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. This edition includes the original French text.
Andre Breton (1896-1966) was a writer, poet, and co-founder of the
surrealist movement. A student of psychiatry and a devout Marxist,
Breton saw surrealism as the ultimate means to liberation both
personal and political.
Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) was a co-founder of the surrealist
movement alongside Andre Breton. Soupault left surrealism behind
following political disagreements with Breton, remaining a lifelong
writer.
Charlotte Mandell is a translator of French literature. She has
published numerous translations of writers including Jean Genet,
Guy de Maupassant, and Gustave Flaubert. She has been awarded a
translation prize from the Modern Language Association and the
National Translation Award in Prose. She lives in the Hudson Valley
of New York.
“With distance, a sort of unity has established itself,
and The Magnetic Fields have become the work of a single
author with two heads. This double gaze has made it possible, as
nothing else would, for Philippe Soupault and André Breton to push
forward on the path where no one had preceded them, into these
shadows where they were both speaking aloud.” —Louis Aragon
“Fantastic, disconnected but vivid and poetic as though Breton and
Soupault were seeing sea life at the bottom of the ocean’s floor:
very few of us have the intensity of spirit to live with that sense
of life.” —Kimberly Lyons
“The Magnetic Fields opened the verbal floodgates for the
writers aligned first with Dada and then with Surrealism: Breton,
Soupault, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Benjamin
Peret.” —Christopher Merrill, Los Angeles Times
“Breton and Soupault ushered a freshly new phenomenon of writing
into being. Theirs remains the key 20th century collaboration. . .
Going forward there was acknowledged precedent for the validity of
jointly recording words onto the page as they come, whether
borrowed, imagined or otherwise summoned forth from whatever
depths.” —Patrick James Dunagan, Periodicities
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