Poet Alan Bernheimer provides a long overdue English translation of this French literary classic. Opening with a reminiscence of the international Dada movement in the late 1910s and its transformation into the beginnings of surrealism, Lost Profiles then proceeds to usher its readers into encounters with a variety of literary lions. We meet an elegant Marcel Proust, renting five adjoining rooms at an expensive hotel to "contain" the silence needed to produce Remembrance of Things Past; an exhausted James Joyce putting himself through grueling translation sessions for Finnegans Wake; and an enigmatic Apollinaire in search of the ultimate objet trouvé. Soupault sketches lively portraits of surrealist precursors like Pierre Reverdy and Blaise Cendrars, a moving account of his tragic fellow surrealist René Crevel, and the story of his unlikely friendship with right-wing anti-Vichy critic George Bernanos. The collection ends with essays on two modernist forerunners, Charles Baudelaire and Henri Rousseau. With an afterword by Ron Padgett recounting his meeting with Soupault in the mid 70's and a preface by André Breton biographer Mark Polizzotti, Lost Profiles confirms Soupault's place in the vanguard of twentieth-century literature.
"Philippe Soupault was a central figure in both the Dada and Surrealist movements but throughout his long life walked under no banner except the one of artistic freedom. In this previously untranslated book, he gives us a collection of richly remembered portraits of some of his best-loved friends from the old days of the new modernism. As a glimpse into that time, these lost portraits are invaluableand often deeply moving."Paul Auster, author of Report from the Interior
"Reading Alan Bernheimer's splendid translation of Soupault's memoir, I forgot that it was a translation, that it was Soupault writing or talking about another time, about his friends of one century past. I read myself into these vivid and virile (so, sue me!) assaults on time, and Time stopped."Andrei Codrescu, author of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess
"Philippe Soupault was present at the creation of both Dada and Surrealismcollaborating with André Breton to produce The Magnetic Fields, the first book of automatic writingbefore going his own way as a poet, novelist, and journalist. In this present volume, Soupault's fierce independence, deep wit, and generous heart shine through a set of sharply observed portraits of European writersfellow geniuses, most of them known to him personally. Alan Bernheimer's fine translation allows Soupault's vibrant voice to come to life in our time, and to reanimate in turn some of the greatest spirits of the past century's literaturea marvelous and much-needed apparition."Andrew Joron, author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems
"In this dazzling bookadroitly, smoothly &amp; accurately translated by poet Alan Bernheimerpoet &amp; co-founder of Surrealism Philippe Soupault trains his great secret eye &amp; ear to auscultate an astounding range of core 20th century literary figures he knew personally. And does so with serenity, humor &amp; profound insight. Like none of the academic histories covering this period, no matter how well written and documented, this book makes you say as you devour it: 'Wish I had been there.' Enough said, I’m going to call René Crevel right now."Pierre Joris, author of Barzakh: Poems 2000-2012
Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) served in the French army during WWI and subsequently joined the Dada movement. In 1919, he collaborated with André Breton on the automatic text Les Champs magnétiques, launching the surrealist movement. In the years that followed, he wrote novels and journalism, directed Radio Tunis in Tunisia, and worked for UNESCO.

Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism

Arts & Photography

Soupault, Philippe

History & Criticism

City Lights Publishers

Last nights of Paris

Full Court Press

poetry, tr Paulette Schmidt, bilingual edition

I'm Lying: Selected Translations of Philippe Soupault (Lost Roads) (English and French Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Schmidt, Paulette

Poetry

Lost Roads Pub

Where the Four Winds Blow

Pygmy Forest Pr

The Magnetic Fields

BRETON, André

Small Pr Distribution

This book collects together the two most vital "automatic" texts of Surrealism. Breton’s prefatory essay The Automatic Message relates this technique to the underlying concepts and aesthetic of the Surrealist movement. 
The Magnetic Fields (1919) was the first work of literary Surrealism and is thus one of the foundations of modern European thought and writing. This authorised translation is by the poet David Gascoyne, himself a member of the group and a friend of both authors. 
The Immaculate Conception (1930) traces the interior and exterior life of man from Conception and Intra-Uterine Life to Death and The Original Judgement. The central section is a celebrated series of "simulations" of various types of mental instability. 
Maurice Nadeau (in The History of Surrealism) described the book as "An astonishing series of poems in prose, more brilliant than those of either Breton or Eluard on his own . . . if all that remained of the Surrealist movement were the pages of The Immaculate Conception, man, alerted, could not turn away from the astounding mystery of his condition."

The Automatic Message, the Magnetic Fields, the Immaculate Conception (Atlas Anti-Classics)

Éluard, Paul

Literary

Atlas Pr

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.\nIn the spring of 1919, two young men, André 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.\nThis 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.

The Magnetic Fields (Nyrb Poets)

NYRB Poets

Written in 1928 by one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, and translated the following year by William Carlos Williams (the two had been introduced in Paris by a mutual friend), Last Nights of Paris is related to Surrealist novels such as Nadja and Paris Peasant, but also to the American expatriate novels of its day such as Day of the Locust. The story concerns the narrator's obsession with a woman who leads him into an underworld that promises to reveal the secrets of the city itself ... and in Williams' wonderfully direct translation it reads like a lost Great American Novel. A vivid portrait of the city that entranced both its native writers and the Americans who traveled to it in the 20s, Last Nights of Paris is a rare collaboration between the literary circles at the root of both French and American Modernism.

Last Nights Of Paris

Exact Change

A Rimbaudesque novella of wayward wanderlust and liberty from the cofounder of SurrealismConceived in a hospital bed in 1917 and written a few months later after his fateful encounter with Lautréamont's Maldoror, Philippe Soupault's novella The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle preceded the author's involvement with Parisian Dada and the Surrealist movement he would later launch with his friends. Inspired by a schoolmate's sudden departure for Greenland on a whim and his subsequent disappearance, Soupault imagines his alter ego's adventures as entries in a journal both personal and fictional. Adopted by an Inuit tribe, Pirouelle drifts from one encounter to another, from one casual murder to another, until his life of liberty and spontaneity leads him to stasis at the edge of existence. After taking an active part in French Dada, Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) cofounded the Surrealist movement with André Breton and Louis Aragon, and authored with Breton The Magnetic Fields, the first official Surrealist work. After being expelled from the movement for the crime of being "too literary," he devoted his life to writing, travel, journalism and political activity (for which he was put in prison by the collaborationist Vichy government).

The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle: Voyage of Horace Pirouelle

Wakefield Press

Les Champs magnétiques / S'il vous plaît /Vous m'oublierez

Gallimard]

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