The 1966 collaboration between Egyptian French Surrealist writer Joyce Mansour and the Chilean visual artist Roberto Matta titled Les damnations is sumptuously bound in blood red morocco, folio-sized and imposing. Except for turning pages, I shouldn’t touch it; but in the quiet of the New York Public Library’s Print Collection, I nevertheless run my fingertips over the cover’s pebbled leather. This tension between the smooth and the rough remembers the animal from which it was made, its pebbled texture achieved in the tannery by application of extreme heat and pressure to the hide. So Surrealist. So Matta, admired for his biomorphic forms: hybrid human-non-humans often conjoined with each other, nearly always touching. So Mansour, known for her transgressive, erotically charged writing.
        Mansour turns forcefully into de-romanticized eroticism as she writes the complexities of female desire into her body of work: fourteen volumes of poetry, a play, and four books of prose, nearly all published as collaborations with artists such as Matta, Pierre Alechinsky, Wilfredo Lam, and Ted Jones. Her writing focuses on a female experience of embodiment, addressing sex and death alongside startling descriptions of hunger, mutilation, and a surprising amount of peeing. Considered to be one of the most important female Surrealist writers, her initial reception wasn’t terribly positive. “‘Screaming’ is not the best way to make yourself heard,” wrote one critic of her debut, Cris, published in Paris in 1953 by Éditions Seghers.

        Cris begins with what is perhaps Mansour’s most transgressive expression of all: a proclamation of love for an aged female body:

J’aime tes bas qui raffermissent tes jambes.

J’aime ton corset qui soutient ton corps tremblant Tes rides

tes seins ballants ton air affamé

Ta viellesse contre mon corps tendu (309)

“I love your stockings that firm up your legs /I love your corset that supports your trembling body / your wrinkles, your sagging breasts, and your hungry look / your old age against my tight body.” The poem ends two lines later: “Tout ceci me venge enfin / Des hommes qui n’ont pas voulu de moi.” “All this at last avenges me / for the men who didn’t want me.” (My translation.)

        In Cris, Mansour introduces motifs she will carry to her last book, Trous noirs, a collaboration with the Peruvian artist Gerardo Chávez published in 1986 before her death later that year from cancer. Coffins, infanticide, cannibalism, and imagery that raises animals—monkeys, dogs, cats—to the same level as the human populate her pages from the start. Piercing, bleeding, eating, starving, splitting, breaking, and blinding are common actions. “Don’t give her access to the morgue; she’ll wake the corpses,” the French poet Alain Bosquet wrote of Cris. This wasn’t a compliment, but André Breton, intrigued, welcomed Mansour into his inner circle when she relocated to Paris from Cairo in 1956. He called her la tubéreuse-enfant, the tuberose-child. She dedicated two books to him.
        I try not to break the reading room’s silence as I lift the book out of its archival box and onto its cradle. Compelled by its size and material qualities, I remain standing before it, tie back my hair as if it might get caught in the encounter. Exquisitely bound by Gerard Charrière and published by Éditions Georges Visat, known for Surrealists artist books, the center of the cover is inlaid with an amoeba-like form of copper foil. Echoing its outline is a double row of small brass and steel nails, which recall Mansour’s “nasty objects,” her series of small sculptures from the 1960s fashioned out of foam forms pierced with nails. The cover resists, then falls open gracefully to Matta’s frontispiece, a full-page color etching done in sea blues, tans, peaches, and reds and featuring three interconnected, copulating forms: insectoid but with breasts and the suggestion of a phallus.
        The book’s poems are set in an elegant italic serif font, framed by wide margins and with enough leading to accentuate Mansour’s characteristically commanding lineation. Les damnations, like the majority of her poetry, unfolds in long stanzas, doesn’t use punctuation, and begins each line with a capital letter. This emphasizes the line’s autonomous nature while creating the possibility for multiple connections to the lines above and below. Alternative motion, an exquisite-corpse effect; not a flashy use of form, but an assertive one and a guiding force for nonlinear, nonnarrative progression. For poems that gasp and balk. Whorl and spit.
        “Le désir du désir sans fin,” “The Desire for Endless Desire” begins the volume, opposite Matta’s engraving of four peach and pink humanoid forms that seem to be seated inside a large device—a desiring machine—which they peddle. The background is slate blue and atmospheric. Ecstatic gold lines burst from the crown of the machine and swirl into a sun-like disk that razzes the air with energy. Still standing above the book, I resist the urge to trace the gold with my finger and begin to read the stanza facing Matta’s image:

Je te croyais roux

Bouc lippu de ma tendresse Indifférente

Matière gommeuse aux lignes fuyantes Et

arides couchants d’opium

Le froid augmente dans la clairière Mes

poumons refleurissent

D’un sanglot flamboyant Plus

glacé qu’une gravure Plus sérieux

qu’un helléniste Au Panthéon

Tu m’observes

Et quelque chose de dominateur

Pétrit mon épiderme de ses volontés convulsives (11)

I silently sound out the French “jeh teh croy yay rue” while translating via my college French, “I thought you were red / goat thick lips of my tenderness / indifferent / gummy material with lines of flight.”
        “Desire for Endless Desire” begins in retrospection—“Je te croyais roux,” “I thought you were red.” But who, or what, is “you”? The beloved? The self-as-other? What kind of creature is this object of desire, this thick-lipped goat of gummy material? “Bouc,” in French, can be either goat or goatee: I thought you were red, lippy goatee of my indifferent tenderness. An oral image and male. Or, given that the image is isolated from the face and body, the lippy goat or goatee might read as female genitalia. Vulva as lippy goat, as thick-lipped goatee. Or perhaps this reading humanizes too much: the object of desire might be a goat. Or—desire for endless desire—perhaps Mansour intends to conjure all possibilities at once.
        This effacing of boundaries is central to Mansour’s poetry. She presents images in close-up, without context, employing swift shifts akin to collage. Also fundamental is the accentuation of touch, which Aristotle dismissed as being the sense shared by all animals. Yet touch is a way of knowing the world without privileging human experience. Touch, as Luce Irigaray points out, is inherent in the folds and concavities of the labia which produces sites of multiple contact and stimulation, thereby breaking down the division between self and other. Touch is the place where the “I” wobbles off-center.
        I look again at the etching. The figures might be separate figures, but they might all be on creature, joined together in the production of desire. The image is immediate without losing its mystery and makes me frustrated at my rusty French, even though much of my encounter with the book takes place beyond what usually qualifies as reading. Although I struggle to translate Mansour into English- language understanding, I have the feel of her language in my mouth as I sound out her sounds, and in my eyes as I track her lines, and in my fingers as I turn her pages.
        This is a markedly different experience than reading Mansour in translation, most recently in C. Francis Fisher’s In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems (World Poetry, 2024) and Emilie Moorhouse’s Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems(City Lights, 2023). Fisher’s book focuses on Mansour’s later poetry, some of which has never been previously translated. Moorhouse selects from across the works and reveals a trajectory. The early poems are short and unfold as rich, haunting vignettes. Work from the mid-1960s becomes acerbic and flirts with the absurd in a direct critique of women’s stifling gender roles. After the mid-1960s, the poems lengthen while becoming more disjunctive in movement with their swift shifts often dislodging any sense of a speaker as the violence and dislocation that Mansour addresses become as structural as they are figurative.
        Reading these translations brings me to stand beforeLes damnations, but through no fault of their own they allow only partial access to Mansour’s poetry. What would it mean to have Mansour’s language in my body, to meld with it? By this I don’t mean just a deep relationship with the French language, but with Mansour’s French, which was not her mother tongue. Born in England in 1928 to Syrian-Jewish parents, Mansour grew up in Cairo speaking English and Ladino, an archaic form of Castilian Spanish mixed with Hebrew and other languages. Nearly extinct, Ladino is still spoken by some Sephardic Jews in places their ancestors settled after expulsion from Spain in 1492. Mansour began writing poetry in English after the death of her first husband, just six months after their marriage. He died of cancer, leaving Mansour a widow at nineteen years old. Her second husband, Samir Mansour, a wealthy Franco-Egyptian businessman, refused to speak any other language except French and so Mansour began her life in a new language when they married in 1949.
        French was one of the primary languages of the artistic and literary circles Mansour began to frequent in Cairo in the early 1950s. There, she was encouraged as a writer by Georges Henein, co- founder of the Surrealist-adjacent group of artists, writers and activists, Art and Liberty, which was known as Art et Liberté in French and al-Fann wa-l-Hurriyya in Arabic (the group used both the French and Arabic terms for “free art,” and their associated literary journal was bilingual). Active from 1938 to 1948, Art and Liberty embraced Surrealism’s conviction that freeing society from oppression and individual psychic liberation functioned in tandem, and that art and writing could be fashioned into tools of revolt. International in membership and anti-nationalist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist in value, Art and Liberty was acutely aware that it existed within a particular national and regional context that included the rising threat posed by Mussolini’s ambitions in Africa, the legacy of colonial rule and ongoing British control of the Suez Canal, and the North African campaigns of the Second World War.
        Art and Liberty drew on Surrealist techniques while cultivating its own vision and incorporating local aesthetic traditions. As Clare Davies writes in her catalogue entry on “Cairo” for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2021–2022 exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders, the female figure was often the locus for the group’s critique of Egyptian society, ascribing the “oppression of women to the institutionalization of patriarchal attitudes, which naturalized gender inequality” (68). Imagery includes hypersexualized figures plagued by violence, and articles published in the group’s journal “proposed a feminist-Marxist critique of prostitution, identifying society’s most vulnerable as those lowest on intersecting class and gender hierarchies” (68). While Mansour was never an official member of the group, there are intriguing resonances, particularly with the bodies of work produced by two of the primary visual artists of Art and Liberty: female painters Inji Efflatoun and Amy Nimr. For instance, in Nimr’s Untitled (Anatomical Corpse) (1940), a bloated, grotesque female form merges with coral and shells. When Efflatoun was imprisoned between 1959 and 1963 for her activism and communist ties, she painted the portraits of other inmates: prostitutes, murders, thieves, and fellow activists. The abject female figures that haunt Nimr’s and Efflatoun’s canvases would find company in Mansour’s oeuvre.
        During this period the Mansours led a cosmopolitan life, with apartments in Cairo, Paris, and Alexandria until 1956, the summer before the Suez Crisis, when they permanently relocated to Paris as their assets were seized by the Egyptian government. Many Jews, like Edmund Jabès, who was Mansour’s neighbor in Cairo, left Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis, whether fleeing or expelled. In Paris, Mansour became central to the Surrealist scene. Along with her books and publications in Surrealist journals, she produced visual artworks and hosted events, such as the opening performance for the 1959 international Surrealist exhibition, EROS, during which the artist Jean Benoît—dressed in black with a wing-like cape, a large iron phallus, and a squid-like mask—stripped naked as Breton read a testament to the Marquis de Sade, marking the 145th anniversary of his death. Benoît ended the performance by branding the letters SADE on his chest. Inspired, Matta, who was among the attendees, ripped open his shirt and also branded himself with the SADE iron.
        The poems in Les damnations are of this bodily, inscriptive language. I pick up my phone and photograph Mansour’s stanza; if I can’t experience the full range of her writing, at least I can take an image home. But then I tap the icon that looks like a little page on the bottom right of my photo and iPhone instantly translates:

I thought you were red

Lippu oat of my tenderness Apathetic person

Gummy material with fuvant lines And arid sleeping opium

The cold increases in the clearing My lungs are re-refucurinating Of a flamboyant sob

More icy than an engraving More serious than a Hellenist At the Pantheon

You’re serving me

And something domineering

Kneads my epidermis with his convulsive wills

On the surface, iPhone’s translation mimics the disjunction and surprise that Surrealists produced via automatic writing, collage, and collaboration. The “Lippu oat,” “fuvant lines,” and “re- refucurinating,” further estranges Mansour’s already wild language by injecting nonsense words into the poem. Containing both urination and fucking, “re-refucurinating” is a particularly enticing portmanteau word. The strange is made stranger, and I’m momentarily seduced by the thought of the Surrealists collaborating with AI algorithms, had it been available at the birth of the movement one hundred years ago with Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme of 1924.
        However, some of the AI translator’s other choices domesticate Mansour’s language. When the third line, “Indifférente,” is translated as “Apathetic person,” the opening of the poem falls into line with lyric poetry’s most conventual rhetorical situation: an “I” addressing a “you” about an unsatisfactory romantic situation. Whoever this “Lippu oat” is, they are apathetic and gummy when “I” had mistakenly thought they were “red”—passionate, fiery. Hot.
        In contrast, Mansour’s “Indifférente” stands alone on its line, a bare adjective unyoked. French grammar, which places the adjective before the noun it modifies, suggests “indifferent tenderness.” Mansour’s lineation, however, invites “indifferent gummy material.” The poem refuses to choose and offers instead both indifferent tenderness and indifferent gummy material, which might be part of the speaker or part of the “you” or something they make together in a gummy, fleeing erotic encounter.

As Susan Bernofsky, Jonathan Cohen, and Edith Grossman advise in an article about reviewing translations, “every translation is written twice: first by its author, then by its translator. The work in English represents a confluence of sensibilities, a merging of two creative powers” (n.p). In other words, it matters who or what you collaborate with, who or what you merge with. While the AI’s nonsense words are giddy, this is merely surface disruption. Algorithmic processes powered by Big Tech dollars offer anything but the liberation Surrealists thought was both necessary and possible. It is obvious by now that the structure of large language model AI is not objective or neutral. As scholar Safiya Noble notes in her critique of commercial search engines, “racism and sexism are part of the architecture and language of technology” (9). Given that the artificial neural networks powering AI translators learn by tracking the repeating patterns found in the data sets they are fed, is a translation that moves the poem into the place where lyric conventions overlap with romcoms any surprise?
        Thanks to the fact that C. Francis Fisher’s In the Glittering Maw includes “Desire for Endless Desire” as one of the two poems she translates from Les damnations, I can choose an alternative collaborator. In her Translator’s Note Fisher comments, “What draws me to Mansour again and again is the full emotional range she allows for women—from anger and despair to pleasure and eroticism” (177). Her “Desire for Endless Desire” opens as follows:

I thought you were red

Full-lipped goatee of my indifferent

Tenderness

Gummy material with receding and arid lines Opium

sunsets

Cold builds in the clearing My

lungs bloom again With a

fiery sob

Icier than intaglio

More serious than a Hellenist At

the Pantheon

You watch me

And something dominant

Kneads my skin with its convulsive wills (59)

Fisher’s translation begins the poem crisply before revealing some of the difficult choices a translator must consider. Take the rendering of “Lippu bouc.” Fisher’s choice of “Full-lipped goatee” over “Thick-lipped goatee” or the more fantastical “Full-lipped” or “Thick-lipped” “goat” anchors the object of desire in the realm of the human. This is a less shocking choice than “full-lipped goat,” with its implied bestiality, or “thick-lipped goat,” with its additional labial quality would have been. By foregoing shock value, however, Fisher allows the structure of the poem to carry out the deeper, structural work of Surrealist estrangement. The power to dislodge expectation occurs not solely in a flashy image, but in the leap from the cognitive recognition of the first line’s “I thought you were red” into the physical realm of the second line’s “Full-lipped goatee.” This abrupt movement for reflection to physicality announces the turbulent motion that Mansour sustains across the poem’s 134 lines.

        Mansour’s disjunctions also speak to disconnections undergone off the page and away from the book as our conceptions of the world collide with daily physical reality. What is thought or said to be the case encounter what is experientially the case. For today’s translator or reader, an awareness that the two aren’t often in alignment is a skill fundamental to navigating a post-truth reality. Thanks to collaborators in thinking and feeling like Mansour, Fisher, and Morehouse, it just might not be too late for us to learn.






Works Cited

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Bernofsky, Susan, Jonathan Cohen, and Edith Grossman. “On Reviewing Translations.”

Words without Borders, March 23, 2011. https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2011-03/on-reviewing-translations-susan-  bernofsky-jonathan-cohen-and-edith-grossman/

Davies, Clare. “Cairo.” In Surrealism Beyond Borders, edited by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, 66–73. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021.

Mansour, Joyce. Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems. Translated by Emilie Moorhouse. San Francisco: City Lights, 2023.

——— In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems. Translated by C. Francis Fisher. New York: World Poetry, 2024.

——— Les damnations. Paris: Éditions Georges Visat, 1966.

——— Prose & poésie: oeuvre complete. Arles: Actes sud, 1991.


Noble, Safiya. Algorithms of Oppression. New York: New York University Press, 2018.