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...

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

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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

Fantômas

by Jindřich Štyrský

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(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 TueLe Pendu de LondresLa 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.

Owl Manby 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...

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.

A Gothic Soul now availableWe 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...

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.

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”

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.


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Cover by Dan Mayer, front.

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Cover by Dan Mayer.

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Portrait of Jasieński by Witkiewicz.

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2nd Futurist Manifesto “Nife in the Gutt.”

Release: Miruna, a Tale

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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.

Soon : Miruna, a Tale

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[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.

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.

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.