Surrealist manifesto
This is my first translated section of André Breton’s original surrealist manifesto. I was curious to read it carefully and consider how Breton describes life’s dreamlike nature. In reviewing the official translation, I found it was well crafted and precisely recast the French into idiomatic English. But I wanted to retain more of what I felt to be the mood, rhythm, and, well, strangeness of Breton’s words. I also chose to use second person where Breton used third-person masculine, because to me gendered language in French, partially rooted in grammar, can operate more independently of social identities than in English.
Manifeste du surréalisme
Manifesto of surrealism
André Breton, 1924
Belief in life extends so far— life becomes all the more precarious— a sense of “real” life accords— the belief disappears from view. You, the definitive dreamer, daily more discontent with your lot, can hardly handle the objects you’ve been compelled to make use of, objects obtained in nonchalance, or through your effort— your effort almost always— because you consented to work— at least you weren’t loath to try your luck (what you call your luck!). Currently what you possess is a state of great modesty: You know what lovers you’ve had, what ridiculous adventures you got mixed up in; your richness or poverty is nothing to you— you remain in that sense a newborn babe and, as for your moral conscience, let’s admit you find that easy to ignore. If you retain any lucidity, you cannot help returning to your childhood, which, though it must have been massacred by your guardians, still seems full of enchantments. There— childhood— the absence of the rigor you’ve since learned allows another perspective, of several lives lived at once; you take root in this illusion; you no longer want to know anything but absorption— extreme— in all things. Every morning this child sets out without worry. Everything is close— the worst material conditions could be excellent. The woods are white or black— you will never sleep.
But it is true you could not possibly go so far— it’s not just a matter of distance. The threats accumulate— you concede— you abandon a part of the ground you were meant to conquer. Your imagination, which knew no bounds— you no longer permit it to open except to serve the practical— which is arbitrary; but imagination cannot sustain this shrunken role and, around your twentieth year, it abandons you to your destiny without light— without any light at all.
If you were to try later, here and there, to regain yourself— having bit by bit sensed you lack any reason to live— incapable as you’ve become to rise to an exceptional situation such as love— you would hardly achieve this recovery. You belong from now on, body and soul, to an imperious practical necessity, which won't weaken just because you don’t notice it. All your gestures will lack scale, all your ideas, scope.
You will only consider— regarding what happens to you and can happen to you— what connects an event to a crowd of similar events, events you didn’t even experience, missing events.
I mean this: you will judge things in relation to one of these events in particular— whichever one reassures you most, whose consequences distress you least. You will not see this, under any pretext, as your salvation. Dear Imagination, what I love the most in you is that you do not forgive.
Freedom— this one word alone is all that still excites me. Freedom I find suitable for maintaining, indefinitely, the old human fanaticism. Freedom fulfills, without a doubt, my only true aim. Despite the many disgraces we inherit, we must realize freedom, the greatest freedom of mind, is also bequeathed us. It is up to us to not misuse it gravely. To reduce imagination to slavery, even when doing so brings what we crudely call happiness, is to nullify everything one finds, in the depths of self, of supreme justice. Only imagination informs me what can be, and it’s enough to lift a little the terrible prohibition; enough, too, for me to abandon myself to imagination without fear that I am wrong (as if one could be more wrong than one already is).