Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings

by Margaret Carson

Sold out

Account Type

Format

Quantity

Author: Margaret Carson

Publisher: Wakefield Press

Paperback:
ISBN 10: 1939663393
ISBN 13: 978-1939663399

While the reputation of Remedios Varo (1908–63) the surrealist painter is now well established, Remedios Varo the writer has yet to be fully discovered. Her writings, which were never published during her life let alone translated into English, present something of a missing chapter and offer the same qualities to be found in her visual work: an engagement with mysticism and magic, a breakdown of the border between the everyday and the marvelous, a love of mischief and an ongoing meditation on the need for (and the trauma of) escape in all its forms.

This volume brings together the painter's collected writings and includes an unpublished interview, letters to friends and acquaintances (as well as to people unknown), dream accounts, notes for unrealized projects, a project for a theater piece, whimsical recipes for controlled dreaming, exercises in surrealist automatic writing and prose poem commentaries on her paintings. It also includes her longest manuscript, the pseudoscientific, De Homo Rodans, an absurdist study of the wheeled predecessor to Homo sapiens (the skeleton of which Varo had built out of chicken bones). Ostensibly written by the invented anthropologist Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, Varo's text utilizes eccentric Latin and a tongue-in-cheek pompous discourse to explain the origins of the first umbrella and in what ways Myths are merely corrupted Myrtles.

Review

"Fans of the surrealist painter Remedios Varo likely won't be surprised that her writing is as wide reaching and imaginative as her work on canvas." --The Paris Review

"Letters, Dreams & Other Writings, deftly translated by Margaret Carson, is the first compilation of the painter's prose in English. As with her paintings, Varo's writing is a wily escapism, flouting the ordinary to bring us closer to the everyday." --Zack Hatfield, The Brooklyn Rail

"Decrypting the logic that underlies her pictorial and prosaic universe, readers may transcend the stagnant sense of awe to interact with the beings and things that populate it, all of which are seen to be alive." --Elisa Taber, review 31

"This enjoyable collection will spur some readers to investigate Varo's art and it gives us a glimpse of Varo's character and the frames of reference for her as a creator." --Alexander Adams Art Blog

"Remedios Varo is far better known in Mexico than in the barbarian lands north of the border. This revelatory little missile will make at least a little hole in the infernal stupid wall, and perhaps even in the clouds of tear-gas."--Martin Billheimer, Counterpunch

"We can take pleasure in Varo's intimate musings, but we should also acknowledge the writings as creative works that are as significant and intoxicating as her visual art."--M. Buna, Hyperallergic

About the Author

Remedios Varo (1908-1963) was a Spanish-born painter who entered the Surrealist circle in Paris before the German occupation forced her into exile to Mexico at the end of 1941, where she would stay until the end of her life. Her dream-infused, allegorical work combines elements of classical training, alchemical mysticism, and fairy-tale science.

Margaret Carson's translations have appeared in The Paris Review, BOMB, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, Aufgabe, The Massachusetts Review, Seedings, Review: Literature and Arts of the Américas, [SLUG], and EOAGH. Her book translations include Sergio Chejfec's My Two Worlds and Baroni: A Journey and José Tomás de Cuéllar's The Magic Lantern.

Filters

Dreams

Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings