Not every poet knows how to make erotic obsession seem abject. Often, the form reverts back to sexy little nymphets instead of turning sour grapes into something transcendent. Not so with the Surrealists. They are true freaks. Joyce Mansour writes of vomit, bloodshed, vaginal swelling, and bruises. The kind of late night sex one regrets and yet is forever shattered by. As C. Francis Fisher notes, Surrealism “can be linked to its emergence in a time of rising fascist and totalitarian forces.” Fisher links “our own politically turbulent era” to a renewed interest in Surrealist art. Leonora Carrington continues to be re-issued through the next year at NYRB, the Met put on the extensive “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” and Afro-Surrealism is a growing trend among contemporary Black filmmakers. “It is always the right time for surrealism,” Joyelle McSweeney argued in 2023. Robin D. G. Kelley argues Surrealism “recognizes imagination as our most powerful weapon.” There’s something uniquely suited to repressive regime change in images of transgressive violence and the bizarre.

Mansour’s language pricks the ear. In the Glittering Maw, a new translation by C. Francis Fisher, is an excellent inroad to the poet’s work. Carefully read “Coiffed with a heavy sob” in the opening poem “The Breastplate.” Her verbs crackle in the ear. War collides with hysterics. “To eat” is translated in a million different ways. So too “choke” and “orgasm.” “Feed to keep others / from eating you.” Mouths can expel vomit or lust, perform blowjobs or bite the hand that feeds. Nothing is too abject for lyrical observation. “She buries me / I eat my family / I spit on their remains.” These deceptively simple lines strike a careful balance of doom and elliptical precision. Black dogs bark as “[t]he orgasm’s rainbow reflects on the ceiling.” Bees, snakes, and Christ-figures all take on a sinister yet erotic hue. “Ravaged tombs,” funerals, citadels, and bedrooms become opportunities for ecstasy. The title of Fisher’s translation comes from a poem entitled “The Chameleon’s Tongue”:

Mansour straddled many worlds and languages. She was born in England to a wealthy Syrian-Jewish family before growing up in Cairo, having primarily learned English and Ladino before turning to French, the tongue she primarily wrote in. Her first book, Cris (“Screams”), was published in 1953 by a Parisian publisher. She eventually fled to the French metropolis, in exile, after Gamal Abdel Nasser took power in Egypt. This was partially due to Nasser’s nationalization of assets: Mansour’s family was quite wealthy and stood to lose their societal position if they stayed put. In Paris, she met Breton, the father of Surrealism and her own early champion and confidant. Breton is often praised for his role in Mansour’s career, paternalistically by some and ruefully by feminists. “Surrealist poetry, that’s you,” the archmage said of Mansour.

Her later work is the primary focus of Fisher’s new translation: Rapaces (Birds of Prey), 1960; Carré Blanc (White Square), 1965; Les Damnations (The Damnations), 1967; and Faire Signe au Machiniste (To Signal the Machinist), 1977. Fisher argues that Breton’s influence “may have held her back as much as… propelled her forward.” In all, Mansour wrote sixteen books of poetry. The complete corpus has yet to be translated, though previous books have included more samples of the poet’s earlier work.

“While some might try to categorize her work under the umbrella of Feminism™, Mansour was writing beyond the body and this world,” Marwa Helal wrote in a 2023 issue of Poetry Magazine. “Mansour’s mystery is the mystery of the feminine.” Fisher too notes the role of the orgasm (la petite mort, even) in the poems of Mansour. Helal argues that the fluidity of gender in the Arabic language, which while not the primary language Mansour wrote in, certainly influenced the images she created through words. There’s a tendency to overemphasize Euro-and-Anglo-centric readings of the work rather than consider Mansour’s Arab and Egyptian cultural orientations.

The writer Hussein Omar has written that much of the marketing of a previous Mansour translation focused on her Surrealism as opposed to her Egyptian birthplace—yet “[i]n all her photos she wears large peasant gold jewellery from the Nile delta and her home in Paris with Samir was rammed with dramatic Egyptian basalt sculpture and the imagery of much of her poetry is Egyptology-inflected.”

***

Fisher’s translations leave things deftly muddy: “My sex gleams with a great bitter thirst / The exquisite yawn of death.” The gap between giving and taking life is an illusion. The two are closer than we might think, “Spitting sperm into the tomb’s open mouth.” Late in life Mansour was diagnosed with breast cancer, something that continually shows up in her work, not something she considered the opposite of sex so much as the bedroom’s omnipresent reaper. “The burning and godless horizon / Beckons,” Mansour chants.

How should one read “The street is only / Female masturbation?” The public space is where the intellectual meets the sensual, where gendered grammar breaks down and embodiment can be re-examined, where something new can emerge. “It would have been so luxurious / To have the power to piss in the street,” Mansour writes.

Emilie Moorhouse’s translations, featured at The Poetry Foundation in 2023, are notable for their clipped crispness. Here, too, gender fractures: “I am man / Man who pulls the trigger and shoots emotion / To live better.” This is how “Mansour tears women from the pedestal misogyny can relegate them to,” as Fisher puts it in an interview. Translation is a political act, one Fisher notes in the epilogue—Mansour wasn’t immune to using derogatory language. How does the modern reader approach? To wipe clean? To forgive? Or something else?

***

The physicality of Mansour’s verse still shocks the reader, its explicit desire curling like the tendrils of Medusa. “The incomparable islands of her sandy pubis,” the “flaking” of “your clitoris,” the “rosary of testicles.” One man empties his “loins in the throat of another girl.” Come to morning vespers and wipe your sex on the altar. “Art begins where desire ends / Dull and dirty.”

In “Desire for Endless Desire,” lungs blooming give way to a furious uproar, a finale of Biblical proportions:

The next poem, of course, is called “666.” This is the end of days.

Surrealism offers a shriek against the growing fires of fascism. Not all strains of the genre are inherently political but Robin D. G. Kelley’s “Keeping It (Sur)real: Dreams of the Marvelous” points out that Surrealism was forged as a resistance to Western Civilization. In contrast to a mainstream understanding of surrealism as a white, Euro-American movement, Kelley points to the Césaires among other anticolonial writers as Surrealist practitioners in their own right, expanding the genre for their own ends. Black artists like Wilfredo Lam and Ted Joans were both major players in the movement. Lam, born in Cuba to an Afro-Cuban mother and Chinese father, and Joans, born in Illinois, both lived in Paris for many years and integrated African imagery and avant-garde vernaculars into their art. Kelley argues that their art “unleash[es …] the mind’s most creative capacities, catalyzed by participation in struggles for change.” Mansour’s work heeds this call, honing in on the vast undercurrent of lost streets, shifting potency, and the erotic grammar of the grave.

This is how the modern reader can uncover the stark power of Surrealism. Each poet is a member of a grand choir, refashioning Surrealism for their own ends. Mansour’s tremendous voice still sparkles. She howls like a banshee, commanding orgasms and throbbing convulsions among the tombstones. Love is not a directive here. It’s an obsession. Down the hatch, into the glittering maw we go, lost all the way down. It’s time for a tryst, the reader and the sign, the symbol and its lust. Perhaps her words can offer a unifying cry, la petite mort, one that stands for more than simple desire. The kind of erotics that breaks us open instead of merely hollowing us out.