Opacities

Translated by Chris Holdaway, with a foreword by Peter Thompson / March 2027 / 4.5 x 7, 104 pp. / 978-1-962728-14-0

First published in 1928 shortly after the rollicking cosmic Vulturnus, Opacities fully realized André Breton’s description of Léon-Paul Fargue as “surrealist in atmosphere”—an atmosphere proven here to be as thick as jelly and deliriously opaque as night. These prose works realized surrealism’s ambition to unite the subjective and objective—dream and reality—yet without adhering to the movement that had been launched only a few years earlier.

Opacities presents an oblique guidebook on how to thicken an atmosphere and turn emotional states into hallucinatory visions. Subjectivity and language have been sublimated: An insomniac private eye in random pursuit through an oneiric Paris may just as easily be the chattering spirit of a table-turning séance; a dead man reviewing his childhood may transition to a dialogue on art and embroidery. Fargue’s prose formulates a wandering quest that is ultimately in search of nothing but itself.

“The greatest living poet in France.”—Walter Benjamin

“One of our greatest poets.”—Rainer Maria Rilke

Léon-Paul Fargue (1876–1947) was the archetypal poet of Paris, with ties to everyone from Alfred Jarry and Erik Satie to Colette and Maurice Ravel. His work was admired by Rainer Maria Rilke, James Joyce, and Walter Benjamin. Though his work was sometimes associated with various literary movements, a bridge of sorts from symbolism to surrealism (though he was opposed to the latter), he kept to his own path throughout his life: a night wanderer who turned his perambulations through Paris into a unique poetry and prose.