Les champs magnetiques/S'il vous plait/Vous m'oublierez by Andre Breton

Les champs magnetiques/S'il vous plait/Vous m'oublierez by Andre Breton

An indispensible classic of French poetry, this is a new translation of Breton and Soupault's experiment with automatic writing, and also the first known work of literary surrealism.

In the spring of 1919, two young men, Andr Breton and Philippe Soupault, both in a state of shock after World War I, embarked on an experiment. Sick of the literary cultivation of voice, sick of the well-written, they wanted to unleash the power of the word and to create a new morality to replace the prevailing morality, the source of all our trials and tribulations. They had a plan. They would write for a week on every day of the week and they would write fast, as fast as possible, in complete secrecy. When the week was over, the writing would be done. No touching up.

This was how The Magnetic Fields, the first sustained exercise in automatic writing, came to be. Charlotte Mandell's brilliant new translation reveals a key work of twentieth-century literature.

A key poet of Parisian modernism, Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) served in the French army during WWI and subsequently joined the antirationalist Dada movement under the leadership of Tristan Tzara. With friends Andrü¾Ž–”¼ Breton and Louis Aragon, Soupault co-founded the Dada journal Littü¾Ž–”¼rature. In 1919, Soupault collaborated with Breton on the automatic text Les Champs magnü¾Ž–”¼tiques, widely considered the foundation of the surrealist movement. He would remain with the movement until 1929, resigning over its increasing politicization. In the years that followed, he wrote novels and journalism, and directed Radio Tunis in Tunisia, where he was imprisoned by the Vichy government during WWII. After the war, he resumed his journalistic activities and also worked for UNESCO. In 1972 he was awarded the Grand Prix de Poü¾Ž–”¼sie by the French Academy and he lived long enough the assist with the first complete translation of Breton and his Magnetic Fields in 1985.

Poet Alan Bernheimer's most recent collection is The Spoonlight Institute, published by Adventures in Poetry in 2009. He has lived in the Bay Area since the late 1970s, where he was active in Poets Theater and produced a radio program, In the American Tree, of new writing by poets. He has translated works by Robert Desnos and Valery Larbaud.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9782070318773
ISBN 10	207031877X
Title	Les champs magnetiques/S'il vous plait/Vous m'oublierez
Author	Andre Breton
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Editions Flammarion
Year published	1978-01-01
Number of pages	182
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.