I Didn't Just Come Here To Dance
New Episode of "Private Life"—On André Breton with Mark Polizzotti
André Breton’s Nadja (1928) is one of those books that’s exerted outsized and continual influence on me since my early twenties.
I was in graduate school for art history, miserable, sitting around seminar tables with people whose ideas bored me, precisely, I thought, because their lives bored me.
Finding Nadja was like a big neon sign flashing ESCAPE—an attempt to make life and art switch places. Mad Love! Dream Drawings! Strange Coincidences! Whatever!
So, I broke up with my boyfriend, dropped out of school, and took the book with me to Paris for six weeks (having no money and even less French.)
While there I retraced the events of the Nadja, going to every location, making rubbings of the doorsteps. It was…inexplicable. And yet it felt like the beginning of my real life.
Last year NYRB published a beautiful new translation of Nadja by Mark Polizzotti. In addition to being an esteemed translator of French (of Patrick Modiano in particular) he is also a scholar of Breton. His biography Revolution of the Mind (1995) is excellent in every way, a portrait of the important, complicated, (and lately loathed) ringleader of Surrealism.
Our conversation is out today:
“Private Life”: “Mark Polizzotti on Nadja, Translation, and Surrealism”.
It’s one of my very favorites. I hope you enjoy listening!
