My Body and I

In My Body and I (1925), Rene Crevel attempts to trace with words the geography of a being, exploring the tension between body and spirit. Crevel's meditation is a vivid personal journey through illusion and disillusion, secret desire, memory, the possibility and impossibility of life, sensuality and sexuality, poetry and the wilderness of the imagination. The narrator's Romantic mind moves from evocative tales to frank confessions, making the reader a confidant to this great soul trapped in an awkward-fitting body. Admired greatly by Andre Breton and Ezra Pound, Crevel might be thought of as a surrealist Proust. Robert Bononno's translations include Henri Raczymow's Swan's Way and Herve Guibert's Ghost Image.

René Crevel (1900–1935) was deeply involved with the Surrealist movement. Novelist, poet, and essayist, Crevel was an explorer of the psyche. My Body and I allows us to enter the writer’s inner landscape that led to his suicide at the age of 35. Crevel’s English publications include Babylon (North Point Press, 1985), Putting My Foot in It (Dalkey Archive Press, 1994), and Difficult Death (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).

Robert Bononno’s translations include Henri Raczymow’s Swan’s Way, Hervé Guibert’s Ghost Image, and Michel Ciment’s Kubrick. He is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (2002) for his translation of Isabelle Eberhardt: Sept années dans la vie d’une femme.