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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.”—André Breton
Joyce Mansour, a Syrian Jewish exile from Egypt, was 25 years old when she published her first book in Paris in 1953. Her fierce, macabre, erotically charged works caught the eye of André Breton, who welcomed her into his Surrealist group and became her lifelong friend and ally. Despite her success in surrealist circles, her books received scant attention from the literary establishment, which is hardly surprising since Mansour's favorite topics happened to be two of society's greatest fears: death and unfettered female desire.
Now, over half a century later, Mansour's time has come. Emerald Wounds collects her most important work, spanning the entire arc of her career, from the gothic, minimalist fragments of her first published work to the serpentine power of her poems of the 1980s. In fresh new translations, Mansour's voice surges forth uncensored and raw, communicating the frustrations, anger, and sadness of an intelligent, worldly woman who defies the constraints and oppression of a male-dominated society. Mansour is a poet the world needs today.
"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)
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 André 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.
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
Geneva
Conseils 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 Arabe
Arab 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