Robert Desnos

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Robert Desnos (4 July 1900-8 June 1945), was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the surrealistic movement of his day.

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[edit] Biography

Robert Desnos was a son of a café owner. He was born in Paris on 4 July 1900. Desnos attended commercial college, and started work as a clerk. After that he worked as a literary columnist for the newspaper Paris-Soir.

Desnos’ poems were first published in 1917 in La Tribune des Jeunes (Youth's Tribune) and in 1919 in the avant-garde review, Le Trait d’union (The hyphen), and also the same year in the Dadaist magazine Littérature. In 1922 he published his first book, a collection of surrealistic aphorisms, with the title Rrose Selavy (based upon the name (pseudonym) of the popular French artist Marcel Duchamp).

In 1919, he met the poet Benjamin Péret who actually introduced him to the Paris Dada group and André Breton, with whom he soon became a friend. While working as a literary columnist for Paris-Soir, Desnos was an active member of the Surrealist group and developed a particular talent for “automatic writing”. He, together with writers such as Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, would form the literary vanguard of surrealism. But although he was praised by Breton in his 1924 Manifeste du Surréalisme for being the movement’s "prophet", Desnos disagreed with Surrealism’s involvement in communist politics, which caused a rift between him and Breton. Desnos continued work as a columnist.

In 1926 he composed The Night of Loveless Nights, a lyric poem dealing with solitude curiously written in classic quatrains, which makes it more like Baudelaire than Breton. Desnos fell in love with Yvonne George, a singer whose obsessed fans made his love impossible. He wrote several poems for her, as well as a surrealist novel La liberté ou l'amour! (1927).

By 1929, Breton definitively condemned Desnos, who in turn joined Georges Bataille and Documents, as one of the authors to sign "Un Cadavre" (A cadaver) attacking “le boeuf Breton” (the ox Breton). He wrote articles on “Modern Imagery”, “Avant-garde Cinema” (1929, issue 7), “Pygmalion and the Sphinx” (1930, issue 1), and Sergei M. Eisenstein, the Soviet filmmaker, on his film titled The General Line (1930, issue 4).

His career in radio began in 1932 with a show dedicated to Fantomas. During this time, he became friends with Picasso, Hemingway, Artaud and John Dos Passos; published many critical reviews on jazz and cinema; and became increasingly involved in politics. He wrote for many periodicals, including Littérature, La Révolution surréaliste, and Variétés. Besides his numerous collections of poems, he published three novels, Deuil pour deuil (1924), La Liberté ou l’amour! (1927), and Le vin est tiré (1943), a play La Place De La' Etoile, (1928; revised 1944) and a film script, L' Etoile de mer (1928), which was directed by Man Ray that same year.

During World War II, Desnos was an active member of the French Résistance, often publishing under pseudonyms, and was arrested by the Gestapo on 22 February 1944. He was first deported to the Nazi German concentration camps of Auschwitz in occupied Poland, then Buchenwald, Flossenburg in Germany and finally to Terezín (Theresienstadt) in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1945, where he died from typhoid, only weeks after the camp’s liberation. He wrote poems during his imprisonment which were accidentally destroyed following his death.

He was married to Youki Desnos, formerly Lucie Badoud, nicknamed "Youki" ("snow") by her lover Tsuguharu Foujita before she left him for Desnos. Desnos wrote several poems about Youki. One of his most famous poems is "Letter to Youki," written after his arrest.

He is buried at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.

Desnos's poetry has been set to music by a number of composers, including Witold Lutosławski with Les Espaces du Sommeil (1975) and Chantefleurs et Chantefables (1991), Francis Poulenc (Dernier poème, 1956) and Henri Dutilleux with Le Temps l'Horloge (2007). Carolyn Forché has translated his poetry and names Desnos as a significant influence on her own work.

[edit] Works include

  • Deuil pour deuil (1924) /Grief for Grief/
  • La Liberté ou l’amour! (1927) /Liberty or Love/
  • Corps et biens (1930) /Body's fine/
  • État de veille (1943) /Waking/
  • Le vin est tiré (1943) /The wine is drawn/

[edit] Film


[edit] References

Waldberg, Patrick. Surrealism. Thames and Hudson, 1965.

Durozi, Gerard. The History of the Surrealist Movement. University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Pollizzotti, Mark. Revolution of the Mind. Da Capo, 1997

Dada and Surrealist Film. Edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli. MIT Press, 1996.

Modern Frech Theatre. Edied & translated by Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth. E.P. Dutton, 1966

Desnos, Robert. Liberty or Love. Atlas Press, 1993


[edit] External links