INTERVIEW: “A Conversation with Charlotte Mandell,” LA Review of Books
by Paul Maziar, LA Review of Books
IN THE SPRING of 1919, the poets André Breton and Philippe Soupault began an experimental collaboration that would become a foundational document for surrealism: The Magnetic Fields. One hundred years after its initial publication, The Magnetic Fields feels prescient, and at times unnerving, due to the context of global war and pandemic in which it was written. To celebrate the book’s centennial, NYRB Poets has just published Charlotte Mandell’s new English-languge translation of Breton and Soupault. In translator Mandell’s hands, the text feels as thrilling and as bewildering as ever — and, I would add, remarkably timeless. I spoke with Mandell about the book’s context and the joys and complexities of translating this foundational work of surrealist automatic writing.
PAUL MAZIAR: The Magnetic Fields came before Dada and Surrealism took hold. Where is this work situated, relative to those movements?
CHARLOTTE MANDELL: The Magnetic Fields seems to have been written at a pivotal period in France, before Dada took hold there in 1920 and before the advent of Surrealism in 1924, with the publication of Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. Breton’s close friend, Jacques Vaché, was an admirer of Alfred Jarry — a French progenitor of Dada and Surrealism — and introduced his work to Breton. Vaché died of an opium overdose in January 1919; Breton and Soupault began writing The Magnetic Fields soon afterward, using automatic writing as a way to transcend everyday life, a way for Breton to take his mind off his friend’s death. The Magnetic Fields is dedicated to Vaché, and Breton would later go on to mythologize Vaché as a founding force of both Dada and Surrealism in France…