The Revolution Will Not Be Translated: Surrealist Poetry on American Soil

Paper given at the National Academy Museum, New York, 12 March 2005, in the context of the exhibition "Surrealism USA"

When first thinking about the title for this talk, I briefly considered something along the lines of “Surrealist poetry in America: why not?” Although I finally opted for the flashier title you see above, I’d like to pick up the question again, in both senses: that is, why isn’t there Surrealist poetry in America, and why can’t there be?

Let me begin by recapping the obvious. We all know this, but particularly in the context of an art museum I feel compelled to restate it: Surrealism began not as a visual movement but as a philosophical and, given its principal members, literary one - or rather, a movement that took the medium of words as its primary instrument. Although several visual artists were associated with the group from the outset, the plastic arts are barely mentioned at all in André Breton’s Manifesto of 1924. Rather, Surrealism aimed at being a top-to-bottom refurbishing of human understanding. The challenge thrown down by Surrealism meant to engage the way our minds structure the world through language, taking as its weapons automatic writing, verbal collage, sleep trances, and other fundamentally linguistic manifestations. As Breton said, “Language has been given to man so that he may make Surrealist use of it.”

In coming to the United States, however, Surrealism underwent a transformation and became (at least in the public eye) primarily a visual school, while Surrealist writing took a back seat. In other words, it went from being a philosophy that used the instruments of art to an art movement that justified its productions with philosophy.

To some extent, this was predictable. For one thing, the pioneering efforts of curators such as Chick Austin, Julien Levy, and Alfred Barr brought visual Surrealism to our attention in ways that a would-be publisher of Surrealist poetry could only have dreamt of. And the uproarious presence of Dalí, who to many in America became the public face of Surrealism, only reinforced the sense that Surrealism was about funny-looking pictures. Dalí, as we know, was past master at gaining attention for himself, and (at least tangentially) for Surrealism as well. The public was shocked, shocked, by his antics, such as crashing a bathtub through the display window of Bonwit Teller, or dressing his wife up as the Lindbergh baby for a society ball, at the height of the Bruno Hauptmann kidnapping trial – it was shocked, but the point is, it gamely came back for more. And although by 1945 the New York Times could write disparagingly that Dalí had made Surrealism “as comfortable as a pair of scuffed old-fashioned slippers...He has put Surrealism in curl papers for the night and given it a glass of milk,” the damage was done. For many Americans at the time, and even to this day, Surrealism wears a handlebar mustache.

But more fundamentally, what we’re faced with here is the problem of translation. First, translation in the most basic sense: from one language to another. Virtually none of the Surrealists’ writings were available in English by the time many of them sought refuge here in the 1940s, nor for quite some time afterward. True, there had been a smattering of texts by the main Surrealists – published in English in the ´20s and ´30s in magazines like Transition, This Quarter, and New Directions, not to mention Levy’s 1936 anthology Surrealism, but these were small, specialized productions, for a limited audience, and by nature ephemeral.

During the war, owing to the presence on American soil of some of Surrealism’s movers and shakers (notably Breton, Duchamp, and Ernst), things picked up a bit, first with Charles Henri Ford’s magazine View, then with the Surrealist-dominated VVV. View, moreover, was responsible for Breton’s first book in English translation, the anthology of poems Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares in 1946. (The title was derived from a sentence Breton had come across in a horticulture mail-order catalogue, though his fascination with it - which seems to have been obvious to everyone but him - had more to do with his wife Jacqueline’s refusal to be secured against the charms of the American artist David Hare, who became her second husband.) But then the war ended and the Surrealists, for the most part, went home, ending this brief spate of translations. It wasn’t until the 1960s that volumes of Surrealist writing began being published in America in earnest, and only in the last two decades have we seen a truly serious excavation of the Surrealist back-catalogue.

Hand-in-hand with the problem of availability was the problem of quality, for many early translations of Surrealist writing were frankly rather poor. This might not always have been the fault of the translator. The poet Edouard Roditi, who made a more than valiant effort as the translator of Young Cherry Trees, once admitted feeling rather hobbled by the author’s presence, saying that Breton “was impossible to work with. Since he didn’t know English, he’d show the translations to friends who didn’t know much English either, and who would make suggestions I didn’t agree with, but that Breton trusted.” The results, not surprisingly, were to no one’s liking.

But even those of us who haven’t had Breton breathing down our necks know the pitfalls in rendering Surrealist writing into English. For one thing, the English and French languages simply don’t work the same way. This is a difficulty one faces in any translation, but Surrealist writing in particular derives many of its effects from a savvy or instinctive twisting of linguistic conventions. Its effects of surprise or humor are often based on setting up the reader’s expectations and then pulling out the proverbial rug.

I’ll take only one example, no doubt the bane of every translator in this room: the French conjunctions de (of, from) and à (at, with, for). In French, these are often used to place a modifier after the noun. An everyday example might be moulin à vent, literally mill for wind, or windmill. You can immediately see what a candy store this kind of construction can be for the poetic mind at play, and how that moulin à vent could easily morph into a moulin à vache (cowmill), or a moulin à verbe (wordmill), or a moulin à dent (toothmill). And you can also see how transposing that kind of construction into English leaves you with the choice of either keeping the French syntax, with its endless string of of the of the of the’s, which become very very very tedious, or yanking that modifier back in front of the noun where it belongs - and thereby obscuring the entire sense of creation and discovery for which the de or à conjunction becomes the conduit. We run up against an almost identical problem with the French adjective, which normally comes after the noun, giving the speaker a split second of choice or chance in which to deviate from the expected norm. But this deviation becomes artificially premeditated when reordered into an English phrase.

(That said, there are times when translation yields nuggets of its own. Years ago, when I was working as a translation grunt for Berlitz, one of my jobs was to check how well-known product names might sound in foreign markets. Among others, I remember coming across a make of car that in Spanish meant “doesn’t go,” and a brand of deodorant that in Arabic meant “I stink.” Talk about found poetry!)

Getting back to Surrealism proper, the difficulty, the challenge, sometimes the hair-rending impossibility lies in preserving the freshness, spontaneity, experimentation, humor, and excitement that characterize the best Surrealist poetry, and that so often simply fall flat in another language. It is also why even a lot of Surrealist poetry written directly in English sounds stilted or phony, like an American with a mid-Atlantic accent or one who peppers his speech with Gallicisms. Too often it tries too hard, producing the kind of “Surrealist poetry” the very mention of which makes any sensible person shudder.

For translation isn’t only linguistic. There is also the translation of surrounding or context, no matter what language a poem is written in. Breton once remarked that life anywhere outside of Paris was “artificial, like a stage set.” This was, after all, a man who moved into his famous address on Rue Fontaine in 1922 and who didn’t leave it again until his death forty-four years later. So you can imagine what the enforced hiatus of his wartime stay in New York must have been like for him, personally and creatively. I can tell you from experience that poems written in Paris don’t sound like poems written in New York City. It’s small wonder that Breton, surrounded as he was by a language he could barely understand, buildings that looked too tall and too square, streets that ran in grids rather than curves, and any number of other architectural and cultural attributes that were just plain wrong - it’s small wonder that he began writing poetry that sounded different from the Breton we know best. That he began writing poems that were more topical, more expansive, more reflective of the Manhattan skyscrapers, and later of the vast Western landscapes that he explored with his third wife, Elisa Claro. Let me just read you two excerpts, one from Breton’s 1923 “Sunflower,” one of the most famous - and typical - of his early automatic poems:

The traveler who crossed Les Halles at summer’s end
Walked on tiptoe
Despair rolled its great handsome lilies across the sky
And in her handbag was my dream that flask of salts
That only God’s godmother had breathed
Torpors unfurled like mist
At the Chien qui Fume
Where pro and con had just entered
They could hardly see the young woman and then only at an angle
Was I dealing with the ambassadress of saltpeter
Or with the white curve on black background we call thought...

And here’s an excerpt from “Ode to Charles Fourier,” written during Breton’s honeymoon trip through the American southwest in 1945:

Fourier I salute you from the Grand Canyon of Colorado
I see the eagle soaring from your head [...]
I salute you from the Nevada of the gold-prospector
From the land promised and kept
To the land rich in higher promises which it must yet keep
From the depths of the blue ore mine which reflects the loveliest sky
For always beyond that bar sign which continues to haunt the street of a ghost town –
Virginia-City – “The Old Blood Bucket”...

Granted, we’re talking about a remove of over two decades, and poets, even Surrealist poets, evolve. But I believe the difference is not due solely to the passage of time, but even more so to the passage of place, of context. Breton’s head in “Fourier” is literally in a different place, one attuned more to the big sky of Nevada than to the smoky ambiance of a café in Les Halles. In a sense, Breton has begun translating himself, temporarily as it may be, into an American poet, and in so doing has somewhat lost -- misplaced, rather -- his Surrealist voice.

And if that translation can happen in someone as resolutely and obstinately French as Breton, the ur-Surrealist himself, imagine the difficulties faced by an American poet born and bred in trying to produce verse that might come across as authentically Surrealist. All the more so in that the American poet is a product not only of those New York skyscrapers, or Southwestern canyons, or Midwestern plains, but of a different literary upbringing as well. While the Surrealists cut their poetic baby teeth on Rimbaud and Lautréamont, we were weaned on Whitman and Poe. (Poe, the “Surrealist in adventure,” the only American author to be cited in the first Manifesto, before being given the bum’s rush by Breton in the second: “Let us, in passing, spit on Edgar Poe.”)

What I’m getting at here is the translation of culture, the most resistant text of all. It is no secret, or surprise, that Surrealism was given a less than cordial welcome by many when it arrived on these shores. This is what a certain Congressman Dondero was saying in the halls of Congress:

Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason. The question is, what have we, the plain American people, done to deserve this sore affliction that has been visited upon us so direly; who has brought down this curse upon us; who has let into our homeland this horde of germ-carrying art vermin?

We may laugh. We may even remember that the French press and public had very similar comments to make about Dada when it invaded Paris. (Or, for that matter, about the Surrealists in their early days.) But the fact remains that Surrealism in America was a very precarious transplant, and that the American soil was not always hospitable. Nor was it merely a matter of the xenophobic mainstream. Even those well disposed to the movement -- indeed, its own members -- found it hard to accept in this new context. Julien Levy in his memoirs tells about one of Breton’s attempts to lead a Surrealist meeting soon after his arrival in New York: the more he tried to impose the kind of discipline and order that had naturally obtained in the Paris sessions, the more those present broke into guffaws – including some who had previously attended the Paris meetings. In the context of this vast and confusing new world, the old rules of conduct simply seemed ludicrous.

In fact, there are many cultural generalizations that can be drawn between French and American artists. We resist the notion of schools, whereas the European tradition abounds in them. At the same time, even our avant-garde artists take the notion of art seriously, whereas much of the French avant-garde in the 20th century has been characterized by a disdain for its own medium. Can you imagine a Pollock denying the importance of painting, or Eliot turning up his nose at the very notion of poetry? Whereas for the Surrealists, this was part of the program.

As with all generalizations, these can be taken only so far. Still, Surrealism grew out of a particular cultural moment, the aftermath of World War I, and from under a particular cultural weight: as a reaction against centuries of Greco-Latin rationalism. That cultural baggage is as central to its formation as the theories of Freud or the historical accident that brought together Breton, Aragon, and Soupault. It is difficult to imagine Surrealism, at least at its origins, without the backdrop of 1920s Paris, the Café Cyrano, the Buttes-Chaumont, Mazda lightbulbs, seedy Montmartre theaters, and so on and so on. Just as it is almost impossible to imagine Monty Python, or the Beatles, coming out of anywhere but 1960s England.

America doesn’t have the same kind of baggage. Not that we have no art or philosophy of our own - of course we do. But what we don’t really have is the same kind of cultural pressure-cooker that gave rise to Dada, Surrealism, and others in their wake. We can react to injustice, we can protest, we can rage, but it’s much rarer here to find Surrealism’s compressed revolt against layer upon layer of social, behavioral, and artistic strictures. Maybe it’s that we’re too young as a nation (to trot out the old saw), or that our wide-open spaces are too wide and too open. Whatever the cause, it’s interesting to note how Surrealism has usually been welcomed here, even when it is welcomed. By and large, we Americans appreciate the humor of it, the soft watches, the puns and startling imagery, but less so the dark, despairing underpinnings. Dreams and the unconscious might be an exploratory tool for Breton and Co.; for us, they’re more liable to be taken as a diversion, an excuse for being “kooky.” Little wonder that the exiled Surrealists during the war were readily taken in by American high society: what lovely parlor games they brought with them!

I don’t mean to sound glib. These are complex questions, and I won’t pretend to do them justice here. My point is simply that, overall, Surrealism in America sometimes faced greater obstacles from the ingrained attitudes of those who sympathized with it, but ultimately didn’t get it, than from those who gave it a nice clean kick in the pants. It was again Julien Levy who encapsulated this difference when he reported this brief exchange with Breton:

Breton: Julien, you can never be a true surrealist.
Levy: Pourquoi pas, Papa?
Breton: There, you see? Too much humor!

Which brings us to the larger question, what is Surrealism in the first place? The easy answer might be, whatever André Breton said it was at any given time. And on many occasions, the evolution of the Surrealist movement did indeed seem to follow its leader’s often mercurial shifts of focus. But beneath all those shifts, what underlies the entire history of Surrealism as a movement and as a current of thought is the sense of self-exploration, an absolute non-conformism (and remember that the Surrealists were using this term decades before it became a ’60s cliché), a complete and total psychological, cultural, political, social, architectural, moral, and, yes, artistic revolution that left no stone standing, but then - and this is where Breton had his beef with Dada - but that then reordered and rebuilt those stones into something truly marvelous. Something in which humankind - “man, that inveterate dreamer” - could recognize itself.

Did the Surrealists achieve their goal? Hardly. Does their poetry reflect this desired upheaval? At times, at the best of times, yes, though too often it gets mired in the same failings that mar any other literature. But in the final account, it has little to do with exactly how the poetry sounded or how the paintings looked. What determined the Surrealist nature of a work often was more a matter of commitment to a shared set of ideals, and the ability to let those ideals be glimpsed through words, or pigment, or film. In this regard, Breton’s statement from 1922 remains emblematic: “Poetry,” he said, “which is all I’ve ever appreciated in literature, emanates more from the lives of human beings – whether writers or not – than from what they have written or from what we might imagine they could write.”

Now, all that said, why can’t there be Surrealist poetry in America? It is precisely because Surrealism is about a state of mind rather than aesthetic guidelines that we can, despite everything, speak of such a thing as an authentically Surrealist American poetry. I don’t necessarily mean American Surrealist poets: for one thing, the movement is long over, and nothing, not even the spirits of André Breton or Franklin Rosemont, will bring it back. And even if such a group still existed, it’s hard to see how it would maintain an identity in this day, age, and place as recognizably Surrealist without clinging to a code, an orthodoxy that by its very nature negates what is truly Surrealist about the whole enterprise. I should add that, in this regard, American Surrealist poets face a similar problem to the postwar generation of French Surrealist poets: being too aware of the history, they tended to produce waxwork poems, museum-quality imitations that lost the original spirit.

We’re an odd nation. We believe staunchly in our collective institutions, including art, while liking to think we remain fiercely individualistic. We enjoy mixing it up; our motto is, don’t fence me in. To paraphrase Donny Osmond, we’re a little bit Surrealist, a little bit rock and roll, and a little bit - fill in your own blank. To the discipline of the rigidly defined group, we prefer the smorgasbord approach, a form of inspiration that seems best suited to the American context. The melting pot mentality applies to our art as well.

It is perhaps because of this that there have been, and continue to be, flashes of true Surrealism in American poetry, and I’d like to conclude by reading a short collage of lines and excerpts that strike me –- in a way that is wholly subjective, highly debatable, and utterly unsystematic -- as partaking in the Surrealist aura. Lines that can “arouse a physical sensation, like the feeling of a feathery wind brushing across my temples” (Breton said that). That contain a kernel of real mystery and surprise, the kind that linger even after you’ve done your dead-level best to explain them away. In the spirit of Lautréamont’s famous dictum that “poetry must be made by all, not by one,” I’ll read these excerpts without identifying them:

In a dream I return to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house...
Soon it will be fifteen years
He was old he will have fallen into his eyes
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Your hand with crystals shining into the night
pass through my blood
and sever the hands of my eyes
We have come to a place where the nightingales sleep
We are filling the oceans and plains
with the old images of our phosphorescent bones
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You turn
To speak to someone beside the dock and the lighthouse
Shines like garnets. It has become a stricture
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The radio is teaching my goldfish Jujuitsu
I am in love with a skindiver who sleeps underwater,
My neighbors are drunken linguists, & I speak butterfly,
Consolidated Edison is threatening to cut off my brain,
The postman keeps putting sex in my mailbox,
My mirror died, & can’t tell if I still reflect,
I put my eyes on a diet, my tears are gaining too much weight...
I hope that when machines finally take over,
they won’t build men that break down
as soon as they’re paid for
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I pull the fleece over my teeth
And stare innocently at the books I’ve bought
One a book with a drawing
By Apollinaire called ‘Les fraises au Mexique’
‘Strawberries in Mexico’
But when I open the book to that page
It’s just a very blue sky I’m looking at
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You approach me carrying a book
The instructions you read carry me back beyond birth
To childhood and a courtyard bouncing a ball
The town is silent there is only one recreation
It’s throwing the ball against the wall and waiting
To see if it returns
One day
The wall reverses
The ball bounces the other way
Across this barrier into the future
Where it begets occupations names
This is known s the human heart a muscle
A woman adopts it it enters her chest
She falls from a train
The woman rebounds 500 miles back to her childhood
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Time out in this funeral!
This tactical self-bombing of my face from a toy self-airplane.
I’m going to run across the street to the park
and check if the moon is still contending
with that streetlight. Because the attention
span is a horror movie. I’ll be right back
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
With your pockets well protected at last,
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass,
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My wife with the sex of a mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes that are purple armor and a magnetized needle...
My wife with eyes that are the equal of water and air and earth and fire


Mark Polizzotti

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