Sunday, October 13, 2024, 12.30pm to 2pm EST (Please check your own time zone).

Please join us for a discussion hosted by Effie Rentzou with translators C. Frances Fisher and Kathleen Heil on their work on poetry by Meret Oppenheim and Joyce Mansour published by World Poetry Books.

Register for the event here.

The Loveliest Vowel Empties presents for the first time in English the collected poems of legendary Swiss Surrealist Meret Oppenheim, printed with facing-page originals in German and French. Oppenheim’s poetry—49 poems written between 1933 and 1980—moves beyond Surrealism to inhabit a voice all her own, with imagery and sound that, as the Herald Tribune wrote, “express witty and poetic responses to the surprises of life.” A key figure of the Paris art scene in the 1930s, Oppenheim moved in a circle that included André Breton, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Writing for the Village Voice about her work, Gary Indiana noted that “the singularity of Meret Oppenheim’s work is such that nothing seems dated … the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking.” The publication of her collected poems coincides with a major retrospective exhibition of her artwork at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In the Glittering Maw is the first English-language collection focused on the later works of Joyce Mansour, an Arab-Jewish Surrealist poet who was exiled from Egypt in the 1950s and settled in Paris. Mansour’s late poems chart constellations of desire, femininity, and dream. Considered by André Breton to be the preeminent Surrealist of the post-war period, Mansour brings this masculine movement into a feminine realm never-before-imagined. She insists on a forgotten or perhaps vehemently denied eventuality of women’s equality: their ability to do harm, to be violent: “Why tear fire from the impalpable sky / When it already grows and smolders in me / Why throw your glove into the crowd / Tomorrow is a livid stump.” In the Glittering Maw is poet C. Francis Fisher’s first published translation and includes a preface by eminent Surrealism scholar Mary Ann Caws.

The Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) was born in Berlin-Charlottenburg and died in Basel. Best known for Object, her fur-lined teacup from 1936, her expansive body of work included painting, works on paper, and object constructions, as well as jewelry designs, public sculpture commissions, and poetry. From 2021–2023 her work was the subject of a major exhibition, the first transatlantic retrospective of her work, a collaboration between MoMA, The Menil Collection, and Kunstmuseum Bern.

One of the most important female Surrealist writers, Joyce Mansour (1928–1986) was born in England to Syrian-Jewish parents. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Cairo, where Mansour lived until she was forced to emigrate. She settled in Paris in 1953, where she continued writing and became a key member of the postwar Surrealist milieu. Mansour published sixteen books of poetry in her lifetime as well as prose and theater pieces. She died of cancer in Paris in 1986.

C. Francis Fisher received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Yale Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Her poem, “Self-Portrait at 25” was selected for the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize. She has been supported by fellowships from Brooklyn Poets and the Vermont Studio Center. She curates Colloquy, an event series that provides a forum for translators to engage with live audiences in an exploration of the art of translation. In the Glittering Maw (World Poetry, 2024), a selected volume of Joyce Mansour’s poetry, is her first book of translations.

Kathleen Heil is an artist working with languages of the body and written word, whose practice encompasses dance/performance and the writing and translating of poetry and prose. She is the author of the poetry collection You Can Have It All, forthcoming with Moist Books November 2024, and the translator of The Loveliest Vowel Empties, Meret Oppenheim’s collected poems (World Poetry, 2023). Originally from New Orleans, Heil lives and works in Berlin.

Effie Rentzou is Professor of French Literature at Princeton University. Her research and teaching focus on modernism and the avant-garde, especially in their international and political dimensions, on poetics and the interaction of text and image. Her publications include Littérature malgré elle: Le surréalisme et la transformation du littéraire (2010), Concepts of the World: The French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910-1940, (2022), the edited volume 1913: The Year of French Modernism (2020), and many articles and book chapters on surrealism, the avant-garde, and poetry. She is currently working on a book with the working title The Original Antifa: Surrealism against Fascism.