Author Biography

Joyce Mansour (author) was born in England in 1928 to a Jewish family of Syrian descent who moved to Egypt when she was still an infant. Mansour was part of the inner circle of Surrealists, a close friend of Andr Breton, and the most significant poet to join the group after World War II. She wrote 16 books of poetry, as well as prose, works, and plays. She lived in Paris, France until her death in 1986 at age of 58.Emilie Moorhouse (translator & co-editor) holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Raised in a French-speaking household in Toronto, Canada, she now lives in Montreal where she works as a teacher, writer, translator, and environmentalist.Garrett Caples (editor) is a poet and an editor for City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He is also the co-editor of the Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia, editor of Preserving Fire: Selected Prose by Philip Lamantia, and author of the poetry collection Lovers of Today (2021). He lives in San Francisco, CA.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents  Translator's Introduction  Editorial Note  Cris (1953) / Screams  "Je te soulève dans mes bras" "I lift you in my arms" "L'amazone mangeait son dernier sein." "The amazon was eating her last breast" "Chien bleu nez enfoncé dans la terre" "Blue dog whose nose is buried in the sand"  "Je veux me montrer nue à tes yeux chantants." "I want to be naked in your singing eyes." "Ton enfant dans tes bras." "Your child in your arms" "Fièvre ton sexe est un crabe" "Fever your sex is a crab" "Une femme créait le soleil" "A woman created the sun" "Couchée sur mon lit" "Lying on my bed" "J'ai un esprit inquiet." "I have a worried mind""Combien d'amours ont fait crier ton lit?" "How many loves made your bed cry out?" "Coquillage qui traîne sur une plage déserte" "Seashell lying on an empty beach" "Que mes seins te provoquent" "May my breasts provoke you"  Déchirures (1955) / Shreds  "La mort est une marguerite qui dort" "Death is a daisy sleeping" "J'ai volé l'oiseau jaune" "I stole the yellow bird" "Invitez-moi à passer la nuit dans votre bouche" "Invite me to spend the night in your mouth" "Dans le monde sans verdure" "In a world without greenery" "Hurlements d'une montagne" "Shrieks from a mountain giving birth" "Je suis la nuit" "I am the night" "C'était hier:" "It was yesterday." "La nappe rouge" "The red tablecloth" "Pleure petit homme" "Cry little man" "Danse avec moi petit violoncelle" "Dance with me, little cello" "La marée monte sous la pleine lune des aveugles." "The tide is rising under the full moon of the blind." "Je veux dormir avec toi coude à coude" "I want to sleep with you elbow to elbow" "L'orage tire une marge argentée" "The storm draws a silver line"  poems from BIEF (1958–1960)  Le Missel de la Miss (Bonnes Nuits) / The Missel of the Missus (Good Nights)     i) Quelques Conseils En Courant Sur Quatre Roues     i) Advice for Running on Four Wheels     ii) Il Fait Foid? Une Robe S'impose     ii) Cold Out? A Dress Is Essential     iii) Lignes Autour D'un Cercle     iii) Lines Around a Circle Genève GenevaConseils Pratiques en Attendant Practical Advice While You Wait Ce Qui Se Porte Cet Hiver What to Wear This Winter Ce Qui Ne Se Porte Pas Cet Hiver What Not to Wear This Winter Conseils d'une Consœur Advice from a Sister   Rapaces (1960) / Birds of Prey  Rhabdomancie  Dowsing Chant ArabeArab Song  Carré Blanc (1965) / White Square  I : "Où le Bas Blesse" / I: Where the Shoe Hurts Dans L'obscurité A Gauche In the Dark to the Left Leger Comme Une Navette Le Désir Light as a Shuttle Desire L'appel Amer d'un Sanglot The Bitter Call of Tears Dans Le Sillage Du Mont-Arbois In the Wake of Mont-Arbois Nuit De Veille Dans Une Cellule En Cristal De Roche Sleepless Nights in a Cell of Rock Crystal Le Soleil Dans Le Capricorne Sun in Capricorn  II : "L'Heure Erogene" / II: "The Erogenous Hour" Fleurie Comme La Luxure Flowered Like Lewdness Séance Tenante Right Away Papier D'argent Tin Foil L'Amoureuse Guerriere Woman Warrior in Love Souvenir Impose par le Nord au Sud Vaincu Memories Imposed by the North on a Conquered South Sous la Tour Centrale Under the Central Tower  III : "Verres Fumés" / III: "Smoked Glasses" L'Heure Velue The Hairy Hour La Piste du Brouillard The Path of Fog La Facade de l'Obsession The Face of Obsession Heureux les Étourdis Happy Are the Stunned Des Myriads d'Autres Morts A Myriad of More Deaths Sonne n'Écoute Personne n'Écoute Per One Listen to No One Listen to No   Les Damnations (1967) / Damnations  Au-Dela de la House Beyond the Swell Minuit à Perte de Vue Endlessly Midnight  Pandémonium (1976) / Pandemonium  Jasmin d'Hiver (1982) / Winter Jasmine  Flammes Immobiles (1985) / Still Flames  "Ne jamais dire son rêve" "Never share your dream" "Les eaux de ce pays-là ne s'écoulent jamais" "The waters of that country never flow" "Brûler l'encense dans la quiétude" "To burn incense in the quiet of a room"  Trous Noirs (1986) / Black Holes      

Review

"I'm so grateful to Moorhouse for her helping bring this remarkable poet's work to English readers, and help expand our knowledge of women writers throughout the world—helping buck against the historical chauvinism Mansour endured. I know my bookshelf will be better for it."—Diana Arterian, LitHub's The Annotated Nightstand
"Emilie Moorhouse's sharp, steamy translation of Syrian-Jewish poet Joyce Mansour . . . Surreal incarnations of raw female power—erotic, rageful—permeate."—Rebecca Morgan Frank, LitHub
"This ardent, well-honed collection coaxes Mansour's 'molecules of revolt' into jewel-bright, posthumous flares."—Joyelle McSweeney, Full Stop
"Erotic, subversive, sensual, vivacious, defiant, fragile, satirical, ironic, lyrical, eruptive, heretical, anguished, sexy, and buoyant."—Allan Graubard, Rain Taxi Review of Books
"This is a very welcome translation, one English readers can trust. Mansour should be far more read (in both French and English) than she is. Emilie Moorhouse has performed an invaluable service to her and to French literature in English."—Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, Cable Street
"Slippery, stained, and gloriously indelicate, Joyce Mansour reveals to us the grisly face of eros."—Elaine Kahn, author of Women in Public
"Fierce, uncompromising, intelligent, weird, assertive, abject—Joyce Mansour's poems are a long cry of female rage and desire. The world is 'a shitting bird,' the dead 'bloom like Parma hams,' and the patriarchy subverted, mocked, & challenged at every turn, in personal relationships with men, in the fatuous advice of women's magazines. 'I do not know hell,' Mansour writes, 'But my body has been burning ever since I was born.' These poems are the searing result of that life."—Kim Addonizio, author of Now We're Getting Somewhere"It is high time (and way past it!) that someone bring to publishing daylight the truly great range of poems by the English/Egyptian writer artist/entertainer Joyce Patricia Adès, whom we salute as Joyce Mansour. Emilie Moorhouse has just accomplished this feat and we can gladly say, to this bilingual and welcome presentation of a large selection of those texts with City Lights, a very loud hooray!"—Mary Ann Caws, author of Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism: Selected Essays
"Among the many dark pleasures of Emerald Wounds, most marvelous is Joyce Mansour's canny adaptation of the Surrealist impulse towards revolt to subversively femme ends. In Emilie Moorhouse's astonishingly fresh translations, these palm-sized poems are arousing, alarming, and, finally, transformational, offering outlandish anti-psalms, sex tips from the devil, adroit instruction manuals for surviving the eradicating world. Like emeralds held so tightly they bite the flesh, these poems are compressed, brilliant works of maximum refulgence."—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne"In Joyce Mansour's exuberant, macabre, strange and sexy poems, I find such kinship, such lineage, such permission. It is such a delight to read this collection and meet her. These poems invite me to be brave, to be loud, to cackle and mourn and seduce. I only wish we'd met sooner, that I'd known sooner to place myself in her lineage."—Safia Elhillo, author of Girls That Never Die"Transgressive delight and terror of the supreme surreal feminist in this remarkable and most original book of dreams. Mansour, 'an animal of the night,' has been waiting to be reclaimed and counted. She who 'prunes the sky with carnivorous thighs,' who ruse lies in a chignon is wonderfully abetted in these excellent, luminous translations. A poet who listens to the 'dialect of undressed sexes,' and 'pierces the stagnant eye of the night' is the aligning, yet jolting force we've all been anticipating. This is her moment."—Anne Waldman, author of Bard, Kinetic"In the poetry of Joyce Mansour, we feel the churn of the devouring and excreting body and its parts. Each part emits parts: the lover births his sex; the receptive octopus outputs its legs like a burst seedpod. Vicious as childbirth, delicate as the tension in a throat about to speak, Mansour's poems demand we attend to the forbidden maximums of our desires."—Sophia Dahlin, author of Natch
"This legendary Surrealist woman poet with her singular lyric fusion of love and death, phantasies of gleeful and grim inexorability, constructs radical strategies of irrational disjunction. . . .Translated with verve by Emilie Moorhouse."—Norma Cole, author of Fate News"Emerald Wounds feels like a resuscitation. Joyce Mansour's Arab Jewish consciousness sticks its tongue out in the face of macho Euro mores. Given new breath by translator Emilie Moorhouse, Mansour's work is phantastic, inverted, explicit, full of spells. It seems to predict and override the world's weakening lust, calling out from a past of feverish slits, Sekhmet and the joy of piss."—Tamara Faith Berger, author of Maidenhead"A revelation and delight to see: a poet whose work still speaks with immediacy decades after she was alive. We love seeing the original language juxtaposed against the translation — here done superbly by Emilie Moorhouse. Brava to all."—Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA
"Sparse and elegant . . . shot through with blood and violence, and a fierce sexuality borne of a life veined with loss and exile."—Susan Norton, Carmichael's Bookstore (Louisville, KY)

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Long Description

Rediscover Joyce Mansour, the most significant Surrealist poet to emerge from 1950s Paris. "You know very well, Joyce, that you are for me--and very objectively too--the greatest poet of our time. Surrealist poetry, that's you." --Andr

Review Quote

"Love is, for Mansour, a dominant passion . . . The urgent need to communicate the feelings it promotes leads her to adopt a tone that is sometimes harsh, violent even, but always sustained by an authenticity of inspiration that is its own justification. The poetry of Joyce Mansour thus taps a lyrical source of indisputable richness." --J.H. Matthews, Yale French Studies Praise for Joyce Mansour's Screams : "But it is the publication of a small book of poems which seems, in retrospect, to have been the poetic event of this year 1954. This is the first collection of Joyce Mansour: Screams (Seghers ed.). From the outset, the poetry of this young woman, who was still unknown to them, aroused in Breton and his friends much more than curiosity or even interest. "There is nothing here that does not spring from the darkest depths of being, where love and death, anguish and desire, pleasure and pain merge into a single consuming reality, which devours itself through the object of its lust," one could read about Screams in Medium. From then on Joyce Mansour collaborated on all surrealist publications and brought to the life of the group a unique, irreplaceable element."-- Jean-Louis B

Feature

A classic post-war Surrealist poet whose work has not yet received its due, and is ripe for discovery. Translator and editor Emilie Moorhouse describes Mansour as, "Baudelaire minus the shame or a Georges Bataille ' au feminin ,'" and will appeal to fans of both. Mansour's writing about unfettered female desire resonates in the work of contemporary poets like Harryette Mullen, Ariana Reines, Joyelle McSweeney, Kim Addonizio, and Elaine Kahn. Mansour's work is basically unavailable in English translation, the last edition having gone out of print some time ago. Emerald Wounds presents Mansour's poems in French alongside their English translations, the first collection of Mansour's poems to do so. There is not currently a collection of Mansour's work available in her native French, making this title all the more vital to the preservation and rediscovery of this classic Surrealist voice.

Excerpt from Book

Translating Desire: The Erotic-Macabre Poetry of Joyce Mansour Introduction by Emilie Moorhouse In 1966, the first English-language account of the desire-filled, erotic-macabre poems of cigar-smoking Egyptian surrealist Joyce Mansour appeared, perhaps fittingly, in the section of the journal Books Abroad called "Not in the Reviews." In this article, "The Poetry of Joyce Mansour," pioneering British scholar of surrealism J. H. Matthews laments Mansour''s lack of recognition from literary critics who seemed intent on ignoring her. Even today, a half-century later, Joyce Mansour''s work remains underappreciated in France and virtually unknown in the rest of the world. Given the entrenched sexism of literary circles, the fact that a woman''s shameless and provocative writing on sex and death--what Matthews terms her "cries of uninhibited desire"--has been shunned by the literary establishment for so long is hardly a surprise. In the fall of 2017, I was looking for poems in preparation for a literary translation workshop. A few days after I began my search, the #MeToo movement went viral, putting a new spotlight on sexism and the abuse of power in our cultural industries. What I found most striking among the ugly stories of assault, harassment, silencing, and coercion that were breaking on a daily basis was the extent to which our culture continually dismisses and denies the needs and desires of women, while centering the importance of male desire in so many narratives. I set new parameters on my search: I decided I needed to translate the writing of a woman who spoke openly and shamelessly about her desires. I knew that, as I looked further back in time, almost any woman who spoke her truth was likely to have been ignored, forgotten, dismissed, or worse. After all, if so many prominent women were experiencing abuse and silencing in 2017, how many prior works of art by women were relegated to the dark corners of history? Without a doubt, there were works that had been shelved and forgotten for the sole reason that they had been held to different standards than those written by men; women''s writing has often been judged as "too much": too sultry, too frigid, too hysterical. If the pre-2017 world had not been ready for these voices, perhaps we had finally reached a moment where our culture could embrace them. France, of course, has experienced periods of exceptional openness in publishing that benefited women writers; French-Canadian poet Anne H

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