Nadja

A new translation of one of the defining works of the French surrealist movement, an energetic autobiographical novel that is at once both a tumultuous romance story and an initiation into the surrealism of everyday life.

The most renowned of all surrealist literary works, André Breton’s Nadja has been stirring passions and imaginations since its first publication in 1928. At once a poignant romance, an autobiography, a philosophical inquiry into questions of identity, and a lively illustration of the surrealist belief in life-changing chance, Nadja relates the fortuitous meeting and brief, tumultuous relationship between Breton, surrealism’s founder and primary theorist, and the “wandering soul” who called herself Nadja, “because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word for hope, and because it’s only the beginning.”

Over the course of a single breathless week, recounted with scrupulous precision and a poet’s sense of drama, Breton and Nadja pursue an adventure that stands outside of societal or moral conventions, and that brings both of them to what Breton termed “the extreme limit of the surrealist aspiration.” Bookending this beguiling and ultimately tragic story are a series of “petrifying coincidences,” episodes that initiate the reader into the surrealism of everyday life, and a penetrating examination of Breton’s own share of responsibility in Nadja’s ultimate fate, ending with the shattering intrusion into the author’s life of a final transformative occurrence.

In this, the first new translation of Nadja in more than sixty years, award-winning translator and surrealism scholar Mark Polizzotti brings a fresh perspective to this unique and haunting tale. Making use of the most recent research (including the revelation of Nadja’s identity and life story and the discovery of Breton’s original manuscript), he sets the narrative in its historical and biographical context and corrects a number of inaccuracies in the previous English version.

This vibrant, emotionally resonant translation breathes new energy and urgency into a book that has long been recognized as one of the seminal masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism.

André Breton (1896–1966) was a French poet, leftist activist, and co-founder and leader of the Surrealist movement. After a brief career in medicine, he moved to Paris, where he co-founded the journal Littérature with Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon. His writings include Manifestoes of Surrealism, Surrealism and Painting, and The Magnetic Fields.

Mark Polizzotti has translated over fifty books from the French by writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, Patrick Modiano, and Marguerite Duras. A Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and recipient of the 2016 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, he is the author of twelve books. He lives in New York.