Patrick James Dunagan : MARVEL OF COLLABORATION, by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, trans. Charlotte Mandell

The Magnetic Fields, André Breton and Philippe Soupault
translated by Charlotte Mandell
NYRB / Poets, 2020

 

 

Approached with the right mix of luck and mutual easy-going openness, collaboration exposes the artist to newfound approaches to artistic creation. Any strong sense of personal ownership of the work at hand drops away and astute allegiance to principled rules of practice becomes ever so undone with a disciplined frivolity. (This doesn’t mean all collaboration must be humorous and/or ironic, but hopefully it is both fun and revelatory.) Releasing individual control over the artistic process ushers in a newfound state of engagement, open to whatever direction the work itself appears most interested in heading. There will come a moment when the individual identity or “author” of the work splits into multiples: the self, the other (fellow collaborator), and the third, further other(s), as those who are the “voice” of the work emerge.

A collaborative text of major importance in this regard appeared one hundred years ago when French poets André Breton and Philippe Soupault compulsively committed themselves to an intensive bout of writing. Deciding to write as quickly as possible without looking back over their work and avoiding any discussion as to where the work was headed, they produced The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magnétiques) over the course of just one week.

Seafood wholesaler friend of serious behavior follow me carefully

I have more than one trick up my sleeve

With green well-trained transparencies

We have no idea of these calorimeters

Which give their scope to our desires

Where beautiful sentimentalities have a conversation at 90 degrees Fahrenheit

(“Tempest in a Teacup”) (78)

During that momentous string of days, Breton and Soupault ushered a freshly new phenomenon of writing into being.

Theirs remains the key 20th century collaboration, sparking as it did the automatic writing of the Surrealist movement (as many of its practitioners moved to break away from Dada, the movement which brought Breton and Soupault together) along with an unheralded number of later texts furthering like impulses, such as Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett’s Bean Spasms (NYC, ca. 1967) among many others. Permission to no longer seek permission had been granted. The encouraging nod that never should have been needed had been given. Cohesive narrative/sentence structure and rigid title of authorship had been discarded. 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.

“I swear to you that I am innocent. You mistake my burning cigarette for my glowing eye.”

“This ceiling frightens you and I know that, if we don’t take care, an old man, that is, the bookcase, will tread on my foot. It’s in this same drawing room that we played our life for the last time.”

“Basta! A long time ago I set that famous silkworm free. In Cairo, the navy officers are pretty mulberry leaves.” (“Barriers”) (52)

In collaboration nobody need (or most properly should) claim any element of the work as theirs alone. So with Magnetic Fields two poets are named as author without any direct attributions given to any of the individually titled works within the collection. Seven prose poems, each several pages in length, are followed by two sections sharing the same title, “The Hermit Crab Says:”, with ten fairly short broken-line poems per section. Whether the poems have been written by way of the poets exchanging line-by-line responses or alternating paragraph/verse stanza or even composing entire individually titled works does not matter. The works are all of one source: The Magnetic Fields.

Breton describes some aspects of their process in his essay “The Mediums Enter” from his essay collection Lost Steps (Les Pas perdus). Noting how “each chapter had no other reason for stopping than the end of the day on which it was composed” he makes it clear they simply wrote as quickly as possible without aim or intention. And, claiming that the writing originated from a source beyond their own intentions, he emphasizes “nothing said or done is worthwhile outside of obedience to that magic dictation.” The work is the result of listening as best they could to “this self-sufficient murmur” as they scrambled to record “a few words from the ‘mouth of shadows.’”  

The lake we cross with an umbrella, the unsettling iridescence of the earth—all that makes us want to disappear. A man walks while cracking hazelnuts and at times folds in on himself like a fan. He heads for the lounge where the ferrets have preceded him. If he arrives for the closing, he’ll see underwater gates opening a way for the honeysuckle boat. Tomorrow or the next day, he’ll go find his wife who’s waiting for him while stitching together lights and threading tears. The worm-filled apples in the ditch and the echo of the Caspian Sea try with all their might to keep the emerald powder. His hands are as sorrowful as a snail’s horns; he claps his hands in front of him. Everything illumines him with its lukewarm reasoning like the body of a dying bird; he listens to the contractions of stones on the road, and they devour each other like fish. The glassmaker’s spittle gives him starry thrills. He tries to find out what he has become since his death. (“Let’s Stop Moving”) (58)

Rather remarkably, there haven’t been many English translations of this epochal work in its entirety. Charlotte Mandell’s new translation for the NYRB/Poets series is thus all the more noteworthy as it makes the complete work now readily available in English for current and future readers. For many this will be the first opportunity to read the entire work. Mandell recollects:

“I started translating The Magnetic Fields when a poet friend of mine, Tamas Panitz, was told to read it by the poet Gerrit Lansing, but since the David Gascoyene edition had long been out of print and was prohibitively expensive, he couldn’t find an English version.” (102)

Mandell’s anecdote is extraordinarily multi-generational: Lansing passed away in 2018 just shy of his 80th birthday and Mandell is a generation or so younger than Lansing, while Panitz in turn is about a generation younger than her. Panitz, along with so many others of his generation, will finally no longer search in vain.

Prison tobacco mother of dreams

A roundabout bar sickly gallantry

Thursday Thursday

Take your hand head in the trees

Calm of suns

Compound salts

Trucks bring us the results

(“The Factories”) (90)

Mandell intends her translation to be “as immediate and fresh—and sometimes startling—as the original” (103) capable of yet still surprising readers. The rapid juxtaposition of images and startlingly abrupt shifts of metaphor are seamlessly carried over. She offers younger generations the gift of being turned on by the vitality of a 100 year old collaboration.

Capping off the delightfulness of this nicely sized affordable edition is the inclusion of sketch-portraits of each poet’s profile, likely included in the original French edition, by their peer and pal Francis Picabia. It’s easy to imagine the painter and poets hanging out together after the writing had concluded. With publication imminent, the idea of including the portraits must have come up and Picabia probably drew them on the spot. Instantaneous and as crisp as the writing. Further making this book just the thing to slip into the back-pocket/coat jacket when next heading out the door for a walk into the unknown.

 

 

[This review first appeared in print earlier this year in SALT #1 edited by Billie Chernicoff.]

 

 

 

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at Gleeson Library for the University of San Francisco. A graduate of the Poetics program from the now-defunct New College of California he edited Roots and Routes: Poetics at New College of California, eds. Patrick James Dunagan, Marina Lazzara, Nicholas James Whittington (Vernon Press) an anthology of critical writings by Poetics program alumni and faculty. He also edited a Portfolio of work on and by David Meltzer for Dispatches from the Poetry Wars (where he served on the editorial board). In addition, he edited poet Owen Hill's A Walk Among the Bogus (Lavender Ink). His essays and book reviews appear frequently with a wide number of both online and print publications. His most recent books include: “There are people who think that painters shouldn't talk”: A Gustonbook (Post Apollo), Das Gedichtete (Ugly Duckling), from Book of Kings (Bird and Beckett Books), Drops of Rain / Drops of Wine (Spuyten Duyvil), The Duncan Era: One Reader's Cosmology (Spuyten Duyvil), and Sketch of the Artist (fsmbw).