Robert desnos biography completely wrong

Robert Desnos was born in Paris on 4 July 1900,the son of a successful café owner,He was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement.

When World War II broke out in 1939, he  was drafted as a sergeant. His wartime journalism appeared in magazines such as Europe, Commune, and Ce-Soir. In 1940, he started writing for the newspaper Aujourd’hui.

By the early 1940s, he was working for the French Resistance, provided information collected during his job at the paper Aujourd’hui and made false identity papers. As well as  publishing, articles critical of the Occupation, under pseudonyms.

The Nazis eventually discovered his role in the Resistance and was arrested by the Gestapo on 22 February 1944.

Desnos was first  sent to Auschwitz, but was later  transferred to Theresienstadt concentration camp via Buchenwald concentration camp.He died on June 8 1945 in “Malá pevnost”, which was an inner part of Terezín used only for political prisoners, from typhoid, a month after the camp had been liberated by the allies.

Ending the blog with a translated version of  one of his poems

Epitaph

lived in those times. For a thousand years
I have been dead. Not fallen, but hunted;
When all human decency was imprisoned,
I was free amongst the masked slaves.

I lived in those times, yet I was free.
I watched the river, the earth, the sky,
Turning around me, keeping their balance,
The seasons provided their birds and their honey.

You who live, what have you made of your luck?
Do you regret the time when I struggled?
Have you cultivated for the common harvest?
Have you enriched the town I lived in?

Living men, think nothing of me. I am dead.
Nothing survives of my spirit or my body.

Dreaming as one.

By DAVID ROSENBERG.

LESS AMBITIOUS THAN Lewis Warsh, when he worked on Robert Desnos’s small book of an epic poem, Night of Loveless Nights, I translated some short ones:

Dialogue

—Nothing interests me

—Laughs, lovingly, Therese

Actually, of course, Desnos is quite interested in Therese, but she fails to take him seriously. Which one is alive? In this tiny poem, Therese resurrects him from the dead of “nothing”, so that Desnos can lose her again: she is enlivened only by the poem. Or: Therese is in dialogue with herself, doubly distant in her self-love. What it can’t be is an homage; it’d be a burlesque of a coquette. So, is it comedy or tragedy? Rather, it’s a blues. With these six words, the trimeter is stretched from nothing (as it were) in the first line to a double caesura in the second.

And with this tiny piece among others, Desnos has brought American blues to Paris, to underscore the jazz age. Here, it’s an advance on the strength of imagism in Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” (“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:/ Petals on a wet, black bough.”) What Pound called “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,” has become within almost the same period and place (both poems were written in Paris) more of an intellectual and emotional drama in Desnos’s instant of time.

Night of Loveless Nights works hundreds of lines to the same effect. It invokes every mode from epic to lyric, yet it’s none of them, nor is it Apollinaire’s early jazz. It’s a solo theater of the blues, an orchestration of despair raised to the level of a post-devil-may- care postwar goodbye to romantic,

Quick: name the dominant figures of surrealism. If you’re thinking of visual arts: Magritte. Leonora Carrington. Dali. If you’re a writer, you might imagine Lorca or Apollinaire. You might picture Andre Breton, the colossus and self-styled leader of the movement. It’s from Breton that we get surrealism’s interest in dreams and automatic writing, and its valuing of outsider art, with its privileging of creativity that comes from outside of mainstream culture. Breton also pushed the notion that surrealism should be practicable by any man or woman—though the artistic end products of most surrealist artists proved to be as difficult and obscure as most other texts coming out of modernist literature.

One name you might not know: Robert Desnos. Excommunicated from the movement by Breton, Desnos is at once an artist who troubles the traditional narrative of surrealism and who embodies most wholly some of its most important tenets. Despite Breton’s on-paper embrace of anti-elitism in art, it annoyed him that Desnos came from a working class background and—even more—that Desnos held down a day job as a journalist. More importantly, though, the work itself strays from surrealism’s irrationality, obscurity, and inaccessibility through Desnos’s use of concrete images, plain diction, and traditional structures and patterns.

Desnos’s poem “I Have Dreamed of You So Much” is a particularly masterful example. The title contains an address—an immediate gesture toward inclusion of the reader, rather than alienation. From the first line, the speaker admits the difficulty of balancing the dream and the reality of the “you”: “I have dreamed of you so much that you lose your reality.” This line is traditionally surrealist and typically Desnos; in an introduction to one of his volumes, Desnos wrote that the desire was in “placing dream and reality on the same level without caring whether it is all false or all true.” However, the possible loss of the “you” to unreality is a source o

French writer

Robert Desnos (French:[ʁɔbɛʁdɛsnos]; 4 July 1900 – 8 June 1945) was a French poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement.

Early life

Robert Desnos was born in Paris on 4 July 1900, the son of a licensed dealer in game and poultry at the Halles market. Desnos attended commercial college, and started work as a clerk. He also worked as an amanuensis for journalist Jean de Bonnefon. After that he worked as a literary columnist for the newspaper Paris-Soir.

Career

The first poems by Desnos to appear in print were published in 1917 in La Tribune des Jeunes (Platform for Youth) and in 1919 in the avant-garde review Le Trait d'union (Hyphen), and also the same year in the Dadaist magazine Littérature. In 1922 he published his first book, a collection of surrealistic aphorisms, with the title Rrose Sélavy (the name adopted as an "alternative persona" by the avant-garde French artist Marcel Duchamp; a pun on "Eros, c'est la vie").

In 1919 he met the poet Benjamin Péret, who introduced him to the Paris Dada group and André Breton, with whom he soon became friends. In 1920, he did his military service which led him to Chaumont and then Morocco.

While working as a literary columnist for Paris-Soir, Desnos was an active member of the Surrealist group and developed a particular talent for automatic writing. He, together with writers such as Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, would form the literary vanguard of surrealism. André Breton included two photographs of Desnos sleeping in his surrealist novel Nadja. Although he was praised by Breton in his 1924 Manifeste du Surréalisme for being the movement's "prophet", Desnos disagreed with Surrealism's involvement in communist politics, which caused a rift between him and Breton. Desnos continued work as a columnist.

In 1926 he composed The Night of Loveless Nights, a lyric poem dealing with solitude curiously written in classi