right, I know it. Men have never invented anything. We never create anything of importance. They are always right. Even when they appear pained by our incurable cretinism. There again, how can we fight? We are crushed beneath the atavism of centuries.

And the days, the months elapse in this house where I am kept. From earliest childhood, I have been initiated into all the subtleties of the rites that women celebrate here in order to forget their difficult days of work and responsibility.
Scarcely out of I.A.V.S. (the Institute for Advanced Voluptuous Studies), I was placed in the boarding-house. I am, it seems, exceptionally gifted by nature, intuitive to desire, sometimes tender, always efficient. And isn't this all as they had foreseen? Even when they are repulsive, we are conditioned to serve them. It is stronger than volition. Alas, the flesh is weak and they have read all the books. This is how the scientific findings of a 20th-century professor inspired them to the dreamed-of solution. A solution they have successfully applied. At I.A.V.S., over the course long years of study, each time they brought us to euphoria -- and they know how to go about it! -- a bell resounded through the practice rooms. Which gave us, after innumerable such sessions, a conditioned reflex to the least echo of a bell... Briefly, whenever a women, however unattractive she may be, pays us a visit, an ingenious system of chimes triggered throughout the rooms makes of us an inexaustible -- or nearly so -- and astonished victim.

One day, perhaps, everything will change again. Intuition tells me that the succession will be carried out by the strange mutants that appeared after the first Great Destruction, disturbing androgynes with gold-flecked eyes. For the moment, they are still in our service. But their strange smiles and the extent of their powers do not deceive me. We, the men, and the women who dominate us today, will disappear in the centuries to come. And I believe that this will be only just.
But this belongs only to the future. At this actual moment, resigned lodger that I am, I can hear steps climb towards my room. The door opens. I am too tired to turn around, and wait indolently, supine, eyes closed.
Again a women...
She approaches and, in a voice drowned in the abuse of Martian liquor, she greets me. Then she begins to undress me. Is she beautiful or hideous? I suppose that it's time to open my eyes and find out. But already a sweet vertigo of chimes gives me all the answers. And I prefer to wait with eyes closed, letting myself be carried away, resigned and radiant.
It is impossible to resist. It is again the matriarchy.

Very nicely done, Nate. Perhaps you'll also publish your translation in a Review Box so that we can employ those Like buttons to spread the good word.

Perhaps! Lemmee do a few more first. And thanks.

Yes. More is good.