ii A FOREIGN MIRROR: INTERTEXTS WITH SURREALISM IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY U. S. POETRIES A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Nick Moudry January, 2012 Examining Committee Members: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Advisory Chair, English Lawrence Venuti, English Jena Osman, English Alan C. Braddock, External Member, Art History iii © Copyright 2012 by Nick Moudry All Rights Reserved € iv ABSTRACT In the latter half of the twentieth-century, fewer U. S. poets translated foreign poetry than their modernist predecessors. The scope of their translation projects correspondingly narrowed. Gone, for example, were projects like Ezra Pound’s reaching back to thirteenth- century Italy to see how U. S. poets could push forward. Instead, translations of European and Latin American modernism prevailed. Often, multiple translations of the same author were produced by different translators at the expense of presenting a more well-rounded vision of national literatures. Of these translations, a surprisingly large number were of poets who were either loosely or explicitly connected to surrealism as a literary movement. My dissertation locates this explosion of interest in surrealism as an attraction to the surrealist emphasis on reconciling binaries. This emphasis allows American poets a convenient frame through which to confront the difficult questions of place and nation that arise as the U. S. position in the field of world literature shifts from periphery to core. Previous researchers have traced the history of surrealism’s early reception in the United States, but these studies tend to not only focus on the movement’s influence on American art, but also stop shortly after surrealist expatriates returned to Europe following WWII. My dissertation extends these approaches both by bringing the conversation up to the present and by examining the key role that translation and other forms of rewriting play in mediating the relationship between surrealism and American audiences. As surrealism enters the U. S. literary system, the transformed product is often not what one might expect. U. S. rewritings of surrealist literature are primarily carried out by poets and critics whose v fundamental interest in the movement lies in finding a foreign mirror for their own aesthetic or ideological preoccupations. This in turn provokes the development of a strand of surrealist-influenced writing whose aims and goals are vastly different from those of the movement’s founders. The first chapter, “What is Surrealism?,” relays three separate histories that intertwine in the understanding of surrealism in the American context. First, the story of the competing definitions of surrealism by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), who is generally credited with inventing the term, and André Breton (1896-1966), the self-proclaimed leader of surrealism as a literary movement. The discrepancy between their definitions illustrates that the cultural significance attached to the term was in flux from its very inception. This dispute sets the stage for the U. S. reception of the movement, in which the division is generally figured as a competition between “orthodox” and “dissident” surrealisms. I then turn to the American context to examine the anthologizing of surrealism, tracing a history from Michael Benedikt’s The Poetry of Surrealism: An Anthology (1974), the first English- language anthology of surrealist poetry, to Mary Ann Caws’ more recent Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology (2001) to argue that the U. S. conception of surrealism has gradually transformed from a francocentric, male-dominated interpretation to a distinct favoring of dissident figures who employ surrealist techniques to challenge prevailing cultural attitudes toward such issues as race and gender. This shift is consistent with the trajectory of U. S. criticism of the movement, with earlier works rehashing the orthodox-dissident debate and more recent works extolling the virtues of surrealism as a lyric mode highly suited for the development of a poetics of social and institutional critique. The final three chapters present case studies of American poets who engaged in extended intertextual relationships with specific foreign works via the acts of translation or vi adaptation. When taken together, their work constitutes a mini-narrative of the larger structure of twentieth-century U. S. literature’s changing position in the field of world literature and illustrates how that change altered U. S. poet-translators’ stance toward foreign works. The third chapter, “William Carlos Williams: Translation in the American Grain,” is a reading of William Carlos Williams’ translation of Philippe Soupault’s surrealist novel Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (1929), one of the earliest book-length translations of surrealist literature available in English. This translation is rarely mentioned in critical discussions of Williams’ oeuvre, largely because it does not readily conform to the prevailing critical emphasis on Williams’ desire to cultivate an “American idiom” distinct from English literary tradition. In comparing Williams’ translation of Les Dernières Nuits de Paris with his own A Novelette (1932), which he was writing at the same time as the translation, I find aesthetic and ideological correlations that suggest Soupault’s novel was a direct influence on A Novelette. At this point in his career, Williams’ conception of the American idiom was much less focused on opposing English literary tradition than it was—much like the country itself—with constantly expanding and reimagining itself as it accommodates foreign influx. As the United States rises to the status as a major player in the field of world literature, however, and Williams’ theory of the “American idiom” becomes codified, his attitude toward foreign literature becomes increasingly xenophobic, causing him to revise and distance himself from his earlier statements on translation. A major subtext to Williams’ translation strategy is the desire to place himself among an international cadre of likeminded artists. This desire is explored even further in chapter four, “Clayton Eshleman: Translation as Spiritual Rebirth.” As the century progressed, poet- translators like Eshleman found themselves with the ability to anoint foreign writers by translating their work into English. Although Eshleman is cognizant of the colonizing power vii this situation presents, his interest in surrealism and choice of source texts nonetheless rests on the desire to inhabit the subject positions of authors whose lives were antithetical to the conservative aura of his mid-century suburban upbringing. By examining the translations and statements on translation published by Eshleman in his literary journal Caterpillar (1967- 1973), I find that Eshleman and his cohorts use translation to build an alternative tradition for their own work. In his poem “The Book of Yorunomado” (1964), Eshleman figures the act of translation as a battle between master and apprentice in which the translator must kill the translated in order to emerge as a mature artist. The final chapter, “‘I see you better than you do / Because I’m foreign’: Alice Notley’s Désamère (1995),” reads Notley’s appropriation of the French surrealist Robert Desnos (1900-1945) as a form of adaptation, with the inevitable losses and gains that accompany such an act. The book begins as a conversation between Desnos and a female character named Amère, a stand-in for the author whose name is metonymically linked to the United States of America. Throughout the course of the book, the two fuse into a figure named Désamère, whose subjectivity can be read as an allegory for the cross-cultural and transhistorical bond created in that fusion. Notley presents this bond as solution to the social problems confronted in the book: U. S. cultural and political imperialism, the horrors of the Vietnam and Gulf wars, impending environmental disaster, and gender conflict in contemporary U. S. culture. In adopting stylistic and thematic conceits from Desnos, Notley not only comments on the previously mentioned issues, but she also criticizes the idealized portrayal of women in the work of Desnos and his surrealist cohorts. Notley’s adaptation in the service of ideological critique is ultimately a more progressive model of U. S. relations to foreign literary works than the appropriation for the sake of psychological or aesthetic gain put forth by poets like Eshleman. viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I would like to thank David Lenson at the University of Massachusetts– Amherst for encouraging my interest in translation and for supervising my translation of a selection of poems by Tristan Tzara, a project that eventually blossomed into my version of Tzara’s Twenty-Five and One Poems (2004). I would also like to thank Peter Gizzi, my thesis advisor at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, for encouraging me to continue my studies and pursue a Ph.D. in American literature. It is impossible to express sufficient gratitude to my dissertation committee at Temple University—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Lawrence Venuti, and Jena Osman—for their careful and consistent guidance in shaping this product. I hope I can take a small step in that direction by saying that I would be hard pressed to find a better committee at any institution. I would also like to thank the following friends and writers whose conversations about surrealism and American poetry influenced the writing of this book in ways that they might not even be cognizant of: Eric Baus, Andrew Joron, George Kalamaras, John Olson, G. C. Waldrep, and John Yau. I would like to thank the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for the Literature Fellowship that allowed me to focus on the early stages of writing this manuscript, the Center for the Humanities at Temple for the Senior Doctoral Fellowship that supported the middle stages of the writing of this dissertation, and all of the 2009-2010 CHAT fellows— especially Oliver Gaycken and Peter Logan—for their incisive comments on an early draft of the third chapter and for being such exemplary models of scholars in their various fields.