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“... When André Breton proclaimed in 1922 that poetry ‘emanates more from the lives of men – whether or not they are writers – than from what they have written or from what we might imagine they could write’, it is unlikely that Laure, then 19 and cloistered in the bourgeois family estate, would have got wind of it. Yet in many ways she was the embodiment of Breton’s pronouncement ...”

“... zeal, are needed from translators. In their recent books about translation, Mireille Gansel and Mark Polizzotti come close to playing the role of scouts – Polizzotti is interesting on the interconnections of translation and intelligence, and surveys a number of translators who were information-gatherers for their ...”

“... the re-enactments. In an informative introduction to his translation of Impressions d’Afrique, Mark Polizzotti describes in some detail his effort to arrive at an English comparable to Roussel’s near mathematically concise French. The author of a biography of Breton, a short book on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, and a translator of ...”

“... in his saying he is a master in (‘maître en’) such things rather than of them, which Mark Polizzotti catches well with his ‘I am a master at phantasmagoria.’Do boats talk about how they feel when their haulers have been killed and their crews have vanished, leaving them to float down rivers to the sea and an unimaginable freedom? Do they ...”

“... Bataille was often, as Breton remarked, an ‘excrement philosopher’.In Why Surrealism Matters, Mark Polizzotti, a biographer of Breton and translator of many Surrealist texts, makes a good case for the varied influence of the movement, especially regarding sexual politics and anticolonial struggles. He also points to its many complicities. While ...”

“... representation in major ways. But the real achievement of its self-styled leader (the subject of Mark Polizzotti’s biography) is questionable. It is difficult not to find oneself writing biliously about so self-righteously bilious a man as André Breton. It is perhaps no accident – another way of formulating Breton’s opaque notion of ‘objective ...”

“... Of the three books that Gustave Flaubert was able to write only after a lengthy cohabitation with his sources, Bouvard et Pécuchet is by some way the most approachable. The other two are exhibition pieces, admirable for their form but keeping their distance, full as they are of the rare knowledge he had come to by his reading. In La Tentation de Saint Antoine, the desert-dwelling anchorite of that name – an antisocial paragon to whom Flaubert felt sufficiently drawn to go on writing and rewriting the book for thirty years – endures a punishing series of night-time intrusions from various biblical, classical and other phantasmal interlocutors, until the sun comes up and the saint can go back to his solitary prayers ...”

“... his khaki shorts are ‘like a schoolboy’s kabutura’. (In the original French, and in Mark Polizzotti’s faithful translation, Kinyarwanda words are left untranslated.) The villagers even joke that ‘old white professors are like infants’ who need to be treated with special care. Mukasonga’s aim here isn’t to ridicule the pursuit of ...”

“... a duplicitous defence of the reasonable. In a recently published booklet, Lautréamont Nomad, Mark Polizzotti recommends reading the two works together ‘in the perspective of an infinite movement of evasion and disappearance’, and comments that the Poésies ‘protect Maldoror (and the entire opus) from being re-appropriated by the distributors ...”