Philippe Soupault effectively cofounded the literary wing of the surrealist movement by coauthoring with Andrè Breton Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Field). The work, originally published in 1920, was created with automatic writing, a sort of non-idiomatic improvisation for the pen that surrealist painters would famously champion and use to beguiling effect. Soupault’s impressions of his era and literary contemporaries, including James Joyce, René Crevel, Apollinaire, and Marcel Proust, are now available in English as Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism — newly translated by Bay Area poet Alan Bernheimer and published by City Lights with an afterword by poet Ron Padgett and a preface by Breton biographer Mark Polizzotti. Bernheimer, who has also translated works by Robert Desnos and Valery Larbaud, will discuss and sign copies of Lost Profiles on Tuesday at Diesel, A Bookstore (5433 College Avenue) on Tuesday, November 15.
.Alan Bernheimer At Diesel, a Bookstore.
