Mark Polizzotti on André Breton, Translation, and Surrealism

In this episode of Private Life, Jarrett Earnest is joined by Mark Polizzotti to discuss André Breton’s surrealist novel, Nadja, originally published in 1928 and translated into English by Polizzotti for NYRB Classics in 2025. Polizzotti gives insight into the process of translation, the facts of the real Nadja’s life, and the quotations and photography that Breton employed to evoke the woman behind the “ethereal phantom.” 

André Breton was a French poet, writer, and theorist, best known as a pioneering Surrealist and Dadaist. He published Claire de Terre, a collection of poems, in 1923 and the Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme)in 1924. Breton also cofounded the literary magazine Littérature in 1919.  

Mark Polizzotti is a writer based in New York. He has translated over seventy books from the French, including Command Performance (NYRB Classics, 2025) by Jean Echenoz and The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings (NYRB Poets, 2022) by Arthur Rimbaud. Polizzotti is the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (1995), Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (2018), and Why Surrealism Matters (2024). He is currently the publisher and editor-in-chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

To find Nadja and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963. 

 

Creators and Guests

Host

Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

What is Private Life: A New York Review Podcast?

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick. 

Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

Jarrett Earnest: This is Private Life, a New York Review podcast. I'm Jarrett Earnest, and today I'm speaking with Mark Polizzotti. Polizzatti is an acclaimed translator of French as well as a leading scholar on Andre Breton, having authored the biography, Revolution of the Mind, The Life of Andre Breton, in 1995, as well many other essays on surrealism more broadly. NYRB Classics recently published his translation. Of Breton's 1928 book, Naja, the first new translation into English in over 60 years. It's a mysterious and complicated work and we dive into its provocations together as a way of considering what surrealism can mean for us today. So Mark, I wanted to start by telling you a little bit about my relationship to this novel, which I think is indicative about what is so special about it, like why we might even still be talking about it. But there was a time when I dropped out of graduate school, broke up with my boyfriend and went to Paris. Good start to any story. And I brought Nadja with me because I loved it, but also... I think that it somehow seemed like a key to figuring out what I was gonna do next, which when I was in Paris, included like going to the locations of every place named and depicted in Nadja. And I felt like I was kind of trying to play both parts, like instrumentalizing my own experience, being Breton, but also being forced into position like Nadja where you're like reacting to things you don't understand or whatever. It is such a beautiful and complicated and contradictory text that has just really stayed with me and about what it means to envision your life as an artwork or envision it differently. And so I wanted to ask, one, how did this text come to you? And having been something you've lived with for so long, why did you feel led to make new translation.

Mark Polizzotti: Well, my discovery of the text is maybe not all that different from yours in the sense that I was 17 and living in Paris. And always a good start. The family that I was living with had an attic with this box of old dusty books that I discovered one day, and one of them was a old French paperback of this book, Nadra. I knew a little bit about surrealism at the time because I had practiced what I didn't even know was automatic writing when I was in high school until a friend sort of turned me on to, there were people doing this a long time ago, buddy. And so I started studying who they were, but I didn't really connect with it until I found this book and immediately got absorbed because I think, you know, as you say, it's the kind of book it's almost in a way, a kind of a, a travel log of a certain kind of Paris, um, that most people don't see and that Breton was so good at unearthing and, and sort of pinpointing and spotlighting these little moments, these little hidden corners that sadly are becoming less and common and less and less available to people today. So this was in the 1970s, Breton wrote the book in the 1920s. You know, even 50 years later, it was still possible to find some of these corners and get some of that sense of thrill that he manages to evoke. And also it's a travel out for life. You mentioned that too. And I think that as one, you know, when you're young and you're trying to figure out who you are, what to do, what you're going to do when you grow up. I can think of worse guides than this, maybe not the ones your parents would necessarily want for you, but I would say that, you know, if one has a certain mental inclination or philosophical inclination, this is a great way to discover that there's more to the street than what you actually see on the asphalt, that there is that sort of hidden life of the street that Breton was so talented and so wonderful at evoking. And, um... So there was that attraction to it. At the same time, there's this sort of tease quality that the book has where he tells you about his life, but he tells. Only what he wants you to know. And even though my mission in life is to make people stop calling this a novel or fiction, because it's, it's not, it, it it's really an autobiographical memoir. Uh, you know, Nadja really did exist. The encounter really did happen, uh, you know, for all the research that's been done into that. And this is one of the most studied books in the entire Surrealist canon. We do know who she was and what she looked like now and the facts of their encounters. So even though he relates it in a way that's almost novelistic, it was real. So you do have that kind of absorption in the way that fiction can absorb you in and pull you into this world that he manages to create. And so that was my real introduction to surrealism. Then I went on to study it more when I got into university and afterward ended up writing the Android Breton's biography. Partly because I was so enticed by the little bits and pieces that he does tell you in his, in this book, in Mad Love, in Communicating Vessels, and some of the other ones, these sort of autobiographical, analogical prose works. I just wanted to know what the full story was. And so I spent 10 years of my life working on that book. But what I've now found too, and what we've learned in the last two decades is a lot more about Nadja herself because she was kept rigorously secret by. By the Breton state, by not just family who, you know, this was, this was crazy aunt Leona or grandma Leona. They didn't, they didn't want anything to do with her. And the Bretonne people, uh, considered this to be, you know almost a kind of a state secret, like they were not going to give out any personal information. And so it's funny that you should mention having come upon this book by Chad's, as both of us seem to have done. Um, there's another person who also found this book, by Chad's a Dutch novelist named Hester Albach. Uh, who happened to be going through, as she tells in a article she's written, a difficult time in her life, found a copy of the book stashed behind a radiator in an apartment she was living, staying in, and became so obsessed with it that she made it a mission to go out and find who this person was and she actually managed to do it. And this was a secret that had been alluding Breton scholars for years. I mean, I'd read every article that you could possibly find on who we think she was, who Anantja might have been. There were all kinds of theories, including that it was just simply Breton sort of, you know, externalizing himself or a composite of various women he'd known or somebody he made up from whole cloth, whatever it was. Well, she actually managed to track down through an incredible amount of detective work, family records that led her to the little town in the North of France where the granddaughter still lived and had all of the family papers and was able to reconstruct through these papers and through conversations with the granddaughter who Nadja had been. So, to your question about why. Re-translate this, I mean, that's a complex one. It's several reasons, and I should preface it by saying that I have nothing but huge respect for Richard Howard, who did the original translation that was published in 1960. That was 65 years ago. You know, translations do age. Howard was a poet, and he translated like a poet. There are some beautiful phrasings and formulations in his translation, and, I say in my preface, there are a couple of times when I felt I couldn't do any better, and just left them. You know? I ruined success. But there are also a lot of moments where he either read a little too quickly or he didn't entirely understand what Breton was getting at, which admittedly is not always easy, or he dropped a phrase, we assume inadvertently, or simply didn't have the facts to interpret what Bretone was getting, and this was a case where now with all of the information that we do have and the fact of having worked through Breton's biography and knowing some of those details, I was able to say, aha, this is what he's getting at here. This is, you know, he's being cagey about it. But I can tell what he's talking about. And so that helped me formulate the English in a way that would actually make sense to an English language reader.

Jarrett Earnest: I have a lot of questions for you about that in particular, but just to stay for a moment about the identity of Nadja, when you open this book, the frontispiece is a photograph of her. Right. And that gesture alone feels almost polemical. Like it's such a huge statement and then you follow it up in your really beautiful introduction by extensive quotations of her own writing and letters and diaries. Which are such a wrenching way within which to enter this text. And in a way, it's transformative to enter the text through her own language and through her experience as opposed to just taking it as Breton's fantasy. And I wanna hear more about the decisions you made around that.

Mark Polizzotti: Yeah. Thank you for bringing that up because, you know, look, I love this book. I always have. I've been fascinated by it for all of these years. I've wanted to retranslate it for many, many years. But it's true that it's his telling of the tale. And one of the things that I wanted to do was to re-elevate Nadja herself. You know, now that we do know who she is, now that she's not just this sort of ethereal phantom that, you imagine he invented. You know, now that we know she was, what her life was like, what she looks like, you know, photographs have come to light. Which, by the way, there is no photograph of Nadja in Breton's book. There was a later edition, a revised edition that he published shortly before he died in the early 1960s. He went back and, you know rewrote little bits here, rewrot little bits there, including one fairly significant alteration. And one of the things that he did do was to slightly alter the iconography of the book and add a picture of Nadja's eyes cut into four strips. So you see like, you know, four times over this, this picture of Naja's eyes, that was about as far as he was going to go. That photograph that was in fact the photograph that he used. Cause if you compare the two, you see the eyes are exactly the same. When that photograph came to light again, largely because of this novelist that I mentioned, uh, Hester Albach, it was really a revelation. Nobody had known what she looked like. Now it's, it's out there. People can find it. It's been reproduced various times, but it seemed to be important not only to try to tell her story as part of the overall story of this book and of Bertone's writing of it. But also to show us who she was. The book has 44 illustrations that he commissioned. Photographs by Man Ray, photographs by Man Ray's assistant Jacques-Henri Beaufort of places, you know, you mentioned going to visit all the places. He documents all those places again, as a way of telling people, this is real. I really, I would, you know, this was not fiction. This happened. So he's got these documents, these photographs of various places, of various people that he mentions, you know, it's all very, very carefully noted. Visually, including this wonderfully stiff portrait of himself at the end, sort of looking with distant authorial gaze off into the ether. Even as he said- It's a fabulous picture. It's fabulous picture and you know, even as he's sort of mocking the profession of author, he's there looking just like an author, but there's no picture of her. And so I thought this was the one gap that I can fill in the introduction because that's the other thing is that Howard's book, this was very much Grove Press. They published the book as was, they didn't really set out to- Enhance it, educate you in any way. This is like, here's Nadja, start, finish, done. I felt this was an opportunity, especially since so many people do know this book. I've probably read the Howard translation or at least are familiar with the book to add something extra. And so that's why we have the, the introduction, um, which has that photograph and in which I was able to bring in the other big discovery recently, which was the whole case of letters that she wrote to him, uh, that no one had ever seen. There had been little snippets published. In a scholarly edition of Breton's works. You know, again, a kind of a tease. So, you know, one knew that people in the Breton camp knew them, but it wasn't until the big auction of his works in the early 2000s, where things were sold off to various collectors. But one of the conditions that the Bretons estate put was that all of these documents then had to be digitized and put online. So now one can, in fact, see the scans of the actual letters with her handwriting. Which is amazing. Just the way she uses like these furious dashes of times, which I tried to reproduce a little bit in the TypeScript. But we have that voice that in the book, Breton quotes her very touchingly here and there, but it's just a little piece of it. Whereas now you can really see how she sounded when writing to him. So I thought that that was also a really important piece of the story that needed to come out.

Jarrett Earnest: In the introduction, you do something that is so effective, which just run together these dated excerpts of her voice. And it's like the absent voice from the rest of the book, the answers to his side of the conversation. And it goes on for pages.

Mark Polizzotti: Yeah. The, um, so, so what happened for those of you who haven't read it, Bertone's interactions with Nadja, the core of the book Nadja really takes place only over nine days. It's, it's really very short, but he describes it in such intimate and fascinating detail that it feels like it must have gone on for weeks and weeks, but in fact, it was really just more than a, it was a week and a half. And what happened afterward, we learned is that Nadja was committed to an insane asylum. And Breton basically lost touch with her, although apparently he did try to, to visit her and wasn't able to do it. But during the period from the end of basically at the end, of August, when they stopped seeing each other to the time that she was committed, which was in the following spring, the spring of 27, they were still in contact and they did see each other and she wrote to him, I mean, almost daily because she'd gotten hooked, you know, she fell in love and Uh, Breton could be a fascinating and charismatic person, and I think that he was not in love with her. Uh, I think he was fascinated by her, but I think that that fascination, he talks about it, it kind of wanes, like at a certain point it's like, Hmm, maybe now the fascination and the boredom or the weights are shifting between one and the other. And. You know, he was not about to break up his marriage over this, this relationship. And then as it turns out, he fell in love with someone else anyway, but during this period, she is all about him and. She's writing to him constantly. And the letters are, I mean, there was, of course, even several pages. I was able to quote the most telling snippets over a period of several months. They go on for pages and pages and page and pages. I mean these letters are just these outpourings and they, they shift between, you know, a kind of a fantasy life that they're going to have together and anger and disappointment and pleading. And I mean they're just the whole gamut of emotions and, you know, sort of bargaining and it's all the stages of grief, basically. Really heartbreaking when you look at them, because here's a woman who had become made part of this world that, that Breton was so good at creating. And then suddenly found herself cut out of it, which makes him sound like an awful monster. And I know that that of course has been a charge that that's often leveled against him. And I think it's important to recognize as well that like it or not, I think he got himself in deeper than he expected to as well. Condoning or excusing it. It's just that I think he suddenly found himself in this situation and it was like, uh-oh, I can't help you.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, you are one of the foremost scholars on surrealism and in particular, an authority on Breton. And what I have noticed over the past few weeks as I've been returning to this material, getting ready to have this conversation, talking to friends at parties and stuff, Breton has such a bad reputation by people who know a lot, but not necessarily in depth. And how did he earn that particular kind of reputation and how do you regard it, having spent so much time thinking about it.

Mark Polizzotti: You know, it's funny. So I spent 10 years working on this, this biography. And of course there was a, a lot of interest, a lot of fascination. I wouldn't have started working on it without it. Didn't know it was going to take me that long, but you don't start. The old saw about biography is that you start off really loving the person that you're going to write about. And by the end, you would like easily shaft them in the gut. And, and in my case, it actually was a little bit the opposite, which was that I was very aware of the controversial nature of his personality, charismatic, fascinating, authoritarian, difficult, mercurial. I mean, you know, the whole gamut having read, of course, the people who raised him to the skies and the ones who were ready to stick a stake in his heart. And by the end of it, I felt like I understood someone who was a much more complex human being than the typical portraits would lead one to believe and to understand. He was trying to do something I think quite interesting, which was to open a space in our daily lives, everyone's daily life for a sense of wonder, a sense Marvel, a sense revolt of empowerment really, that In 1930s and 1920s France, no more or less than in 2025 America is hard to come by. And as we're faced with rising tides of conformity and oppression and censorship, this was not that different from the world that the surrealists grew up in, as it were, and formed the group in. And so what Bertone was trying to do was open up this space where people could have a sense of liberation. The curious thing about that and the part that's a little bit ironic is that he himself could also be quite authoritarian and the caricature is that he would, he'd welcome people in and then he'd turn on them and he'd cast them out and throw them into the depths of the shadows. In fact, I think that there was a more rigorous philosophical commitment behind that. So the people who got excommunicated and there were quite a number of them from the surrealist group were people that he felt. Had really betrayed the ideals that the group was built around. And I think it's important to remember that surrealism was not an art movement, even though that's tends to be how we think of it in this country. It wasn't the literary movement. I wouldn't even say it was a philosophical movement. It was a movement about how to live. It was really about the art of living. And that could be expressed in a number of ways, which could be art, it could be film, it could objects, it can be writing, whatever it was, poetry. But really what they were getting at was a way of being in the world That was... Possibly utopian, certainly revolutionary in its intent, which is also why they partnered at a certain point with, or tried to partner with the French Communist Party and with the Comintern, because they saw them as sort of the political manifestation of that same sense of revolt. And so if people signed on for that by joining the Surrealist movement, he felt that you were committing yourself to living up to it. And so things like, selling your talent to be a journalist or something like that, or turning against the movement to go join someone else were things that were in his book, just absolutely unforgivable. And of course, as the surrealists and the communist party really started understanding very quickly that, you know, the, the ways we're partying and that, that what the surrealist wanted, what the communist wanted were, were really not the same thing. And the communists were, they were political party. They had a very set agenda for taking power, putting the proletarian power and having policies and all of that and government. Surrealists weren't interested in any of that stuff, you know, for them it was much more theoretical and they really saw themselves as the kind of the theoreticians of the movement, which of course, communists couldn't care less than, I mean, not that they couldn't care less about theory, but they really couldn't care less, about surrealist theory. Um, so it became fairly clear to a certain point that these two, you know this was a real mismatch. It took about 10 years for it to finally blow up, but then when it blew up, it was serious. And Those members of the Surrealist group had decided that they would migrate over to the communist camp. As far as Breton was concerned, they were anathema, they were gone. It could also be over how you conceived of love. You know, Breton, interestingly enough, for somebody who wrote a book called Mad Love, and for the theoretician and founder of a movement that in some ways espoused the notion of free love, actually was kind of prudish as a person. He himself. Had, he was a serial monogamist. He had, I mean, he had three wives, but they were all, you know, one after the other after the other, and his affairs were, were pretty sequential. And he was very uncomfortable with some of the members like Paul Elouard, who was all orgies all the time. They were close friends, but this was something that you could just tell was kind of churning up in Breton's gut. So when the two of them finally broke, when Breton finally broke with Elouar, even though he didn't say as much, you know that was part of the motor behind it.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, one of the things I love about your biography, so aptly titled Revolution of the Mind, is I think Breton is a profoundly contradictory character. And I also think with works of art, I feel like all great works of arts have a contradiction that's somewhere located in them. And part of what I like to do is try and find the level at which that resides. And so the idea that Breton's whole project is about liberation. Psychic erotic liberation. He's like deeply, almost pathologically uncomfortable with gay people. CB. Totally. AC. Has this idealization of women that is also all about control. And so the nexus between control and freedom, on the one hand, he's the authoritarian head of the group. On the other hand, he's so committed to the collaborative aspect.

Mark Polizzotti: Absolutely.

Jarrett Earnest: That it's more than just a singular self.

Mark Polizzotti: Yeah. And, you know, obviously not to do the two cent psychoanalysis here, but you know Breton was his mother's son and his mother was a very pious, strict, bigoted, uh, you know, like a real French petit bourgeois of the late 19th century or devout Catholic. She didn't want Breton when he was a child out in the streets playing with those dirty children in their working class neighborhood, you know, it was very controlling. Um, so the joke was always, you know, his father had been. For a while, uh, worked in the gendarmerie. He was a, he was a cop. And so everyone said, well, of course, Breton such a cop because of his father. It was really because of mother. His mother was the real cop in the family. Um, and you know, people are who they are. I mean, there was, there, was a lot of anxiety and a lot of neurosis there that he never. He sort of tries to analyze it a little bit himself in his writings, but I don't think he ever went all that deep. And so you do have this contradiction and this kind of wavering back and forth between, I think, a very deep, honest, profound commitment to this notion of liberation. And a personal incapacity to live that way. Now, the other face of that is that it probably took someone like that to keep the Surrealist movement going for almost 50 years as an organized movement. I mean, because there were people that it certainly attracted like Harteau and Robert Desnos and some of the others who were major figures in the Surreallist movement and who lived much more that way, Nadja herself. I mean the thing that Breton was really fascinated about And he even says so in the footnote in the book is that she lived the extreme limit of the surrealist aspiration. As he saw it, this was, this was somebody who lived surrealist. Well, none of them ended up very well. You know, Nadja was committed to an insane asylum. Artur died in insane asylum, uh, Desnos was not insane. He, you know, he died in a concentration camp. Um, but I don't think any of them would have been capable of keeping that movement together. And. One indication we have of this is when Breton died in 1966, his chosen successor, a man named Jean Schuster, who joined the movement after the second world war, he was one of the young new members, very committed, very much an acolyte, very, very strong willed and had the force of personality. But even he realized that the little warring factions that Breton had sort of managed to keep in harmony in some way, shape or form during his tenure, even Schuster couldn't do it. He said several years afterward, they. In the wake of the 1968 demonstrations, they dissolved the Paris group as an actual entity. And his article for Le Monde, where he talks about this, he says, basically, we realized that nobody after Breton had the personal prestige to hold all these disparate elements together. It just.

Jarrett Earnest: Something that occurred to me on this point of the role that he played, the complicated role that you played, is in the stretch of your biography of Breton where you're talking about the sleeping fit, where Desnaud in particular is going into a trance and like dictating this automatic poetry and the kind of madness around is really riveting the way that you recount it. And it made me realize that they're all performing for him. Or they're performing for each other, but he is playing the role of like the most ideal audience member for the art and the poetry and the gestures. And how important it is to have that, that person is kind of the glue of elevating a particular sub.

Mark Polizzotti: They were definitely performing for him. So the sleeping fits, the slumbers are basically, there were seances essentially, where someone would go under and would start dictating these fabulous stories or poetry or sometimes they would act out. One of them got on the floor and started barking like a dog, whatever it might be. But Desnos, who we both mentioned, was a young poet who was one of the major poets of surrealism. And he really came to the head of the class because he was able to better than anyone to just improvise these amazing poems or spoonerisms kind of like Marcel Duchamp, uh, who he thought he was or he claimed to be in telepathic communication with from Paris to New York. Um, and, you know, we just come out with these things and Breton was absolutely convinced that they had never been prepared in advance. We don't know. Um, but he says in Najah, like, if you've seen him do it the way I have. You would know that there was no possible way that he could have prepared these. They just came out of him. And so, you know, he was absolutely riveted as all of them were. I mean, for a period of several months, every single night they would get together and one or the other would go into a trance and sort of come out of these things and they all come out completely exhausted and devastated. And Breton's wife, Simone, who was one of the great chroniclers of the early days of surrealism, says like, every night we swear we're never gonna go back there and then the next night all we can think about is starting up again. So it was sort of this addiction. And since you mentioned control and Desnos, part of the problem was that these started liberating some not so creative impulses. And for example, Desnos at one point was chasing Elward around the, around the house with a steak knife, trying to stab him in the back. And, and Rene Crevelle, who was another one who was very good at these, these performances at one time, I think was trying to get everybody who was under the influence to hang themselves from the coat rack. So Bertone started seeing like this could end up in a really bad place. And he put an end to it and to the great distress of some of the. Some of the members who had been really kind of hooked on, on this performance night after night, but it was his, again, his sort of a role as the, the, teacher, you know, the guy who holds the class together, who realized that this is starting to get a little too much and he had to pull back and it's not the only time. This has happened several times in surrealism where he would start something and then, okay, guys, we've got to stop now.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, I want to ask you some specific questions about Nadja, which re-reading it in this just absolutely sparkling translation. I was struck by how deeply it imprinted me as an aspiration at the level of form and feeling and there's so much going on in the writing, different kinds of writing, different kinds language. Of course, as you mentioned, there's photographs, there are drawings, there're different kinds with illustrations that are all creating this rub against each other. And I think one of the things that seems so prescient about it and so still relevant is the fact that it is non-fiction as opposed to experiments in surrealist poetry, which are about language. And I there's something that happens when these surrealist gestures are rubbing against reality. They're rubbing against the happenstance of the world trying to invert the causal relationship of experience that creates an energy to this book and this kind of writing that is, I don't wanna say unique among surrealist literature, but gives this book a very special quality.

Mark Polizzotti: It does. And I think it also, you know, directly or indirectly led to a lot of the kinds of writing that we're more used to today, the new journalism, auto-fiction, there are certain things that have become common coin in our experience of reading and of literature these days that we are really very, again, I don't want to use the word unique, but we're very rare. It's certainly in Breton's time. And one of the things that I think really makes this book effective is What's that? He keeps a very dispassionate tone throughout. So I wouldn't call it flat necessarily. And there's a lot of emotion. You could just feel a roiling underneath. But one of the kernels of surrealism was, uh, Raton had been a medical student before the first rule of war and he was a medical intern during the war, and that's where he came into contact for the first time with the writings of, um, Sigmund Freud and discovered psychoanalysis, which was just beginning to penetrate into French. The French medical community at that point, Freud's works hadn't been translated yet, but little pieces of them had been, or put in anthologies. And he was absolutely fascinated by, by this, though, by the notion of this is where automatic writing came from. This is where like the whole, you know, he treated shell shock patients and the, the, things that would come out of their mouths. He's like, this is the most amazing poetry I've ever heard. Um, so, and he was, he was particularly impressed by Freud's case studies where Freud would talk about these patients that he had who had these amazing delusions. That he would present in this very kind of matter of fact, you know, he was an analyst, he would presented in this very matter of a fact clinical way, and that gave it more power because he wasn't trying to overdo it, you know? Same thing when Freud writes about dreams, you know the interpretation of dreams has these wonderful narratives that are really thrilling as you know dream narratives, but again, because it's, he can talk about it the same way you talk about, you know I walked down the street and bought a cigar at the local tobacconist. And so Breton was trying to, and I think he even says so, or it says so in a letter at the time, was basically using that as a model for Nadja. So his relation, especially once he gets past the initial preamble, which is a little more philosophical and is kind of setting the ground for why this book, essentially. Once he gets into the actual narratives, both the little vignettes that populate the early part and then the story of Nadja herself. He really is trying to present this kind of flat screen on which the story of Nadja is projected. And because he doesn't write in this very emotive way or experimental way or overtly literary way, I think the story itself becomes that much more powerful.

Jarrett Earnest: Right, he's laying out all the evidence.

Mark Polizzotti: Exactly.

Jarrett Earnest: Almost instrumentalizing his experience to try and learn what actually happened. With a certain amount of skepticism, but also a huge amount of belief that there's some meaning beyond the appearance of it.

Mark Polizzotti: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, this was, you know, Nadja really is, I would say almost more than the surrealist manifesto, certainly as much as the surrealist manifesto a manifesto of what surrealism was about, at least in the, in its early years, which was this notion that the wonder of childhood, the wonder that a child feels as they're trying to sort of figure out the world and things don't entirely make sense, but they can be absolutely fascinating partly because they don't fully understand what they are. That was a feeling that surrealism is trying to recapture. And through the various means, literary, artistic, you know, whatever it might be, um, that was really the end goal was to create these, as I said, open the space in the world as we live it for these moments of absolute wonder and fascination. And this is why, and again, another, another big difference with the communist party. This is why the surrealists were so against the idea of work, regular work, because if you had to go to a job or if you had to go to the factory, you weren't free during the day to walk around and be open to. These things that might happen to you. Now, you know, the communist said, well, that's great. If you have money to do it. Um, which by the way, most of them didn't, I mean, they weren't rich. That's part of.

Jarrett Earnest: What Lin's drama to the pronouncement. I remember hearing very early that Breton basically worked for a living or did not work for a li- like he needed money and never really made much money.

Mark Polizzotti: No, you know, I found sort of amusing letters to his publisher, Gaston Gallimard, that I came across when I was doing research for the biography, which, you know, any author in the world will immediately recognize you owe me royalties and I think you're a crook and it's like all this kind of stuff. But the fact is he needed the money. Um, and very often he had to sell a painting. One of the nice things about being the head of a movement that at least has a strong artistic component is that people give you stuff. People give you works and if those people happen to then become Max Ernst and Andre Messon and some of the others, those works actually can end up being rather valuable. Now they weren't entirely when he had them, but they were enough to sort of keep the electricity and the gas on for another couple of months, you know, that kind of thing. And a little royalty check would come in here, a little commission would come into there. He occasionally had these odd jobs when he was young, he worked for this dressmaker, dress designer Jacques Doucet, who has now given his name to one of the most important literary. Collections, libraries in the world, which is housed in Paris, and which in fact is the place where many of Breton's letters and the letters and documents and manuscripts of the other surrealists, as well as a number of other modernist writers, live and can be consulted. And the reason that that collection is what it is was largely because of Breton, because he was the literary advisor to Doucet because he needed the money. That's his day job. That was the Deja!

Jarrett Earnest: One of the day jobs was helping Proust correct the second volume of In Search of Lost Time.

Mark Polizzotti: He was basically thrown this favor, which was to serve as Proust's proofreader, where he would go through the galleys and make the corrections that Proust was sort of listening to and then would dictate the corrections. And he said that, um, first of all, Proust only worked at night. So, you know, Breton by that time was married. He had a wife and so he would come home from Doucet, spend two minutes with his wife and have dinner, go out to Proust. Late at night and basically spend the wee hours of the morning reading these galleys and then making the changes and Bruce would wheel in some huge dinner that, that he had brought in from, you know, Fouquet's or something like that. Um, and Britt was like, I already ate, but Bruce wouldn't hear about it. So then he had to have like a second dinner and really all he wanted to do was go home. Um, on top of which he didn't really think much of Bruce Ryan when it was not his thing.

Jarrett Earnest: So funny. But also those are the kind of gigs that you do. That's what you do when you're young and you need a job. I mean, Jonas Mekas gave me a job typing up in a word processor his diaries and I was like, because he wanted to give a job to a young poet, even though I wasn't a poet. And I was so bad at it that I ultimately had to be like, Jonas, I'm sorry. Like you need to have someone else do it. And he's like, I know I was already paying someone else to do it

Mark Polizzotti: Well, if it makes you feel any better, Bertone was not very good at being a proofreader either. Um, and when the book did come out, there were so many mistakes that, that, uh, Proust wrote, you know, in typically polite, but you could tell in between the lines sort of annoyed fashion to his publishers. Like that nice young man you sent over, maybe he didn't do such a great job, did he? And I've had to correct so many different things that, you know.

Jarrett Earnest: Yeah, I really, that was a moment of just real recognition where I was like, I have been there. Oh yeah, haven't we all? You are, in addition to your knowledge of Surrealism, one of the great translators and have translated many, many books, including and also authored a really wonderful book about the art of translation. Thank you. And so I wanted to talk with you about some specific instances within this particular translation that we might use as a lens. Not only to think about this book and how it works, but also about the questions that come up with translating in general and translating this kind of text in particular. And I know you had identified some passages.

Mark Polizzotti: Yeah. So, um, we'll just do a few brief ones. Um, so there's one toward the beginning, which is Breton sort of long philosophical digression that kind of gets you into the book about. I would say it's a banger. I would see the opening of this book. Oh, no, I mean, it's amazing, you know, it's like this long, you know, it is a kind of a long, long theoretical preface, let's say. And, you, you sort of have to sometimes warn people that like the story's there, just, you don't hang on. Uh, I've had a few people say, like, I couldn't get into it after the first 10 pages. I'm, if you're listening, go past the first 10, read the first ten pages because they're wonderful and then keep going because it's worth it. Um, but so he's passing in review at a certain point, some of the writers who have been really important to him. Um, and he's talking about, uh, Joris Karl Wiesmael, so it was the, uh I guess his most famous book in English is Against the Grain and he was sort of one of the decade of the 19th century decadence. I'm And Breton so has this passage, uh, which I'll read in first in Richard Howard's translation. And then I'll, I'll read mine. Um, he said, no one before Wiesmans could, if not exemplify this great victory of the involuntary over the ravaged domain of conscious possibilities, at least convinced me in human terms of its absolute inevitability and of the uselessness of trying to find loopholes for myself. And my reaction is what exactly is he talking about? And so when I was translating it, I did it a little bit differently. And I'll tell you why in a second. Um, what he's talking about is automatic writing really, which Breton was very. Involved with at the time. So once I realized that what he was really thinking about is how we small, you know, we small did not practice automatic writing per se, but there was something in his way of writing in his, way of presenting the, the text that kind of hinted to Breton at this. Less regulated, less conscious form of verbal expression, and this is what he really responds to in Huizmul's. And so he says in my translation, while he could not quite show me the dawning of the unpremeditated over the ravaged fields of conscious possibility, he was at least the first to convince me of its absolute human inevitability and of the uselessness of seeking loopholes for myself. So again, this was a case where the prose is, you know, can be a little bit. A little bit convoluted. Breton's style was never simple. He himself called it serpentine. It's very fluid. It's rather sinuous. And so it's easy to lose your way on that path. His sentences can also be very long. And so this was a case where having some insight into what it was he was actually getting at from having worked on the biography, from having written surrealism, allowed me to then sort of get underneath it and try to figure out like, what is it exactly that he's getting at? How can I? Without betraying the complexity of his thought, without betray the complexity of his prose, how can I help the English language reader understand that what he's really talking about is the unconscious bleeding through in the literary text as he sees Wee Smalls having started to do. Now there are cases where also, honestly I sort of questioned some of Howard's choices. So just before this, he's also again talking about Wee smalls and he says But has he not also done more than anyone else to consummate that necessary vital discrimination between the apparently fragile link, which can be of the utmost aid to us and the dizzying array of forces which conspire together for our destruction. And again, it's like, what is that link? What are these forces? And I realized, well, first of all, the word that Breton uses in French is ennui, which means ring. And I realize that the image that he's really putting across is that of a lifesaver, a life preserver. And so what I said here is, but also hasn't he more than anyone taken to extremes, the necessary vital distinction between the ring so fragile in appearance that could be our life preserver and the dizzying conspiracy of forces that threaten to drag us down. So what he's really talking about is being drowned essentially by these vicissitudes of life that someone like Wiesmaals in his prose is able to sort of act as a kind of a, as a safeguard.

Jarrett Earnest: Can I ask you about something that happens just a little later at the end of that page? Sure. Because it's really one of the thesis statements of the book. It's one of things that has been made this book like a kind of talisman for me. So I'm gonna read just a stretch, but it's gonna get to the punchline. As for me, I'll continue to live in my glass house where at all hours you can see who comes to visit. Where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls is held there as if by magic, where I sleep at night in a glass bed under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear to me etched by a diamond. Well, because I know that by heart from the Richard Howard, I know it's almost identical with one surgical shift. And that is the insertion of the phrase to me. In Richard Howard's, it just says, I'll sleep at night in a glass bed under glass sheets where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond. And that is such a subtle shift, but I actually think it changes partly the meaning of the thought because the idea of living in the glass house is already this kind of exhibitionism and you kind of. Doing these surrealist moves into the glass bed and the sheets. The glass sheet I always thought was almost like a microscope slide or something. Like it has this inversion of the softness of the bed. But the idea that whoever he is is going to become apparent by the traces that are made into the sheet. That seemed to me like it was an exhibitionism that was visible from the outside to others. And so to say that sooner or later it will appear to me etched by a diamond. That recasts it slightly, that sense remains, but then it includes his own self-reflection or a kind of recursive aspect to the investigation that I was like, oh, it's so surgical, but also just slightly.

Mark Polizzotti: But no, I don't, I should have brought the French with me. But what I would say is that that insertion wouldn't be mine, it would be his. In other words, I think it might've been left out the first time.

Jarrett Earnest: I believe it. I believe that it sounded better to Richard Howard to just say where I, who I am would be etched like a diamond.

Mark Polizzotti: I think there are times when Howard follows Breton's syntax a little too closely and the result is that things that you can get away with in French become very hard to follow in English. My job as a translator, I've always felt, is to translate not only verbally, but culturally, meaning that things, that a French audience of Breton time would have been able to follow more easily because of the because of their familiarity with the language and the way it works and French thought and the way that, you know, all of that. I need to translate as well, that sense of comprehensibility. And so I was very conscious of everything that he was saying and how he was saying it and the order in which he was. But sometimes it meant that I had to move things around a little bit, which is a little different from the point you were just making about the, the for me, but especially in this first section, which does You know, I think Breton was sort of working his way into the book. So it can be a little bit denser than the story once it really takes off. And there were a lot of cases where I really had to sort of sit there and look at the French and just say, you know, what is it exactly that you're trying to say? Like, what does it, you, I need to feel it myself. In English, I realized that, you know, if I take this and move this a little bit here, move that a little bit there, you now shifting it around a little bit, actually that your thought is coming through more clearly. So one could say that in that regard, if you want to dredge up the old, you know, faithful unfaithful debate and translation in that regardless, I'm being maybe unfaethful to Bratall. I think I'm more faithful because what I'm actually doing is helping a reader of 2025 understand what this man of 1925 was trying to And, you know, the thing is for all of his, you know, surrealism and the cookiness and everything else one associates with him, he wanted to be understood, you, know, he had a philosophical point to make this book is really, as I said, it's a manifesto of, of what surrealist thinking was at the moment and his polemics that sort of bubble up about the novel. And, and you know I think that that's monstrous and his review of people like Victor Hugo and we smalls and, and the Kiriko and some of the others in the first section are really kind of setting the age to explain. Why is it that the story of Nadja is important? You know, this is not just table. It's not just dressing. It's actually a really key part of the tale, because if you don't understand the ground that he is clearing for that story, the story itself is just going to be, you know, I mean, it's cool. It's interesting. It's sort of a heartbreaking little romance or whatever it might be. But the real import of it, the reason that he was so fascinated by her, the reason that we're still reading this book a hundred and something years later is that it participated so much. What I consider to be the real fundamental core of surrealism, which was these gatherings of forces that made life so much richer than what daily life was offering you.

Jarrett Earnest: Also, it's a short book and the section that deals explicitly with Nadja is quite short. Just a little stretch in the middle with like a long introduction and then a tail.

Mark Polizzotti: But she herself has such a strong presence that you tend to think of it as being all about Nadja all the time. And in fact, you're right, the book isn't three parts. The first part being that philosophical, you know, the preamble where he sort of goes through various considerations and then follows that up with a series of vignettes from his own life, which are meant to sort of illustrate that these moments of chance and, you know, marvelous occurrence and various things, how he met certain people who became important to him. He even kind of goes back. It's, it's interesting in the revised edition that he did in the 1960s, which I included those snippets as part of the notes at the end of the book so that you could see what the differences were. There are a couple of cases where he goes back and says, like, what was actually thinking to highlight this story? There's one in particular of this woman that he meets in a flea market and is fascinated by her. She's a young working class poet. She gives him a couple pages of manuscript of her poems. And he sort of describes it as this kind of. Revelation and oracle and, and ends the thing by saying her name was funny business. And then he's got a footnote in the 1963 edition saying, what was I actually expecting here? Because I think clearly what he was expecting was that this was going to become a major light of surrealism. And we would see, you know, it was like, this was Pablo Picasso. I was like ah, okay. Well, nothing happened. You know, the, the woman, I mean, she, unfortunately she was a political militant. She met a tragic end. She was arrested by the Gestapo during the war, during the occupation and sent to a concentration camp and was killed. And her career such as it was really had to do more with political militancy. She never became a poet. She never published. So you could tell that when he wrote this book in 1928, he had this expectation that by sort of building her up, she would fulfill that promise and people reading the book in the future would say, wow, you know, he met Fanny Buznos back when she was just Fanny, you know, didn't happen. So he, you, you left it, but he sort of has to come back and say, okay, not everything that I thought was going to be a big deal was a big deal.

Jarrett Earnest: Wow, so funny. What's the next section you've isolated to talk about? I think that was such a good explanation of like how the book is structured.

Mark Polizzotti: Well, actually I'll do one right toward the end. And again, I, I say this with all love and respect, but this is where sometimes Howard could be a little bit fast in his reading. So what happened was Breton wrote the first two thirds of the book, which is the, the introduction part, the story of Nadja, and then he, uh, summer ends. He wrote it over the summer in Brittany, comes back to Paris. It's September. He stops, he reads what he's got to his friends. They all think it's great, doesn't that, but he's still got this. Last part that he has to write, which he's sort of thinking of as going to be a meditation on beauty and, you know, how it sort of relates to all of this. And then he meets this woman and she's the one who really does break up his marriage and he has this passionate affair with her that goes on for several years and is totally tumultuous and, cause all sorts of upheavals. And the thing is that they got together because of the manuscript of because he was talking to a publisher who wanted to publish it. Uh, he had this girlfriend who was interested in reading the manuscript. And then she wanted to meet the author because she was so fascinated by it. So they set up a dinner and kaboom. And that was the next thing you know, the two of them, Breton, Suzanne Musar running off to the south of France together. But Suzanne wanted more stability in a relationship that Breton can offer her. He hesitated about leaving his wife. He hesitating about all these various things. And so she basically goes back to the first guy and so the last part of the book was written in that situation. Where he's sort of grappling with the idea of, you know, I met this woman, I had her, I lost her, will I ever see her again? This isn't the other thing, but he says at one point, um,

Jarrett Earnest: Nadja.

Mark Polizzotti: Does not know that does not have the other we're going to have a lot of knowledge that i have a loss

Jarrett Earnest: I had her, I lost her. Oh wait, that was not her. It's written in the second person.

Mark Polizzotti: He calls her you.

Jarrett Earnest: But you don't know who is being addressed.

Mark Polizzotti: Yeah, exactly. I mean, we do now, but we like as a scholar.

Jarrett Earnest: Like as a scholar, like within the text of the book.

Mark Polizzotti: No, he doesn't name her, he says you. He addresses her directly. So just you as who she is. So he's sort of looking back over what he's already written and he's saying, if I were to reread the story with the patient and somehow disinterested eye, I would be sure to have, I hardly know to be faithful to my present sense of myself, what I would leave standing. I do not insist upon knowing. I prefer thinking that from the end of August, the date of her first appearance, meaning you, to the end December. When the story finding me bent beneath the burden of infinitely greater emotion detaches itself from me and begins to alarm me, I have lived badly or well as one can and the hopes you left me, et cetera, et, cetera, et cetera. That's, that's the Richard Howard. Now, in fact, that entire section hinges in his translation on a misreading. Um, ouch. Yes, we love Richard Howard, um, so in my translation. If I were to reread the story with the patient and somewhat disinterested eye that I'm sure I'd have, I don't know how much of it I'd let stand, given how I currently feel about myself. I do not wish to know. I prefer to think that between the end of August, when I stopped writing it, and the end of December, when the story finding me bent under the weight of an infinitely greater emotion tears loose, et cetera, et cetera. So he says, end of of August the moment of her appearance. He misreads interruption for eruption. So he's thinking And I could see it, you know, eruptions. What does that mean? Well, it means that the eruption of this woman in Breton's life. But in fact, what Breton says is interruption. In other words, the end of August, when I stopped writing this and now all these things have happened to me. So you can't make sense of that passage. If you misfollow what's going on there.

Jarrett Earnest: And of course it's thematized, that section is thematised as him reflecting on that interval. Like that's the point of that.

Mark Polizzotti: It's now December since the end of August, when he came back to Paris and stopped writing the book for a moment, all these things have happened, which basically threw him off track. He's had this tumultuous affair that as far as he knows might never continue, even though he's still desperately in love with this woman, as it happens, it went on for another two years, but that's what he's talking about is, you know, is, is how I have changed. And he then is able to relate that to the influence also of his relationship with Nadja and he sort of sees her in a way as a kind of a beacon. As she was the precursor who then led him to this next woman, which of course was a little bit of magical thinking that was very much Bertone's specialty.

Jarrett Earnest: So much of the scholarship and the discourse, especially lately around thinking back of historical surrealism has to do with the role of women and the role women artists and the figure of the woman. And there's an aspect, I mean, part of what is my perverse attachment to this book and to Breton is it's like, okay, this guy was a misogynist, homophobic and an extraordinarily brilliant. Mind and poet, and I can deal with that complexity. But the premise itself, it's hard when you explain it to someone that it's like, okay, he is using this woman's mental illness as a tool to upend his experience of reality. It feels inherently misogynist or at least in a certain level of reduction. And I wanna know how you, obviously we're two men here talking about this, but How you have. Understood that and grappled with that aspect of the...

Mark Polizzotti: Yeah. I mean, the question of women in surrealism and women relating to the Surrealist movement is really one of the most interesting ones and it's one of most complex and difficult to deal with because on the one hand, there's no question, it was mostly male dominated, no question about that. Breton certainly was homophobic, which to me, as with any targeting of someone who's the other, any othering to me really comes down to fear and threat.

Jarrett Earnest: Yeah, yeah, he's scared. He's gay.

Mark Polizzotti: Uh, you know, there's something to be said for that, given some of his, some of his past.

Jarrett Earnest: It's very, very passionate platonic male relationship.

Mark Polizzotti: Yes, yes, very close. You know, so obviously there was some insecurity there. As far as women go, he had a pretty ambivalent relationship with them, partly again, not to be too Freudian, but because of his mother, who he really hated. He resented the strictures that she put on him. She resented who she was. He didn't respect her. He doesn't like her. Somebody talked about later in life, Breton came across this novel by a young French writer who talks about this awful mother that he grew up with a kind of memoir. And brothers are like, that's me. That's my mother. That's exactly it. You know, so he was much closer to his father who was an easier guy to get along with. So you've got these really ambivalent feelings toward women because on the other hand, he sort of idealized them. He venerated them. He put them on a pedestal. There was this kind of overestimation of what female power and a woman's closer relationship with nature. I mean, it's sort of cliche, which I think he really felt was empowering and generating, but the thing that women were. Not allowed to do was to be creative agents in their own right, you know, to have that sort of independence. So there was a great power in being female, but it was a power that, in his view, it was power that was essentially dependent on some kind of relationship with a man, relationship in the amorous sense or relationship in a more philosophical sense. But there was kind of a co-dependence there. And so it's easy to sort of see how frustrating it would be. Women who were attracted to the movement because of what it promised, which was, you know, a more liberating form of existence than what French bourgeois society was offering with mother and child and all that stuff. But once you got there, a lot of them felt like it wasn't really that different because it was still the guys who kind of ran the roost and women were idealized but not really empowered in the sense of becoming their own creative agents. Now, there are some who did manage to do that. There was Leonora Carrington, there was Dorothea Tanning, there was Merit Oppenheim. I mean, there were Romelia Osvaldo. I mean there were a number of women who were associated with the movement and who in fact were able to express themselves quite creatively. Sometimes because they had to leave the movement first. Sometimes did manage to have a presence within it. Joyce Malsour was a poet of the later generation who was very involved with the day-to-day life of the movement. Some of the others as well. So it's not an easy question to answer. I talk about it in the book that I recently published about surrealism called Why Surrealism Matters, there's a whole chapter devoted to women and surrealism. And, you know, what I try to do is strike a balance between the very understandable anger and frustration that some women had towards surrealism, toward the men, toward the movement, some of the really stupid things that the surrealist men said. And at the same time, people like Merit Oppenheim or Tanning, you know, coming back and saying, look, on the one hand, yes, there was a kind of a a sexist misogynist quality, but it also did offer us opportunities that nowhere else was offering and it did offer us an encouragement and that Britell himself could be quite encouraging of us as artists. So it's really neither one nor the other. I don't think you can take, you know, the hardline position that surrealism was the best thing to ever happen to women artists, you know ever, which is obviously not true. But at the same time, I think it's, it's dangerous to take the position that there were all a bunch of machos and they kept the women down. I think that the truth is sort of very slippery between those two.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, you make the point in that chapter that the proportion of women artists within surrealism was much greater than in any other art movement.

Mark Polizzotti: And, and I'm not the one to point that out. Actually, that was one of the, um, women surrealists, uh, women named Penelope Rosemont, who sort of makes that point. Penelopi Rosemount was, uh she and her husband, uh Franklin Rosemond were sort of the spearheads of the Chicago Surrealist group. They met Breton when they were two hippie kids in the 1960s over in Paris, um and were completely absorbed by the movement and fascinated by it. And they came back and they started a Chicago branch essentially, which in some ways is still going on.

Jarrett Earnest: What's so beautiful about that story is it highlights the true, probably the true measure of the importance of surrealism is that as an idea, as a set of attitudes, as an approach to being, many, many people were really opened up in their creative work by doing it, especially a lot of extremely important women artists.

Mark Polizzotti: Yeah. And I think that this is where it's important to draw a bit of a distinction between surrealism as a concept or surrealism, as a vision, and surrealism as a group with a daily practice, because what was set afoot, what was described, what comes out in the writings by surrealism A set of possibilities is valid and ongoing. Where we sometimes get into trouble is when we try to conflate that with the way it actually operated on a day-to-day basis, when you have just human beings with their flaws doing what they're trying to do and sometimes it works and sometimes they just come off as being rather ridiculous or oppressive or not living up to the ideals. But again, as you say, it's the contradictions that make it interesting.

Jarrett Earnest: Kind of on that note, I was thinking about that when reading, I think particularly because of how the introduction sort of sets the stage is like, what are we, how is Naj actually functioning in this text? And interestingly, there's a way in which he's so outside of her, he doesn't presume to know her inner life or things about her or secrets about her, even to the extent of like wanting her diary, like she's a very complicated character who has a huge amount of agency. And I actually had one of the, I would say one of best mornings I had in a long time where I read the whole book out loud to myself because I wanted to hear the voice. I wanted it to hear how it worked. And, I found your translation to be funnier than I had remembered. I mean the whole there's that section where he's recounting the play, is it called the damned? What's it called? The deranged. I mean, that's hysterical. And it's also like such a move that I think of as such a later avant-garde gesture to just retell, it's like Kathy Acker or like whatever. It's like retelling the plot of this play and it's so funny. And then you go into this dated set of accounts of him having this thing with Nadja. And then there's a break in the narrative and he gets into this section where he's reflecting on his own behavior toward Nadja. Within the narrative of the book itself, he says, well, she's been committed into an asylum. And then it peels into this very powerful condemnation of psychiatry as an undertaking, as an institution, which I was like, really it's very moving. And then the end of that section, I found increasingly moving. And it's like the kind of veneer of the case study starts to give away. And at the end of it, there was a section where he's reflecting on the meaning of Nadja and her own, how we should think about her experience. And I just wanna read it sort of into the record as it were, because I have to admit, when I got to this point in the book, I burst into tears. I was really sobbing. And this is a class thing too, he's where he's reflecting on all the things Nadja had against her and he said, well, if you're rich and you go in insane asylum, you get treated a certain way, right? You could get out of it. And he says, but Nadja was poor, which in our time is enough to condemn her the moment she dares to be not entirely in conformity with the imbecilic code of good sense and good behavior. And she was alone. Sometimes it's terrible to be so alone. You're my only friends. She told my wife over the phone the last time In the end her strength and her weakness as one can be weak Was her belief in an idea she'd always held but in which I too readily encouraged her Helped her to give it primacy over any other The idea that freedom acquired here on earth at the cost of a thousand difficult sacrifices Demands that we enjoy it unreservedly and without any practical considerations in the time we have it. The human emancipation, conceived in its simplest revolutionary form, which is nonetheless human emanciation in every respect, that is, according to each person's means, remains the only cause worth serving. Nadja was born to serve it, if only by demonstrating that every individual must foment a private conspiracy, which doesn't exist solely in the imagination and which it would be wise just from the standpoint of knowledge to take into account, but also and much more dangerously by passing her head than her arm through the bars of logic that most hateful of prisons which this knowledge has pulled apart. I mean. It's gorgeous. It is so, so painful.

Mark Polizzotti: I mean to, I mean, but so beautiful. It is, because what he's really saying is he's acknowledging that he helped get her there, that he helped push her there. He sort of defends himself against it to some extent. I believe him when he says that he didn't realize how far he was pushing her or that this would be the outcome. But at the same time, you know, Breton was a former medical student. He'd certainly seen a number of patients during the war with what we would call mental disturbances. So. You have to sort of weigh it up and down, but I do think that there was a lot of guilt on his part about how she ended up. There was guilt about the fact that he couldn't really help her out at a certain point, that the need was just too great, you know, he gave her money when he could, but as I said, he, he was himself was not wealthy by any stretch, so we'd help her with the rent when he couldn, or he sold a painting that he told his wife. Well, you, I kind of needed the money to give her. And I mean, he's very open about this whole, this is none of this was clandestine he wrote to his wife in great detail. About these various things. And one of them was saying, well, the, the absence of that painting on the wall is, you know, much more eloquent than the painting itself, because of what it went to help out with, but you know, in the final account, he couldn't be the person that in her life, that she wanted him to be in her life, which is essentially a, a really committed life partner. That just wasn't, this wasn't in the cards. So when he did find out about what happened to her, I think it really stung deep with him and the, you're right, the emotion. That he puts into that passage first as he's castigating the psychiatric profession and its way of going about, you know, as he says, they create lunatics and then say the silo is the way that they create criminals and prisons. And then going on about, who Naja was and maybe his role and kind of encouraging her down a path that ultimately was, was destructive, although he feels he didn't recognize it as such. There's a lot of feeling there, you know, and I think it is one of the strongest passages of the book. You know the fact is again something that the reader wouldn't necessarily know, but that we know since, is that he made several attempts during the course of his life to find out about what had happened to her. And there's some correspondence that was only recently unearthed, I mean, really recently unearthed, someone I think from maybe the first hospital she'd been committed to or something like that, a kind of a social worker who worked at St. Anne, where he was asking, do you have any records? You know, like what happened to or, and you know, he was able to find out a couple of things, but of course, by that time, Nanja was long dead. You allude to it at the end of the video.

Jarrett Earnest: End of the introduction, but I would love to know more that she read the manuscript?

Mark Polizzotti: I know. I don't think she ever quite knew about this book. What she read were his notes about her. So in the book, there is the sense that he will write a book about her and she even says, you know, you write a boogie, write a novel about me, this and that. And so that part of it was, you know was kind of understood between the two of them. And he did ask for her diaries with the intention of actually publishing them. In fact, there's this one little announcement in one of the Surrealist magazines of the time that sort of announces a book of drawings and writings by Leona D. Leona was her real first name, Leona Delcourt. And so that's actually the closest we come before the revelation of her real name to seeing some kind of an acknowledgement of who she was. And it never happened because he, I think he just felt disappointed by them. Like, you know, her jottings to herself and the things that she would say to him that had him so hooked were, there was a big difference between the two of them. And she even says in her letters, my little kinshinsink writings were. Obviously not enough for you, you know. So the other thing that she did see is some notes that he had taken on them because Breton, first of all, he had a prodigious memory. So he retained a lot of their conversations together, which is how he's able to report them. But also basically from the moment that they stopped seeing each other, he was writing stuff down and keeping notes with an eye towards at some point doing this book. And when he showed them to her, she was absolutely outraged because his version of her And of their relationship and her version of their relationship were two very different things. I think she saw it really as a great love story. And for him, it was, it was a case study.

Jarrett Earnest: I guess the final thing I'd want to ask is like we're seeing across the world this kind of re-engagement with the anniversary of surrealism, the historical surrealism the expanded sense of surrealism and so I'm curious you know almost a hundred years later how you think people might regard this text and the legacy of it and its role in what surrealism might mean for us now.

Mark Polizzotti: I mean, this text in particular, I think it's interesting in a number of ways. It could be problematic in some ways, because I think we think of things differently. And I mean that in a, in a good sense. So the attitude toward relationships, the attitude toward women, you know, it's not to say that it's retrograde in Breton. I don't think it is, but I think that there are certain things that maybe in 1928 would not have raised eyebrows quite as much as they would today. That said, I would hope that that would not be an impediment to people being able to understand and enjoy and take advantage of the really wonderful messages that are coming through here in the portraits. The thing is, and you alluded to this before, one of the things that he really manages to do in this book is not only paint a portrait of sort of surrealist way of living, but of a person. And Nanja comes through as this really engaging, living, breathing person with a real personality. I mean, I could hear her voice. And one of the things that I was very careful about when I was translating this is that voice that I hearing in my head in French, I wanted that the voice to be the same thing that I heard in English, because I wanted an English reader to be able to understand like what it is that he would have found so fascinating and that we find so fascinating and the reason that this book is still being read a hundred years later, and it is heartening to me to see people saying. Basically that, you know, I was, I read this book and I was blown away by it. I just discovered this book or I'd overheard, always heard about it and now I just read it and it was incredible. You know, so I think that, that there are things that we need to acknowledge and that I do try to acknowledge in the introduction to the book. You know it's not as simple as it might've seemed in 1928 when the book was first published, but I don't think that that invalidates what's going on here. I think what Breton was presenting is really ultimately an elevating portrait of this woman and of this way of living. The fact that the story has a tragic end and the fact that he ultimately couldn't be what, what she wanted him to be for her is in a way, hesitate to say almost secondary, but it's important, but it's not the whole story. Um, I think we need to be complex in our reading of this book.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, at the very beginning when you were talking about the Paris that he describes and the Paris remained a little bit when you are there and you know, when I talked about going to Paris that time, it was before I had a smartphone, it before maps, I mean I had like a physical map of Paris and it meant that you just had to wander around and get lost and like, oh, find some cool bar and like. See things in your daily life that you didn't know what it was. And those are aspects of our present tech saturated reality that are increasingly rare, rubbing up against not knowing, but with a kind of urgency where you're like, I kind of need to get somewhere.

Mark Polizzotti: And I don't know how to do it. Well, there's that, but I think also just that sense of being there on your own, allowing yourself to wander. I mean, the thing is with the tech saturation on the one hand, where we've become so used to, and I'm, you know, I include myself in this, I'm not, not any different from anyone else, you now I use my GPS when I'm driving somewhere, whatever it is, but isn't it wonderful to just get in the car or walk out onto the street and kind of head somewhere without necessarily knowing where you're going and leaving yourself open to chance. The other thing is that cities in particular, or the major Western cities, uh, the capitals have become so corporatized. Uh, you know, we certainly see it here in New York. We see, I see it in Paris. I mean, the difference between when I was first in Paris in the 1970s and now is, is sadly quite distinct, just the way wonderful buildings have been knocked down and replaced with things that are much less interesting, but even, you now, not to sound like one of those grumpy old people who's like, you know, it used to be better in my day. It's the whole character is it just feels less. Conducive to that sort of open-ended wandering that Breton was trying to promote. And so if there's a message in this book, it's, you know, it not, it is not too late. I think that it is possible to try to recapture that. It's not maybe as easy as it used to be, where there were these funny little weird corners and things that one could discover, but there's still, there still are things here or there or anywhere.

Jarrett Earnest: It makes me feel like this book is a kind of beacon towards a kind of freedom in your life that is more urgent than ever. And it's so valuable to have some form to these thoughts where you can measure your own experience against it and say, okay, is this the way things are working now? It's not the way they have to be. And how could I do it and what would be the benefit?

Mark Polizzotti: Yeah. And I think it's important to remember that French society at the time was much more normative than we might be used to now. We've lived through the 1960s, we've lived through like various upheavals, various shifts in attitudes and societal expectations. And so I think that there are things that we sort of take for granted that you would not have been able to take for granted back when this book was originally written, now that I feel we're in a place where we're sort of pushing back toward that sense of normativity and conformity and everything else. It becomes all the more urgent for us to read a book like this, because unfortunately we're getting to a place that is just as oppressive and just as normative as it might've been in daily life in Paris at the time. So, you know, I think, I think the message absolutely stands of nausea and of surrealism in general.

Jarrett Earnest: Next week's episode of Private Life will feature a reading from Mark Pulitzati's translation of André Breton's Nadja. You can buy your own copy from NYRB.com or from your favorite bookseller. Private Life is hosted and produced by me, Jared Ernest, along with associate producer Luna Hayes-Dean. The audio is edited and produced Tyler Hill. The music is by Matthew McCoyne, and it is a production of the New York Review.