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from Woman in the Plural by Vítezslav Nezval cover image and collages by Karel Teige Translated from Czech by Stephan Delbos & Tereza Novická

A Chemise

Strange nameless beings enthrall me Their history plain as Gibraltar They are the bastards of reality and wind that wandered Africa The Angelus chimes

One of those sweltering nights at the end of June 1935 I walked past the Luxembourg Gardens The clock was striking twelve And the streets were empty As delivery vans and desolate as Ash Wednesday I thought of nothing And desired nothing I desired nothing was in no hurry nothing weighing on me I walked like a man without memory A shell of a person I walked like an old man who no longer needs sleep

I don’t know what suddenly captured my attention I recall my sigh The trees in the Luxembourg Gardens were full of white gauze I gazed at those paper bandages Through the iron fence And maybe I was even singing

That is all And Paris sold into slavery Writhed in a frenzy

O Paris shackled by your bridges Prague Paris Leningrad and all the other cities I have wandered I see that herd of fettered women Drowned still ablaze under open sky Just like their manacles trampled by crowds O archway of bridges I see a single city Through which flow the Seine Neva and Vltava And a brook where countrywomen do the laundry The brook I live beside

Windows Through one a statue from Place du Panthéon enters my room A second faces Charles Bridge From a third I look onto Nevsky Prospekt But there are even more windows

I always loved the paper cones of street vendors Whose secrets I have yet to discover They remind me of an empty laundry room And a pile of chemises A chute the common grave of nameless women I know of a forest where wide burdock leaves conceal a girl’s bosom A tin cross with her white arms A sofa whose stuffing reeks of disinfectant

Who are you I always see as a sewing machine This evening I speak of Boulevard du Montparnasse resembled you I was sitting in front of Café du Dôme Looking at the ornamentation on a building’s sixth floor It felt like it was snowing In my mind I was celebrating the last New Year’s Eve of the nineteenth century A landau parked beneath a tree full of song I tried in vain to find the house with the sewing machine from whose shuttle I would have liked a thread Then I walked toward the Luxembourg Gardens

It is beautiful how the gardeners protect the fruit on trees with little pouches Like you cover your naked breasts in a chemise Beautiful as a pail of water tipped over in a funeral home Beautiful as a needle in birch bark with a carved date Beautiful as a poppyhead touched by a bell Beautiful as a slipper floating in floodwaters by a window with an oil lamp Beautiful as a woodpile where a butterfly sits Beautiful as a roasted apple in snow Beautiful as a bed frame struck by a fireball Beautiful as a wet rag in flames Beautiful as a loaf of bread on the sidewalk at midnight Beautiful as a button on a monastery wall Beautiful as a treasure in a flowerpot Beautiful as a spiritist’s table scribbling on a gate Beautiful as a wreath in a shooting range Beautiful as scissors snipping a candlewick Beautiful as a tear in the eye Beautiful as the capillary tissue of a watch in a horse’s ear Beautiful as a diamond in a condottiere’s musket Beautiful as tooth prints in an apple Beautiful as the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens wrapped in starchy linen

Why I Am a Surrealist An Irrational Definition

I am a surrealist For the shrieks of dreams For the shrieks of dreams to open the torture chamber door to human mystery For the shrieks of dreams for the key to childhood For the keyhole of night For my hatred of the mirror For my head busted against a headboard For ghosts in a sack For the flour chest and engravings in dime novels For the closed book on a high shelf For the price lists of orthopedic products For the mystery of the holes in a rattan chair For the rustle in the chimney For the indigestion from the Eucharist For the confessor’s bad breath For the joy of targeting a cop’s nose For Thursday on Sunday For the sauerkraut of barrack walls For the hatred of romantic gibberish For the tedium of lies For the ridiculousness of egoism For indifference to death For the futility of travel For the clairvoyance of friendship For the sun with its crown of night that is André Breton For the morning star that is Paul Éluard For the telescope and microscope of his poetry For the burning resinous wreaths of Benjamin Péret’s imagery For the Columbian eggs of Max Ernst’s collages For Man Ray’s seismograph For the otherworldly plant messages in the paintings of Yves Tanguy For the topsy-turvy Inquisition that is Salvador Dalí For the support in the eyes of all other Surrealists For the long nights of my Prague friends For a classless society For the beauty that “will be convulsive or will not be at all”

All rights reserved.

@2020​ Twisted Spoon Press Out in February 2021 https://www.twistedspoon.com/woman-in-plural.html

#Translation #surrealism #nezval #karel teige #prague

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Fantômas

by Jindřich Štyrský

(Cover by Jindřich Štyrský)

In one of his surrealist texts, Robert Desnos recalls when the first Fantômas books began to appear in Paris, remembering their alluring titles and spellbinding, color covers: “A new volume came out each month … Le Mort qui Tue … Le Pendu de Londres … La Fille de Fantômas … we eagerly awaited more …”

It is no accident that Fantômas returns in the memories of one of the leading young French poets. Fantômas passed through an entire era of French poetry, and for a time was the literary sensation in France. He passed through the work of Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Philippe Soupault, Jean Cocteau, P.M. Orlan, Paul Dermée, and André Breton; Francis Poulenc began to compose the music to a libretto freely adapted from Fantômas, just like André Favory based the blood-soaked work of his early period on ideas inspired by his reading of Fantômas. In France, where opposites and extremes rub shoulders without destroying one another, where in the realm of poetry tradition lives side by side with Dada, where there are no phony biases, the best poets were able to love the fantastic stories of the “legendary outlaw Fantômas whose name filled the whole world with dread,” while feeling no shame that these editions of “pulp fiction” occupied a place on their shelves next to the immortal Proust and Balzac.

How this multivolume series got its start is the stuff of legend. Those in the know say – not in the academic tomes of literary history of course – that several different authors participated in writing the Fantômas series, among whom were included Apollinaire, Max Jacob, André Salmon, and Pierre Reverdy. Others claim that Fantômas was created by an unknown, washed-up journalist who consulted firsthand with criminals and hookers of the Parisian demimonde. The most likely version is the one supported by the Paris publisher Arthème Fayard, who claims that Fantômas was the brainchild of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain (whose existence is shrouded in mystery), with the former disappearing about ten years ago somewhere in South America and the latter falling in the Great War. – The Fantômas books contain such a concentration of horror, blood, corpses along with so much poetry, moonlit nights, garden parties, the sea, and maidenly charm, that it is hard to imagine it was written by a mediocre writer/storyteller. The fact that the Fantômas tales are often based on contemporary and historical crimes, sensational trials, and official and classified police records clearly suggests that it was written by someone with inside information. Some of the volumes are analogous to actual great crimes, such as: the Gerard case of 1911; the infamous “corpse in the suitcase” of 1889 (Lille); the crime on rue Montaigne (the Pranzini Affair); “the severed hand” found at Aix-les-Baines in 1903; or the so-called “broken dagger affair” (Meynier and Madeleine Delvigne) from 1909, which had its finale one fine morning on Place de la Roquette.* The real and tragic sources of these fantastic stories and mysteries shimmer on the pages of Fantômas, their horror and novelty bringing to mind the magnified details of insignificant things, the sight of which leaves us quaking in terror.

Only after the success of Fantômas – a success of the literary and the universal – after the popularity it enjoyed in France, several other French authors – Leblanc, Marcel Nadaud, André Fage, Maurice Pelletiere, et al. – began to adopt this form and mode to write crime stories. The English and the Americans also adopted the template of this new type of novel – Sapper, Martyn, and Packard (see The Grey Seal) – but they have produced only a pedestrian form of detective fiction.

* Prisons were located on both sides of rue de la Roquette and the site witnessed myriad executions.

• An outtake from Dreamverse by Jindřich Štyrský (Twisted Spoon Press, 2018). It was originally published in Czech in Odeon, literární kurýr, no. 8, May 1930, and is translated here by Jed Slast. All rights reserved.

#Fantomas #avant-garde #Surrealism #Jindřich Štyrský

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Owl Man

by Vítězslav Nezval

The owl man bathing in his own knee That forms a trough Hides beneath his long beard Flowing Like a stony creek Over his belly A black-haired youth Striving To escape his tyrannical embrace And holding in his left arm Elbow severed A cloud dog Lunging Into a deep pit

This black-haired youth Who is actually The owl man’s Athletic shoulder Is a plastic representation Of the relationship between father and son Who Inseparably bound By an ardent embrace Painfully tear apart Their common chimerical body In a lacerated landscape At the foot Of slate cliffs overgrown with horsetail Eroded By a prehistoric waterfall run dry

Poetry and decalcomania by V. Nezval from The Absolute Gravedigger, translated from the Czech by Stephan Delbos & Tereza Novická, published by Twisted Spoon Press in September 2016. The decalcomonia image is titled “Owl Man,” 1 of 6 included by Nezval in the volume as examples of his “interpretive delirium.” All rights reserved.

#Vítězslav Nezval #Surrealism #translation #Stephan Delbos #Tereza Novická #Twisted Spoon Press #Czech literature

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A Gothic Soul now available

We have just published Jiří Karásek’s classic Decadent novella A Gothic Soul. The translation has been made by Kirsten Lodge, who also supplies an informative afterword and author bio note. As Karásek states in the first paragraph of his Preface:

“A Gothic Soul is not a novel in the usual sense of the word: it is a diary of emotions and moods, of the undulating play of the spiritual world, an account of stories of the soul, of everything that agitates the inner self beneath the waves of nuances, fragrances, and tremors with which the real world inundates it. The chimera of a daydreamer who wants to inebriate himself with life and around whom the dream of life flutters constantly like a veil that cannot be removed, and who believes that for life it is necessary for that dream to come true, and the tragedy of this delusion – that is the inner story of my work.”

Karásek was only twenty-nine when the journal he co-founded in 1894, Moderní revue, published the novella in 1900, revised versions, now including the Preface, coming out in 1905 and 1921. The influence of Joris-Karl Huysmans is evident, and indeed the text can be seen as the Czech response to French Decadence (a topic Kirsten addresses in her afterword). Karásek, who affixed “ze Lvovic” (of Lvovice) to his name, was known primarily as a poet, but his later prose works explored sexuality, mysticism, alchemy, and science fiction. The owner of a renowned art collection, he also wrote art and literary criticism. Considered the seminal work of Czech Decadence, one can see echoes of A Gothic Soul in Paul Leppin’s Severin’s Journey into the Dark (Karásek was an early champion of Leppin’s work).

For the illustrations, we considered both a contemporary of Karásek and a contemporary of ours. We eventually decided on a selection of prints by Sascha Schneider (1870-1927) from a rare album owned by a friend. Apparently Schneider and Karásek were acquainted, which made the choice easier.

For more on Karásek and Kirsten’s translations of a couple shorter prose works: here.

The webpage for A Gothic Soul: here.

Photos of the book: here.

#Czech Decadence #czech literature #Jiří Karásek #Kirsten Lodge #translation #Central Europe avant-garde #Prague

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New stuff from Soren Gauger

Getting ready for Soren Gauger month in Krakow and the release of his novel Neither/Nor in Polish by the excellent Ha!art.

Soren will be appearing at the International Festival of the Literary Ha!vantgarde first week of October and then at the Conrad Festival a few weeks later.

His short fiction recently appeared at Per Contra, and Monkey Bicycle has just run a week-long series:

"An Ugly Fact"

"A Calamity Belongs to Everyone"

"Before the Opera"

#soren gauger #krakow #expat writers

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The Legs of Izolda Morgan now out

The Legs of Izolda Morgan, a selection of novellas, essays, and manifestos by Bruno Jasieński is now available.

The Futurist writing is translated from Polish by Soren Gauger and the later satiric grotesques from his time in the Soviet Union is translated from Russian by Guy Torr.

It includes a frontispiece portrait of Jasieński by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz.

For info about the book go here.

Read an excerpt here.

Cover by Dan Mayer, front.

Cover by Dan Mayer.

Portrait of Jasieński by Witkiewicz.

2nd Futurist Manifesto "Nife in the Gutt."

#Futurism #Polish avant-garde #Central European modernism #translation #Soren Gauger #Polish literature

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Release: Miruna, a Tale

Bogdan Suceavă's novella Miruna, a Tale will be in the UK next week, and later in the year it will be released in the US.

The cover, shown here, is by Dan Mayer and is stamped (the monstrance resemblance entirely by chance, albeit apropos). The explosion of time is a common theme throughout Central Europe (viz. Jachým Topol's Sister), but the novella is less about time exploding than time transforming, even by inertia or entropy, via the act of storytelling.

Some links:

Excerpt

Afterword

Taxing fortunetellers and witches (for background, absurd certainly but explains much): "If witches are forced to pay income taxes, Buzea said, they will cast a curse on lawmakers."

Miruna, a Tale has a lot to say about the power of curses.

#Central Europe #Carpathians #Romanian literature #Fortunetelling #Bogdan Suceava #translation #contemporary European writing

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Soon : Miruna, a Tale

[The lower Carpathians]

We are finally getting Bogdan Suceavă's magical novella Miruna, a Tale to the printers this week. On the surface it is about the art of storytelling, and the telling of the history of a family and their ancestral village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. But what becomes clear as the telling progresses is that when one speaks of history there is no way to disentangle myth from reality, no matter what the source (newspapers are hardly more believable than hearsay), so that "truth" remains forever elusive, nothing more than an amalgam of the actual and pure invention.

We have posted an excerpt here and the author's afterword here.

The official "release" is mid-January in the UK, and sometime next autumn in the US, but we'll have copies first week of December. For more info go here.

#Bogdan Suceava #Romanian literature #translation #Central Europe #Carpathians

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Walter Serner's Cuff Poems

Hans Arp makes the claim that automatic writing came into being when he, Tristan Tzara, and Walter Serner wrote a series of poems at Café de la Terrasse in Zürich. Serner states that they wrote about 15 or 16 together, of which nine have survived and are found in Tzara’s collected typescripts. Serner also wrote automatic poems by himself, giving the cycle the title “Manschette” (“Cuff”), with each poem having a number and a subtitle. Three of the seven presented here in translation were published in 1919 in the Dada magazine Der Zeltweg. Supposedly there were an additional ten automatic poems that Serner sent to Richard Huelsenbeck in September 1919 — but he could not remember later what happened to them or even if he had ever received them. Another Serner mystery. cuff 5 (epitaph postal) You never loved the damp rags On your table every breadroll was a reason On your upper lip vibrated the last edge You whistled vowels as if intended just for me On your wrist hung everything quite severely You were reason You gave me up cuff 6 (placide of the teashaker) wild and tiredly the bright hoes everything is a beatdown it lets the slag pile if it´s like on the last day the mild mouth will swell and beg do you not see the eleventh case how he does still love the silent cheesemaker cuff 7 (romance) It is not difficult to be blonde Since in some nights Red rings blast apart Every hope is in the sense of the moment Lazy Look into my eyes Softshelled almond at half-mast Cointreau triple sec with double-tax Every throatcloud a mistake Every bellyfold a fullbath Every main word a round-trip-ticket Je te crache sur la tete Look into my eyes Is it so difficult to be blonde cuff 9 (elegie) speak more clearly a yellow walking stick slides diagonally through my head in all basements is it brighter than in my guts speak more clearly I like hearing the whack on naked babies´ bottoms Since it so enchanted you When I simply whirled away O why not slowly stroke oneself Rapturously greeting bootjacks silent Beyond every bourgeois kitchen O speak more clearly Make your corpulent mounds of filth collapse Above your belly With a powerful metaphysical belch cuff 22 (eastern cathedrals) can the fist sloshed-round more gently chirp poking every breastsnout may jasmines the bloomingchild from the dams of hourly hotels and aerobanalers the mousebase whisks a summerflatcakes long this completely mute fog-absorber does flex much much too long and full of consideration too not without gout pukes he much more have you already seen bill´s terror cuff 202 (joop) drawn from the loose red of the bandages metropoles the docks the heels the vaus the calves ha how tüllich ha how evening edition what is finland to me of the haagforehead geyser and from downy light a very somber confounded to the vests of the rollreduction tanks from the adjacent stool ha as it ticks in the gills of the majorities ha like it fops on the glaze of the drains ha how it sucks on the latrines of offenses and schnüff pamf wumpf tremsch well pulsed trilled in the silky hemp om prolonged sesame of knüllgebl.ses oj oj oj dont j’étais vraiment amoureux give me the teemingapple the reststamme (o leckerté) the sunny caravan the modetext the lungscentedbillowed the hot can only dwell in the foam of the ginning chottochott the lovely hungerpoles of the throats the soaked settletwitch warped hinge o the unlernt fingeryminderd yummy yummy and emptied from the spittletrap c´est exquis cuff 797 (micarème) idiot poire imbécile cochon well yeah and kisses away the taut scent onto which the slobberstreams refresh themselves and overly buoyant fusillades dredge and are dewy and heated in stubbyarches of wet nuts of greenland strawyfavorites candlestockings sigh too pressed garbagesufferances from the palestorms grim dumplings and rubbery results henceforth the sweetly fried horizonplowers albeit burst like an adult with highsoundflatulence in front of the muffled minister of debris for columngreenspan simmering still the glrery stand-up collars why hummed in the finesse of autoskeweredravens someday lubberlyer eavesdroppers consume prepositions disturbingpeacefuls raise their steelraillegs unto us stukkoturish omnibuses sober up purposefully before sloping trainstation edgeysides of the quite syphilitic jupiterstallions on the second day of easter unto which the sky more or less blue and wandered around behind the barracks and he got bored and quite mechanically almost all of them were drunk and the smutty songs and already two holidays a quarter of an hour ago since felix marries at a moment of his life had cochon imbécile poire idiot so that one simply was no longer balanced and just for fun disembodied those gentlemen translated from the German and introduced by Mark Kanak

All rights reserved.

For more on Serner and other work by him go here.

#Walter Serner #Dada #Mark Kanak #Twisted Spoon Press #Central Europe avant-garde

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Mark Kanak projects

Mark Kanak, the translator of Peter Pessl's Aquamarine and Walter Serner's Last Loosening: A Handbook for Con Men and Those Who Wish to Be One, has a few things going on involving his own work in German: An ongoing online project here that will be published as a book in 2015 or so. A just published collection of "torture" poems (Folterlyrik) here. A piece in Idiome, a magazine for new prose out of Berlin & Vienna.

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Phil Shoenfelt U.S concerts in May

Phil Shoenfelt, author of Junkie Love, will be performing at a number of venues with Pavel Cingl in the U.S. in May.

May 21 Interview with Phil on the ReW & WhO Internet TV show, NYC May 23 7 p.m. : Barbes, Brooklyn, NY May 24 Pete’s Candy Store, Brooklyn, NY with Lorraine Leckie May 25 Salt Creek Grille, Princton, NJ with William Hart Strecker May 26 7 p.m. : Zirzamin, NYC with Lorraine Leckie 11 p.m. : Otto’s Shrunken Head May 27 Bohemian Hall & Beer Garden, NYC May 29 Cedars, Youngstown, Ohio May 31 Alpine Banquet House, Chicago

#Phil Shoenfelt #Junkie Love #Prague expats #Twisted Spoon Press

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Jindřich Štyrský on encountering Marquis de Sade's La Coste

The Landscape of Marquis de Sade text and photographs by Jindřich Štyrský History is nothing if not the remarkable dissipation of truth in time. This is why the names of poets are always connected to ruins and shadows. Everything the poet forsakes turns to gray and ash. Poets delight in observing how oblivion corrupts the forms of what was once beauty, how emptiness expands in hearts once vital, how everything around them ripens toward death, how everything rushes toward expiration, while their hearts are denied the benevolence of aging. Todays and tomorrows are not a poet’s concern, time is. The Marquis de Sade, one of the greatest minds and the literary epitome of the 18th century, escaped, fortunately, the notice of his contemporaries. — His vast oeuvre has only received its proper due today, and his proscribed name, shrouded for the whole 19th century by heinous legend, only now has been completely rehabilitated.

The sky, azure as the distance, arches over his landscape. I passed through in summer so that I could brush its horizons, read the collapsed walls of La Coste, and later manage to reliably isolate from the bare brown earth of its vineyards on the Saumane slopes that tint of blood lying more than a hundred years on the memory of him.

The ruins of Castle La Coste are situated far from the main arteries between Avignon and Apt. The countryside around it is arid, rocky, and plaintive even in the blazing noonday sun, when the pebbles on the road are white and the leaves of the grapevines hot. It is quiet, and the fragrance of thyme accompanies the fool trekking through the broom. Yet at evening the light recedes into rose and the entire landscape takes on the exuberant air of a cabaret. The clouds begin to slow their course, and a peculiar violet hue burgeons in the distance, one that does not recur beyond this part of Provence and is perceived only by the most sensitive eye accustomed to remembering the dead, a hue passing right into dreams and coloring them with this taboo impression of evil. The bare moon, its light piercing the deep darkness of the branches, brings sleep to the indolent and, compelling lovers to aimlessly wander the countryside, drives the lunatic from this demonic paradise.

So it was here, at night, that I invoked the shade whose true likeness was never captured, the shade dashing off on a gimpy horse over the low vineyard walls and across the fields headed south, toward Marseille, while in the distance on the castle’s terraces the torches gutter out and an assemblage of dishabilled Lyon tarts belts out lewd songs.

Few castles in 18th-century Provence could compare with the magnificence and splendor of this favorite residence of Marquis de Sade. His coat of arms was carved above the gates : a black eagle in a gold star, the family motto, Sade toujours, inscribed under it. Sade had Castle La Coste renovated to be an occasional residence for him and his wife. But when their already tepid relationship turned frigid, and she preferred Château de Saumane, he lived here alone surrounded by a coterie of drunkards and girls. There is no other place on earth, save the prisons at Miolans, Pierre-Encise, Vincennes, and the Bastille, in which Sade spent a total of twenty-seven years, more closely associated with his name than this piece of ground where he lived the fullest moments of his life in freedom. A beautiful dancer and singer by the name of Beauvoisin, to whom he referred as his wife, was now living with him. She was slim, perhaps suffering from consumption, and she was a redhead. To make her feel at home at La Coste, Sade had her room painted with obscene tableaux. Let’s have no illusions about this petite singer and dancer from the 18th century. Did she sit barefoot on the north wall? Did she dance on the terraces in the shadows of the setting sun? Did she resemble an ancient priestess with bluish lips? Let’s have no illusions about love! It takes only one conversation for two hearts to become forever estranged, one second for lovers to slip forever from one another’s embrace.

Castle La Coste is the only place we can associate with love in Marquis de Sade’s life. One day his sister-in-law, Louise de Montreuil, paid him a visit. She was the only love of his life. Fair-haired, her smile ignited Sade’s forebodings. A spring breeze rustled the olive groves on the castle’s slopes. Louise loved the garden’s dark, damp recesses. Shadow followed the angel. And when the Marquis first pressed her translucent hand, she fainted and fell face first to the ground. It was spring in Provence, and for no one was Saint-Just’s later pronouncement more apt: “The milk of liberty! ’tis blood.”

While the Marquis was making ready at La Coste to abscond with Louise to Italy, redheaded Beauvoisin, reminiscing, languished in the arms of a shady lawyer who had set up shop in the passageway of the Palais-Royal – she was subsequently swept from the ranks of the living by the wave of revolution. No place on earth reminds me more of a graveyard than the ruins of La Coste washed with sun. Louise as well would never see her paramour’s region again. She died the following year in Venice, execrated by her family but in Sade’s arms. Whoever wallows in the void does not make a keepsake of fallen hairpins. The Marquis de Sade was not one to look back.

Castle La Coste was deserted. Grass grew on the tiled terraces, nettles filled the nooks, and dirt accumulated in the cellars. Then the French Revolution happened. One morning a mob broke into the castle of the hated aristocrat, plundered it, and set it ablaze. Even today people in the region still claim that subterranean chambers were found with the most terrible instruments of torture and piles of human bones. Perhaps this is one of the sources of the horrific Sade legend. The detailed report on the castle’s pillage, now housed in the archives of the Conseil National of Apt, gives no evidence that anything of the sort was ever discovered. Even so, there is mention of a “room with immoral scenes” and a “hall with paintings depicting the most varied uses of an enema,” in short, nothing shocking to anyone in the 18th century. The Marquis de Sade learned of his home’s destruction while imprisoned at Picpus in Paris, and soon thereafter he sold the castle and its surrounding land to Deputy of Parliament Rovère, who came to open the doors of the jail for him. Ownership has changed hands many times since, but the castle’s buildings have never been rebuilt. This is all well and good. It would be an inexcusable act of vandalism to deny time its nourishment.

Today the extensive ruins blend in with the sporadically inhabited settlement of ramshackle houses below. A small lizard suns itself on a dirty white stone of the wall. A tricolored cat sleeps nearby. A large black butterfly with yellow spots floats over a child’s white shirt drying in the sun. Woodworms tirelessly work on the remains of the heavy gates, the disused knocker having rusted. Ivy, moss, and mold cover the walls jutting skyward with their derelict window openings. In a quiet corner overgrown with geraniums a gray marble hearth is crumbling. Here the remnants of subtly modeled plaster flowers and fine molding still linger on the walls darkly saturated with an orange hue, a kind of mix of vermilion and yellow that will never vanish from my memory. It is a particularly noxious color that always came to mind when reading Maldoror.

1933 translated from the Czech by Jed Slast © 2018 All rights reserved.

Note Originally published in Czech as “Kraj Markýze de Sade,” Rozpravy Aventina, 9, no. 1 (September 27, 1933): 6. It was later collected in Život markýze de Sade [The Life of Marquis de Sade] (Prague: Kra, 1995) with two other longer texts about Sade, which formed an unfinished, and unpublished, biography. It is also included in a volume of Štyrský’s collected writing: Texty (Prague: Argo, 2007), 118-121 (without the photographs). This English translation is from Dreamverse, published by Twisted Spoon Press in 2018. Jindřich Štyrský (Čermná, 1899–Prague, 1942) was a painter, poet, editor, photographer, and collagist. In 1923 he became a member of the avant-garde group Devětsil, later founding Artificialism with Toyen. His outstanding and varied oeuvre also included numerous book covers and illustrations. A founding member of The Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia, he published Edition 69, a series of pornographic books combining text and artwork from fellow Surrealists, and edited Erotic Review and the magazine Odeon.

#Jindřich Štyrský #czech surrealism #translation #Central European avant-garde

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Later I placed an aquarium in the window. In it I cultivated a golden-haired vulva and a magnificent specimen of a penis with a blue eye and delicate veins on its temples. In time, however, I threw in everything I had ever loved: shards of broken teacups, hairpins, Barbara’s slipper,...

#Jindrich Styrsky #Czech Surrealism

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"The Mácha Cult" by Bohuslav Brouk

photo: from the left: Bohuslav Brouk, Toyen, Jaroslav Seifert

  The Mácha Cult by Bohuslav Brouk Common folk, made abject by an inferiority complex, need idols to worship. In the Middle Ages, these idols were provided by religion. Today they are supplied by history, science, and art. The Christian saints have been supplanted by statesmen, generals, inventors, explorers, scientists, philosophers, poets, painters, sculptors, and composers. In Bohemia, the poet Karel Hynek Mácha has become one such idol, and his work surely offers no reason why he shouldn’t be. On the contrary, Mácha is such a leading light of Czech letters that no manner of homage paid him will ever suffice. We should not forget, however, that not all the homages heaped on the giants of spirit are enviable.

Every person who becomes the object of public adoration must undergo a process of artificial adaptation to this condition. As with saints, a legend must first be created around the deserving individual, and for the most part this acutely contradicts the reality. Every luminary in human history and culture must undergo idealization in such way that those who have set him on a pedestal will not see in his character their own weaknesses, obtuseness, and shallowness. In Western culture, a cult of genius has arisen, a veneration for eminent souls that has made famous philosophers, artists, and others into odd, mysterious creatures in the throes of crazed passions or saint-like zeal. A fruit of the Romantic spirit, the cult of genius has had little traction among us Czechs. We have viewed prominent individuals “realistically” rather than romantically, and they have been idealized as sober-minded, upstanding humans full of patriotic and altruistic sentiments. This is why we Czechs do not consider Mácha a genius who made an important contribution to poetry, but a national poet who made an important contribution to the elevation of the Czech language. Czechs have replaced the Romantic cult of genius with the Enlightenment cult of national revivalists, who are considered the models for the ideal citizen rather than the ideal type of scientist or artist. While elsewhere the cult of genius stirs in people a sense of beauty and profundity, our Revivalist cult imbues national pride and other ethical sentiments in the souls of our citizens.

The Mácha legend needs to be explained through the patriotic and moral prism conceived by our luminaries. The tendencies that came into play to skew our image of Mácha are evident from the standard version of his actions during a house fire at night, which was the cause of his premature death. In this version, rather than Mácha being portrayed as a poet-Romantic who was so infatuated with the magic of the flames that he ran for a whole hour to reach the fire to revel in it from up close, he is characterized as a selfless citizen who rushed off to help put out a distant fire and thereby save his neighbor’s property. Clearly, this gratuitously distorted picture we have of Mácha is a result of how May has been so wrongly perceived. Though May reeks more of the gallows and graveyard than it does of flowering nature in the month of May, and has more to do with the unruly passions leading to crime than sentimental amorous longing, despite all this Mácha still has become the patron saint of lovestruck students, the protector of naïve lovers and their trysts, and the symbol for the modestly carnal dreams of spinsters. Even tourists see him in their own way, taking pains to interpret Mácha’s trampings and journeys as a simplistic love of nature and adoration of his homeland. The only consolation we have is that no Fireman’s Association, or Catholic Youth League, or Club of Czechoslovak Tourists will be able to make him an honorary member. The romantic or ethical distortion of important persons, necessary for any cult of veneration, should leave a bad taste in the mouth of any critically thinking individual. Certainly the Romantic legend of genius is much closer to the reality of Mácha than the philistine musings of our leading lights. It would therefore be much more acceptable from an aesthetic as well as scientific perspective if Mácha were portrayed in the legends about him as a transcendent giant than as a tender-hearted, respectable patriot.

The genius-making Romantic conception of Mácha, which is better suited to him and would better serve his legacy, might finally partially redress the manifold wrongs that have been done him by all the adulation and adoration. People are hardly cognizant of the stupidity and disgraceful motives that inform the diverse ways the famous are venerated, transparent though they may be, and that this is generally the purview of cunning, bloodsucking scam artists who endeavor to live off the fame of prominent personalities the same way priests do from the popularity of this or that saint. As with saints, even famous mortals have their own places of pilgrimage where all manner of petty merchant lies in wait to wring as much money as possible from the visitor. Let us consider for a moment how many places exist where not one foot of a single tourist would tread if the town could not boast a memorial plaque announcing that on such and such date some genius lived or spent the night there, or even just sat for a spell. It would surely be instructive to learn how many inns rely on such memorial plaques for their business, and I am sure we would discover that the famous are valuable commodities indeed for the enterprising entrepreneur.

This year’s Mácha celebrations offer us a capital opportunity to observe the economic value of the famous. A trickle of stories about Mácha’s travels near and far have appeared in the newspapers, and for no other reason than to convince the good little Czech to leave his inglenook and help the local publican earn a bit of coin. The greater part of the revenue from the Mácha market will naturally be made in Litoměřice. The town’s shopkeepers are already impatiently waiting to see how large a windfall the monstrous monument to Mácha, which is to be ceremoniously unveiled, will bring them. There will no doubt be a stream of visitors in need of food and lodging, and thirst will produce a sharp spike in the revenues of the Litoměřice brewery. Even the local stationery shops have the opportunity to do a brisk business in picture postcards of the house where Mácha died, his grave, etc. Yet despite all these rosy outlooks for fat profits, the citizens of Litoměřice have been unable to raise the necessary funds for the Mácha monument and have shown no compunction in asking Czech artists to make a donation to help pay for it. We should also keep in mind that Litoměřice’s population is largely made up of ethnic Germans, and the stream of Czech tourists descending on the town overwhelmingly supports the Czech minority. So ultimately the Mácha festivities in Litoměřice should be viewed as a nationalistic fete similar to the Sokol excursions made to our Sudeten border towns, which in the tense political climate at present have certainly done little to promote mutual understanding between Czechs and Germans. Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the publishers who are rolling out various editions of Mácha’s work, for they, too, deserve to have their pockets filled for their service to the famous poet.

As you see, the motives behind commemorating Mácha are not so selfless for these celebrations to be taken as a cultural festival of interest to any decent person. Their degree of success will largely depend on the enterprising prowess of the Czech shopkeeper.

Yet the shopkeepers and loony nationalists are not the only ones parasitizing on Mácha’s fame. Mácha presents an inviting target not only to avaricious bloodsuckers, but also to paltry megalomaniacs seeking to appropriate a bit of his fame for themselves. One will always find a panoply of impotent spirits who, unable to win recognition through their own abilities, will attach themselves to a genius to exploit his celebrity. This year we have plenty of such bedbugs and lice latching onto Mácha, inasmuch as the celebrations planned for the poet of May present a truly unique opportunity for a variety of pathetic cultural types to “make a name” for themselves. Of these bedbugs and lice sucking on Mácha’s fame, we should give special attention to the largely insignificant writers and artists who are trying to achieve some note with their reflections, little novels, and poems on Mácha, or with paintings and sculptures of him, not to mention those setting his verse to music and the like. Worthy of notice are those many painters who have enjoyed producing an array of insipid imaginary portraits of Mácha, as they well know that without the imprimatur of his name hardly anyone would want to reproduce such reprobate creations, much less purchase them. Fortunately, these are only parasites of the moment, and they are sure to completely forget about Mácha next year.

There are as well, of course, those bald souls, even if rather scarce, who with too much time on their hands and too few other talents have made it their lifelong mission to serve Mácha and thereby build their careers on his fame. Such potentates do not have any work more worthwhile than to collect with fetishistic devotion any and all inane mention or information about him. They would purchase every single chair he ever sat on, if only they were able to identify and find them all. They laboriously rifle through old documents to find proof of each second of the poet’s life, to discover how many times he was at this or that castle ruin, or in what role and how many times did he appear in this or that amateur play, and they are filled with pride if they uncover who lent Mácha money; they then go rushing off with their discoveries to editors, who from a paucity of material give these nits the space they require. If these pedants were satisfied with just nitpicking Mácha’s life and work, we would ignore them with a disdainful smile, if not with compassion and sympathy for their moronic pursuits. Yet these nitpickers have unfortunately usurped exclusive rights to Mácha and defend them each time someone would like to show that he was in no way a tourist who clambered up and down castles for sport, or that for him love was something more than sniffing a bunch of lilacs. With prudish fastidiousness they sort their nitpickings and publish only those that do not contradict the current philistine conception of Mácha, such as how in the park at night he discussed the Czech Question with his lover, taking pains to elucidate naïvely each statement he made to her even though in his intimate diary, written in code, he left ample proof that his sex was not covered in moss, as seems to be the case for those who meticulously guard against the diary ever being published. Mácha’s intimate diary evidently will not become public reading, yet because of the philistine deformation of Mácha’s stature and the nitpickers’ accounts of the poet’s life and work, it is imperative more than ever that his diary be published, so that people be made aware that not even this poet was a superhuman able to fully sublimate his libido.

If I have referred to shopkeepers and megalomaniacs profiting from Mácha’s fame, it has been with the purpose to incite all decent folk to take it upon themselves to commemorate Mácha this year in a way that will help to drive off the swarm of parasites afflicting this phenomenon of genius.

June 1936

Translated from the Czech by Jed Slast © 2013 All rights reserved. Note This text was originally published in Czech as “Machův kult” in Ani labuť, ani Lůna (Prague: Otto Jirsák, 1936), 77-81. The anthology was published to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of Karel Hynek Mácha's death and to present the Surrealists' view of him and his work. This particular contribution became the object of a defamation lawsuit brought in June 1936 by Karel Jansky against Brouk and the book's publisher, which was eventually dismissed by the court. Bohuslav Brouk (Prague, November 19, 1912 – London, January 19, 1978) was a psychoanalyst, writer, poet, essayist, philosopher, and founding member of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia in 1934. The enfant terrible of the interwar Czech avant-garde, much of his provocative work from that period was focused on issues of sexuality and demystifying social mores and conventions. Among his most notorious in this regard are his essays “Masturbation as Worldview” in Jindřich Štyrský’s Erotic Review, “The Mácha Cult,” the afterword on pornophilia to Štyrský’s Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream, and his books Psychoanalytical Sexuology and Autosexualism and Psychoeroticism. After the communist seizure of power in February 1948, Brouk fled the country, staying first in a refugee camp in Regensburg before settling for a short time in France. From 1951 to 1958 he lived in Melbourne, Australia, working at Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, and then in London until the end of his life, lecturing first at North Western Polytechnic and then Polytechnic of the South Bank.

#Bohuslav Brouk #Czech Surrealism #Karel Hynek Mácha

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K.J. Erben's "A Bouquet" out soon

Karel J. Erben's A Bouquet with Alén Diviš's artwork will be out in a month or so. We've put up an excerpt here.

#Karel J. Erben #Alén Diviš #Marcela Sulak #Czech literature #translation

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Interview with Soren Gauger

Lemon Hound has posted an interview with Soren Gauger, translator of I Burn Paris, mixing in a review of the book as well.

From Soren: "I have a lot of sympathy for the early Marxism of Central/Eastern Europe, and I believe that some of the most profoundly humanist and moral writing emerged from writers involved in it (Aleksander Wat, Victor Serge, early Ilya Ehrenberg, Mayakovsky). It makes no difference that this humanism was often expressed through a kind of disgust – it remains a defense of the human spirit much more compelling than anything we have in our day, and a rare example of political writing that never becomes mawkish or cloying."

From the review: "The translation ... appears in a moment when materialism and avarice are at their zenith, social unrest is spanning continents, and the disparity of wealth is at its largest point since, well, the original publication of I Burn Paris that saw Polish émigré author Bruno Jasieński escorted to the French-German boarder and warned not to return."

Read the full version here.

#I Burn Paris #Soren Gauger #Futurism #Bruno Jasienski

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Things Bruno Jasieński

A couple of interesting reviews of I Burn Paris have come out recently:

3:AM Magazine

Necessary Fiction

Over at Press Board Press they have been gradually putting up Jasieński's poems in the original Polish and in English translation by Mila Jaroniec. Three have been posted to date:

"The Walk"

"They Ran Him Over" (shades of The Legs of Izolda Morgan)

"Marseillaise"

Hopefully there will be more to come. It's good to see Jasieński finally getting some attention.

A prose piece by Soren Gauger, translator of I Burn Paris, has been posted on their site as well:

"Presidential Drift"

* Portrait of Jasieński by Tytus Czyżewski

#Bruno Jasieński #Futurism #I Burn Paris #Polish literature #Soren Gauger