Constellations of Miro, Breton

During the early days of the Second World War, the Catal n painter, Joan Mir , created a startling series of twenty-three gouaches, his Constellations, works redolent with the nightmare of contemporary events. In 1958 the French poet Andr Breton composed his own "Constellations," a set of hermetic prose poems meant to "illustrate"--that is, not simply to shed light on, but to lend luster to--Mir 's paintings, and to resume a peripatetic dialogue about exile. In Constellations of Mir , Breton Paul Hammond unravels some of the mysteries of the call-and-response of these two surrealists by reading the pictures against the poetry, the poetry against the pictures, and both against the madness of a history that none of us has left that far behind.

Featured in this edition are reproductions of the complete series of Joan Mir 's Constellations and a translation of Andr Breton's "proses parall les." Also included is Andr Breton's essay, "Constellations of Joan Mir ," as well as documentary illustrations and photographs.

Paul Hammond is the author of Marvellous M li s, French Undressing, Upon the Pun: Dual Meaning in Words and Pictures (with Patrick Hughes), and a monograph on Luis Bu uel's L' ge d'or. He is the editor and translator of The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema (a new edition published by City Lights Books in Fall 2000), and the coeditor, with Ian Breakwell, of Seeing in the Dark: A Compendium of Cinemagoing and Brought to Book: The Balance of Books and Life. His translations include Whatever by Michel Houellebecq and The Virgin of the Hitmen by Fernando Vallejo.