Nadja - Paperback

by André Breton (Author), Mark Polizzotti (Translator), Mark Polizzotti (Introduction by)

A new translation of one of the defining works of the French surrealist movement, an energetic autobiographical novel that is at once both a tumultuous romance story and an initiation into the surrealism of everyday life.

In Paris, during the fall of 1926, André Breton met a young woman from the provinces who called herself Nadja because, she said, "in Russian it's the beginning of the word for hope, and because it's only the beginning." Their love affair was brief, intense, and intensely self-conscious. They both talked exuberantly of the book that Breton would make out of their days and nights. And indeed a year later (after Nadja was institutionalized and Breton had moved on to other love affairs) he began to write Nadja--a book of memory and analysis taking its cue in part from Freud's case studies, but also a book of ingeniously intercut images, drawing on Surrealist ideas to portray a soul whose very way of being approaches, in Breton's words, "the extreme limit of the Surrealist aspiration."

In this, the first new translation of Nadja in more than sixty years, Mark Polizzotti captures the youthful excitement, the abiding strangeness, and above all the freshness of Breton's prose. He also provides an illuminating introduction about the fate of the real Nadja, whose identity remained jealously guarded until the twenty-first century.

A gripping tale of infatuation and a meditation on the surrealism of everyday life, Nadja is still a thing of convulsive beauty, impossible to pin or put down, a precursor to works of Julien Gracq, Julio Cortázar, and W.G. Sebald.

This edition of Nadja contains 44 images, which Breton "conceived from the outset as an integral element of the narrative," as Mark Polizzotti writes in his introduction.

Author Biography

André Breton (1896-1966), the son of a Norman policeman and a seamstress, studied medicine in Paris and was drafted to serve in World War I in 1915. While working on a neurological ward, he met Jacques Vaché, a devotee of Alfred Jarry, and Vaché's rebellious spirit and suicide at the age of twenty-three would powerfully shape Breton's sensibility. Thanks to the auspices of Paul Valéry, Breton worked as an assistant to Marcel Proust, and in 1919, along with Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, he founded the journal Littérature. The Magnetic Fields, the first book of automatic writing (published by NYRB Poets), appeared in 1920, and in 1924, having broken with Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists, Breton issued the Manifesto of Surrealism. Among his other major works are Anthology of Black Humor, Mad Love, and Surrealism and Painting.

Mark Polizzotti has translated more than sixty books from the French, including Arthur Rimbaud's The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings (NYRB Poets) and Jean Echenoz's Command Performance (NYRB Classics), and is the author of thirteen books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, Why Surrealism Matters, and Jump Cuts: Essays. He lives in New York.