André Breton

NADJA is a Surrealist romance, and has come to be known as a book which defined that movement's attitude towards life. With its blend of intimate confession and sense of the marvellous, NADJA weaves a myterious and compelling tapestry of daily life as seen through a magical perspective. Combining autobiographical fact with memory and imagination, Breton spins one of the most unusual love stories in modern literature.

"Nadja, " originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in teh city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. "The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen, " Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.

A new translation of one of the defining works of the French surrealist movement, an energetic autobiographical novel that is at once both a tumultuous romance story and an initiation into the surrealism of everyday life. The most renowned of all surrealist literary works, Andr Breton's Nadja has been stirring passions and imaginations since its first publication in 1928. At once a poignant romance, an autobiography, a philosophical inquiry into questions of identity, and a lively illustration of the surrealist belief in life-changing chance, Nadja relates the fortuitous meeting and brief, tumultuous relationship between Breton, surrealism's founder and primary theorist, and the "wandering soul" who called herself Nadja, "because in Russian it's the beginning of the word for hope, and because it's only the beginning." Over the course of a single breathless week, recounted with scrupulous precision and a poet's sense of drama, Breton and Nadja pursue an adventure that stands outside of societal or moral conventions, and that brings both of them to what Breton termed "the extreme limit of the surrealist aspiration." Bookending this beguiling and ultimately tragic story are a series of "petrifying coincidences," episodes that initiate the reader into the surrealism of everyday life, and a penetrating examination of Breton's own share of responsibility in Nadja's ultimate fate, ending with the shattering intrusion into the author's life of a final transformative occurrence. In this, the first new translation of Nadja in more than sixty years, award-winning translator and surrealism scholar Mark Polizzotti brings a fresh perspective to this unique and haunting tale. Making use of the most recent research (including the revelation of Nadja's identity and life story and the discovery of Breton's original manuscript), he sets the narrative in its historical and biographical context and corrects a number of inaccuracies in the previous English version. This vibrant, emotionally resonant translation breathes new energy and urgency into a book that has long been recognized as one of the seminal masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism.

Venez d couvrir l'autobiographie d'Andr Breton gr ce une analyse litt raire de r f rence crite par un sp cialiste universitaire, cette fiche de lecture est recommand e par de nombreux enseignants. Cet ouvrage contient la biographie de l' crivain, le r sum d taill , le mouvement litt raire, le contexte de publication de l'oeuvre et l'analyse compl te. Retrouvez tous nos titres sur: www.fichedelecture.fr.

La collection Conna tre une oeuvre vous offre la possibilit de tout savoir du Manifeste du surr alisme de Andr Breton gr ce une fiche de lecture aussi compl te que d taill e. La r daction, claire et accessible, a t confi e un sp cialiste universitaire. Cette fiche de lecture r pond une charte qualit mise en place par une quipe d'enseignants. Ce livre contient la biographie de Andr Breton, la pr sentation du Manifeste, le r sum d taill , les raisons du succ s, les th mes principaux et l' tude du mouvement litt raire de l'auteur.

Andre Breton (1896-1966) was the founder of Surrealism and a major leader of the avante-garde movement in France following World War I. This title brings together comprehensive selection of poems by Breton. It includes 73 poems representing various styles and stages of the writer's career.

Founder of the Surrealist movement, Andre 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, Andre 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.

The final book by the founder of Surrealism, translated into English for the first time."Cavalier Perspective shows us the lion in winter, André Breton near the end of his life, trying to reconcile all the contradictions of his extraordinary career. It is unexpectedly moving to watch him wrestling with his ghosts, aiming for magic, fitting himself uneasily into the new alien landscape of the 1960s."—Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of TransitionAs leader and chief theoretician of Surrealism, director of myriad publications from the 1920s through the 1960s, poet André Breton was a prolific writer of prose. Author of numerous books, essays, and manifestoes, Breton periodically collected his most significant short essays into carefully arranged volumes. His last such collection, Cavalier Perspective, appeared posthumously in 1970; in it, editor Marguerite Bonnet assembled "articles, prefaces, responses to surveys, interviews," written between 1952 and 1966. Modeled on its predecessors, Cavalier Perspective is considered Breton's final book.Over 50 years after its initial publication, its appearance in English today is a crucial cultural event; here we encounter Breton writing on topics nearest to our present day and most relevant to current social and political issues. Cavalier Perspective finds Breton steadfastly pursuing his anti-fascist, anti-colonialist revolutionary aims in the age of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and space exploration, concerns largely unknown during Surrealism's more notorious interwar period. Far from conceding the movement's claim to contemporary relevance, and pointedly refusing the imposition of "strict temporal limits," Breton insists on Surrealism's dynamic and dialectical position in the book's titular manifesto, asserting its continuity through its perpetual capacity to respond to the needs of the hour.More than simply a poet and theoretician, Breton is best considered an "inaugurator of discourse" on the level of a Marx or Freud, and Cavalier Perspective is an essential capstone to his lifetime as the guiding hand behind the worldwide surrealist movement.

Breton's late treatise on magic and art appears for the first time in English, complete with citations, commentaries and a bibliographyWhat is "Magic Art"? In 1953, Andr Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement, was invited by a prestigious French publisher to explore answers to this question. His resulting analysis is wide-ranging and evocative. Beginning with a literary review of magic and art, Breton draws upon Novalis and Baudelaire before considering the prehistoric rock art of Spain and France, the native art of the Pacific Northwest, the magical grimoires and alchemical symbolism of the Middle Ages, and the work of Hieronymus Bosch, Antoine Caron, Paolo Uccello, Gustav Moreau, Paul Gauguin and the Surrealists. Through these and other diverse sources, Breton traces a mystery that lies at the heart of our timeless fascination with otherness and seeks to place Surrealism as a successor to a magical sensibility that began with art itself.First published in 1957 as L'Art magique, this important text is offered here as an English translation for the first time. Working from manuscript notes for the original project, this edition presents the iconographic content as Breton intended, together with more than 300 new citations and a comprehensive bibliography that emphasizes sources found in Breton's own library.Andr Breton (1896-1966) was one of the founders and most controversial exponents of Surrealism, defining the movement in his first Surrealist Manifesto as "pure psychic automatism." Fleeing from Europe during World War II, Breton traveled throughout North America staging Surrealist exhibitions and lending his voice to several political movements.

Keväällä 1930 runoilijat André Breton, Paul Éluard ja vastikään surrealistien riveihin astunut nuori René Char kiertelivät pitkin poikin Etelä-Ranskaa, ja keksivät kirjoittaa on the road – kahviloissa, halvoissa hotelleissa, autossa – kolmiäänisen runokokoelman ihana raato -seuraleikin tapaan, missä seuraava jatkaa siitä, mihin edellinen lopettaa... Tuloksena syntyi surrealistisen sanataiteen pieni klassikko, kollektiivisen ilmaisun virkistävä tuotos, jonka rikas kuvasto sekä eriskummaiset oivallukset yllättävät yhä tänä päivänä. Tekijät ovat varustaneet kirjan esipuheillaan, ja Éluard lausuu omassaan osuvasti: ”Pikemmin kuin inspiroitunut, runoilija on se joka inspiroi...”

Surrealistit käyttivät myös sanakirjamääritelmiä tekstiensä materiaalina. Kaikkein fantastisin näiden kokeilujen tuloksista oli Surrealismin taskusanakirja {Dictionnaire abrege du surrealisme), jonka Andre Breton ja Paul Eluard laativat Surrealismin kansainväliseen näyttelyyn vuonna 1938. Kuvitettu teos jäljittelee koulusanakirjaa. Siinä määritellään surrealismiin liittyviä käsitteitä terävän humoristisesti tämän taidesuuntauksen kirjailijoita ja kuvataiteilijoita siteeraten.Kirjassa on tekstilainauksia seuraavilta tekijöiltä: Louis Aragon, Hans Arp, Antonin Artaud, Hans Bellmer, Andre Breton, Rene Crevel, Salvador Dali, Robert Desnos, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Maurice Heine, Georges Hugnet, Michel Leiris, Gilbert Lely, Jean Lely,Pierre Mabille, Man Ray, Edouard-Leon-Theodore Mesens, Pierre Naville, Vitezslav Nezval, Paul Nouge, Wolfgang Paalen, Henri Pastoureau, Pablo Picasso, Benjamin Peret, Jacques Prevert, Louis Scutenaire, Gui Rosey, Philippe Soupault ja Tristan Tzara.Teoksen suomentaja Janne Salo sai vuonna 2021 Kääntäjäkarhu-palkinnon Andre Bretonin runovalikoiman Unen hiekkarannoilla (Dans les sables du reve) suomennoksestaan.

Soluble Fish (1924) by Andr Breton is a sophisticated poetic novel which is one of the first works of Surrealism, and with the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), began the new literary movement which followed Paris Dada in the decade of the 1920s. This is the first translation of this important surrealist work since 1969. R J Dent has finally done the almost impossible and rendered Breton's elusive and complex prose into a fluid English that is actually a pleasure to read. Here we see a Breton very different from the dour caricature usually presented to English speaking readers. The text here is playful, warm and engaging.