Description: 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.Review Quotes: "The most remarkable of [Breton's] sorceresses is Nadja. She predicts the future; she conjures up words and images that spring to her friend's mind at the very same instant; and her dreams and sketches are oracular. She is a free spirit." --Simone de Beauvoir
"In Nadja, André Breton does not express himself--which self would that be anyway?--or exploit himself; he surrenders himself... That is why Nadja is necessary, like a natural phenomenon." --René Daumal "A deft new translation by Mark Polizzotti . . . Nearly a century later, Nadja still matters because it reminds us that true self-discovery derives not from grand visions or spiritual transformation but from these small interactions with the mundane that hint at the enchantment of an otherwise banal world." --Ben Libman, The New York Times"It has been a long wait for a new translation of André Breton's Nadja, the quintessential Surrealist narrative . . . [Polizzotti] has now produced a much more readable and accurate rendering of this classic work." --Susan Rubin Suleiman, The New York Review of Books "In Polizzotti's new translation of Nadja, which untangles and rectifies skewed or imprecise passages in Richard Howard's 1960 version and appends informative annotations, we gain a clearer sense of the inherent connection between the book's infamous 'love story' and Breton's concurrent steps toward revolutionary commitment." --Abigail Susik, Los Angeles Review of Books