Ideas Have No Smell: Three Belgian Surrealist Booklets

Paul Nougé

Paul Colinet

Louis Scutenaire

Translated by M. Kasper

Mary Ann Caws, Contributor

POETRY, TRANSLATION  |  $30 $27

October 2018

a delightful sampler of three offbeat virtuosos

McKenzie Wark

The Belgian Surrealist movement, like its contemporary French cousin, included both visual artists—René Magritte most famously—and writers, who were also its theorists. They shared with the Parisians a fierce commitment to personal, political and aesthetic liberty, and to humor, surprise and transgression as artistic strategies, but they parted company when it came to the unconscious and the occult.

Ideas Have No Smell collects the first English-language translation of three Belgian Surrealist works: Transfigured Publicity, visual texts by poet and photographer Paul Nougé; the whimsical, hand-drawn artist’s book, Abstractive Treatise on Obeuse by Paul Colinet; and For Balthazar, a collection of aphorisms and observations by the ever skeptical author, lawyer, and anarchist Louis Scutenaire.

In addition to the booklets presented in a facsimile-style translation by M. Kasper, this special edition includes an introduction by scholar Mary Ann Caws and a poster reproduction of the 1926 handwritten panneau of Nougé’s visual poems.

About the Authors

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.

Praise

"On a deux coquilles mais on n’a qu’un coeur” (“You’ve got two balls but only one heart”). The three Belgian Surrealists—Paul Nougé, Paul Colinet, and Louis Scutenaire—included in this delightful sampler represent a movement much too little known in the English-speaking world. Belgian “Surrealism”—as the art of Magritte testifies—differed considerably from its more doctrinaire and theoretical French counterpart: its poets carry on the experiments with parole in libertà of the Italian Futurists (Nougé), the word play of Zurich Dada (Colinet), and especially the aphoristic enigmas of Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball (Scutenaire); all three poets use appropriation in ways that anticipate current conceptualist writing. This edition, with its excellent translations, is a real treasure trove.

Marjorie Perloff

This lovingly assembled and crafted triptych offers the perfect aperitif for the rich meal of Belgian Surrealist writing waiting to be discovered in English translation.

Marc Lowenthal

The Belgian Surrealists wrote a sparkling minor literature in the shadow of the Parisian grand-standers. They were more radical, rational, and imbued with the wit, folly and brevity of everyday life. They are useful and useable ancestors to have for the poetry of the age of Twitter and Instagram. This is a delightful sampler of three offbeat virtuosos.

McKenzie Wark

But isn’t translation like a second skin, the double life that everyone has dreamed of? And in this case, M. Kasper’s translations indeed double the eternity of these short and striking poems: it makes them alive and kicking twice as much.

Marcelline Delbecq in Rain Taxi

They fit neatly in the hand, and bring forward something we didn't know we missed, but perhaps desired to experience. Ideas may have no smell, but as the artists of Correspondance write, they sometimes behave like fragrance: '...the page which encloses them for an instant, wouldn't know how to hold them back.'

Debra Riley Parr in The Journal of Artist's Books

About the Translator

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.”

About the Contributor

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.

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-13-8
Special Edition
Box set of three booklets and fold-out poster. 4.75 x 6.125 in
Publication Date: October 01 2018
Distribution: Artbook | D.A.P, Asterism Books (US)
Series: Lost Literature #25