Benjamin Péret

Benjamin Péret (4 July 1899 – 18 September 1959) was a French poet, Parisian Dadaist and a founder and central member of the French Surrealist movement with his avid use of Surrealist automatism.

Biography

Benjamin Péret was born in Rezé, France on 4 July 1899. He, as a child, acquired little education due to his dislike of school and he instead attended the Local Art School in 1912. In 1913, he resigned due to his sheer lack of study and willingness to do so. Afterward he spent a short period of time in a School of Industrial Design

During World War I, Péret enlisted in the French army's Cuirassiers, to avoid being jailed for defacing a local statue with paint. He saw action in the Balkans, before being deployed to Salonica, Greece.

During a routine movement of his unit via train, he discovered a copy of the magazine ''Sic'', sitting upon a bench on the station platform, which contained poetry by Apollinaire – sparking his love for poetry. Towards the end of the war, still in Greece, he suffered from an attack of dysentery which led to his repatriation and deployment in Lorraine for the remainder of the war.

After the end of the war he joined the Dada movement and soon after, in 1921, he published ''Le Passager du transtlantique'' – his first book of poetry before he abandoned the Dada movement to follow André Breton and the emerging Surrealist movement, working alongside and influencing the Mexican writer Octavio Paz.

In the fall of 1924 he was the co-editor of the journal ''La Révolution surréaliste'', becoming chief editor in 1925. And in 1928, before emigrating to Brazil in 1929 with his wife Elsie Houston, he published ''Le Grand Jeu''. Two years later in 1931, a mere few months after the birth of his first son, Geyser, whilst living in Rio de Janeiro, he was arrested and expelled from Brazil on grounds of being a 'Communist Agitator' – having formed, with his brother-in-law Mario Pedrosa, the Brazilian Communist League which was based upon the ideas of Trotsky.

After returning to France, he went to Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and entered into an anarchist militia at Pino de Ebro. Back in France, in 1940 he was imprisoned for his political activities. Upon his release, he sailed for Mexico with the aid of the American-based Emergency Rescue Committee to study pre-Columbian myths and American folklore. He had originally wished to emigrate to the United States but was unable to do so due to his Communist affiliations. Péret went to Mexico with his partner, the Spanish artist Remedios Varo. In Mexico City he became involved with the European intellectual community around the Austrian painter and surrealist Wolfgang Paalen living there in exile. He was particularly inspired by Paalen's huge collection and knowledge about the "Totem Art" of the Northwest Coast of British Columbia; 1943 he finished a long essay on the necessity of poetic myths, exemplified with the mythology and art of the Northwest Coast, which was then published in New York by André Breton in '' VVV''.Benjamin Péret: La parole est à Péret, New York 1943, also in: Œuvres complètes, Tome 6, Les Amériques et autres lieux, Paris 1992, p. 18ff While living in Mexico City Péret met Natalia Sedova, Trotsky's widow.

He remained in Mexico until the end of 1947. He returned to Paris and died there on 18 September 1959.

Works

1921: ''Le Passager du transatlantique''

1925: ''Cent cinquante-deux proverbes mis au goût du jour, en collaboration avec Paul Éluard''

1927: ''Dormir, dormir dans les pierres''

1928: ''Le Grand Jeu''

1934: ''De derrière les fagots''

1936: ''Je sublime''

1936: ''Je ne mange pas de ce pain-là''

1945: ''Le Déshonneur des poètes''

1945: ''Dernier Malheur dernière chance''

1946: ''Un point c’est tout''

1952: ''Air mexicain''

1955: ''Le Livre de Chilam Balam de Chumayel''

1956: ''Anthologie de l’amour sublime''

1957: ''Gigot, sa vie, son œuvre''

1960: ''Le premier tournage de porno''

English translations

*''Four Years After the Dog''. Poems of Benjamin Péret. Arc Publications, 1974.
*''Irregular Work''. Actual Size Press, 1984.
*''Death to the Pigs and the Field of Battle''. Atlas Press, 1988.
*''From the Hidden Storehouse (Selected Poems by Benjamin Péret)''. Oberlin College, 1991.
*''Mad Balls''. Atlas Press, 1991.
*''The Automatic Muse''. Atlas Press, 1994.
*''A Menagerie in Revolt! Selected Writings''. Black Swan Press, 2009.
*''The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works.'' Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2011

References

External links

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*
''A Menagerie in Revolt! Selected Writings of Benjamin Péret'' (Publisher website)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Peret, Benjamin
1899 births
1959 deaths
People from Loire-Atlantique
Dada
Surrealist poets
French communists
French Marxists
French Trotskyists
Marxist writers
French male poets
20th-century French poets
20th-century French novelists
French erotica writers
Burials at Batignolles Cemetery
French surrealist writers
Communist poets
French military personnel of World War I