In the 60 years since his death, the great French surrealist poet Robert Desnos has become one of the most accomplished lyricists of the 20th century.  His name has become synonymous with artistic, personal, and political freedom.  He was the last of the Romantics, and the most passionate.

The Voice

Desnos, Robert

Penguin??Books

Fortunes (French Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

French & European Pubns

An early surrealist novel, written by automatic writing while the author was in a trance, presents characters that appear and disappear like the figures in a dream

Liberty or Love!

Chapman, Stanley

World Literature

Consortium Book Sales & Dist

The circle and the star: Selected poems of Robert Desnos

Air and Nothingness Press

Written in early 1922, this is the first prose work by Surrealist poet and exemplary practitioner of automatic writing Robert Desnos (preceding Mourning for Mourning and Liberty or Love!, also published by Atlas Press).
Its protagonists are swept into violent journeys through Paris by train and steamship; fabulous events consume their everyday lives; oracles spout nonsense or wisdom. All of Desnos’ friends in the Paris Dada movement―André Breton, Louis Aragon and Benjamin Péret, among others―make an appearance, and all find a grave in the “cemetery” toward the end of the book, for the past must be buried (even though most of these now legendary names were then in their 20s and had barely made their mark).
By the time this book was written, the Dada movement seemed played out, killed off by a mixture of public success, internal dissent and boredom with the predictability of its scandals. The Punishments of Hell lies between Dada and Surrealism, harking back to the belligerent obfuscation of, say, Tristan Tzara and overwhelming it with the savage lyricism for which Desnos would become known. 
Robert Desnos (1900–45) was one of the most celebrated and celebratory of the writers allied to the Paris Dada and Surrealist groups. He effortlessly combined mystery, eroticism and an irrepressible joi de vivre in a flood of poetry, prose fiction, radio plays and even children’s verse. An active member of the French resistance, he died of typhoid just days after his liberation from the Terezin concentration camp.

The Punishments of Hell

Literary

Atlas Press

Mystery, the marvelous, the city of Paris transmuted by love, and Sanglot the Corsair’s pursuit of the siren Louise Lame: these are the essential ingredients of Liberty or Love!, a masterpiece of early Surrealism written by Robert Desnos (1900–1945) and first published in 1924 to immediate acclaim. Characters appear and disappear at whim; they walk underwater and accept the most astounding coincidences with calm nonchalance. This crown jewel of Surrealist eroticism is part hymn to the erotic and part adventure story illumined by the shades of Lautréamont, Jack the Ripper and Sade. Desnos was famously lauded by André Breton--in his First Manifesto of Surrealism--for having come “closest to the Surrealist truth,” and his novel is a dream at once violent and tender--the perfect embodiment, in fact, of the Surrealist spirit: joyful and despairing, and effortlessly scandalous. This new hardback edition also includes Mourning for Mourning, Desnos’ first book--his own selection of his early stories from the “period of sleeping fits” and automatic writing.

Liberty or Love! and Mourning for Mourning (Atlas Anti-classic)

Surrealist, Lover, Resistant: Collected Poems (English and French Edition)

This extensive and wide-ranging selection comprises the poetry of one of France's most exciting writers of the twentieth century, the surrealist Robert Desnos. Hailed as the 'prophet' of the Surrealist movement by André Breton, Desnos was a hugely influential figure across all art forms at the time, and yet today his work completely underrepresented in the English language, with only his children's poems currently available in English translation. The present volume of nearly 300 poems seeks to redress the balance, moving from youthful, light-hearted material to full-blown surrealism, from poems full of anguish and torment to delightful love poetry, and from whimsical, humorous verses to some of the great poem sequences of the Nazi Occupation period when Desnos was an active resistant.

Surrealist, Lover, Resistant: Collected Poems - Arc Classic Translations

Poetry

Arc Publications

A charming book for children and adults to sing to any tune. The brilliant French poet and surrealist Robert Desnos, 1900-45, wrote these thirty Storysongs or 'Chantefables' in 1943, shortly before he was deported as a Resistant. They were quickly published, but he never saw them in print. These little whimsies of the animal world have delighted generations of French children. Now at last they have been skilfully put into English by the translator-poet, Timothy Ads. This book is bilingual and is adorned with superb illustrations by the award-winning graphic artist Cat Zaza (Caterina Zandonella).

Storysongs/Chantefables (Agenda Editions) H/C: French Poems

Agenda Poetry

In the 60 years since his death, the great French surrealist poet Robert Desnos has become one of the most accomplished lyricists of the 20th century. His name has become synonymous with artistic, personal, and political freedom. He was the last of the Romantics, and the most passionate.

The Voice of Robert Desnos: Selected Poems

Sheep Meadow Press

A startlingly contemporary portrait of drug addiction in prewar Paris Published in 1943 (just a year before its author was arrested by the Gestapo for his Resistance activities), The Die Is Cast was a departure for Robert Desnos: a shift from his earlier, frenetic Surrealist prose to a social realism that borrowed as much from his life experience as his career as a journalist. Drawing on his own use of drugs in the 1920s and his doomed relationship with the chanteuse Yvonne George, Desnos here portrays a band of opium, cocaine and heroin users from all walks of life in Paris. It is a startlingly contemporary portrayal of overdoses, arrests, suicides and the flattened solitude of the addict, yet published in occupied Paris, years before "junkie literature" established itself with the Beat Generation. An anomaly both in his career and for having been published under the Occupation by an active member of the Resistance, The Die Is Cast now stands as timely a piece of work as it had been untimely when it first appeared. Robert Desnos (1900-45) was Surrealism's most accomplished practitioner of automatic writing and dictation before his break with André Breton in 1929. His career in journalism and radio culminated in an active role in the French Resistance. Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, and passed through several concentration camps until finally dying of typhoid in Terezín in 1945, a few days after the camp he was in was liberated.

The Die Is Cast

Wakefield Press

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