Paul Nougé (1895-1967) was a founding member of both the Belgian Communist Party (1921) and the Belgian Surrealist Group (1924). In the latter, he became the central literary and theoretical figure. For decades, while working as a biochemist, he contributed to local and international Surrealist publications, performances, and polemical disputes, elaborating a peripheral form of the movement’s philosophy that shared with the metropolitan Parisians an interest in the erotic, in surprise, and in transgression, but parted company when it came to the unconscious and the occult. Nougé was more rational. His own writing, much of which wasn’t published in book form until the 1950’s and ’60’s, experimented with form, typography, and, especially, creative plagiarism. He became known for versions of a famous grammar text, pulp pornography, and work by Baudelaire and Maupassant; the Situationist notion of détournement owes a lot to him.

Paul Colinet (1898-1957) met the painter René Magritte in the early 1930’s and through him other members of the Belgian Surrealist Group. He participated in the Group’s activities and publications from then on, all while working his day job as a mid-level functionary in the communal administration of a Brussels suburb. After World War II, he founded several key Belgian avant-garde journals and published two books of poems and prose poems before his early death. He first appeared in English in 1946, in translations by Paul Bowles, in Charles Henri Ford’s View magazine.

Louis Scutenaire (1905-1987) joined the Surrealist Group in 1926. For years, he supplied his friend René Magritte with titles for his paintings, in addition to publishing poems and prose in Surrealist magazines under his birth name, Jean Scutenaire. Meanwhile, he worked as a criminal lawyer, and later in the Belgian Ministry of the Interior. ‘Scut,’ as he was affectionately known by legions of readers, was most famous for his aphorisms, first published in 1945 as “Mes Inscriptions.” All told, five full-length volumes of inscriptions were published, the last posthumously. After World War II, Scutenaire pulled away some from official Surrealism, though he stayed close to Magritte and active in avant-garde circles. In the 1950’s he came out as an anarchist, after decades in the Communist Party.

Among M. Kasper’s translations are The Subversion of Images by Paul Nougé (Wakefield Press), Ideas Have No Smell: Three Belgian Surrealist Booklets (UDP), The Development of Aerial Militarism by Paul Scheerbart (UDP), and Saint Ghetto of the Loans by Gabriel Pomerand (with Bhamati Viswanathan; UDP). Kasper — who was born in the Bronx (1947), lived overseas for some years, and worked as a librarian for many at Amherst College in western Massachusetts — has also published a dozen artists books, including All Cotton Briefs (2nd ed., Benzene & the Xeric Foundation), Billy! Turn Down That TV! (Diana’s Bimonthly), Plans for the Night (Benzene), The Shapes and Spacing of the Letters (2nd ed., highmoonoon & the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics), Open-Book (UDP), and Kirghiz Steppes: Accumulated Verbo-Visuals  (Black Scat). As Christopher Middleton once said, “A Kasper a day keeps the moodles away.”

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Resident Professor at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Professor Caws was co-Director of the Henri Peyre French Institute from 1980 to 2002, and a former Trustee of the Alliance Francaise (Washington, D.C.). She is an Officier of the Palmes Académiques (awarded by the French Minister of Education), a Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres (awarded by the French Government), recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Getty fellowships, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science. Professor Caws is the author of The Eye in the Text; Reading Frames in Modern Fiction; The Inner Theatre of Recent French Poetry; and The Modern Art Cookbook among others, and of critical biographies of Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso, among others. She is the editor of The Harper Collins World Reader; Textual Analysis; The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, Surrealism; The Surrealist Painters and Poets; and Surrealist Love Poetry. She has translated Tristan Tzara’s Approximate Man and Other Writings; André Breton’s Mad Love; Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin’s The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud; and Ostinato by Louis-René des Forêts. She is the co-translator and editor of Selected Poems and Prose of Stéphane Mallarmé; Mallarmé in Prose; and The Essential Poems and Texts of Robert Desnos, among many others.