Mary Ann Caws

A biography of the flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde Mina Loy.

Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived variously in New York, Europe and, finally, Aspen, Colorado, where she died in 1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a poet, painter, novelist, essayist, manifesto writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer. Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, feminism, fashion, and everything modern and modernist.

This new account by Mary Ann Caws explores Mina Loy’s exceptional life, and features many rare images of Loy and her husband, the Swiss writer, poet, artist, boxer and provocateur Arthur Cravan, who disappeared without trace in 1918.

Poetry by one of the most powerful female figures in twentieth-century surrealism, now collected in English for the very first time.

Alice Paalen Rahon was a shapeshifter, a surrealist poet turned painter who was born French and died a naturalized citizen of Mexico. Along with her first husband, the artist Wolfgang Paalen, her circle included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Joan Miró, Paul Éluard, Man Ray, and Anaïs Nin. Bicultural, bisexual, and fiercely independent, her romantic life included affairs with Pablo Picasso and the poet Valentine Penrose. This new selection of Rahon’s poems, included both in the original French and in translation by Mary Ann Caws, celebrates the visionary work of a woman who defied easy definition. Her spellbinding poems, inspired by prehistoric art, lost love, and her travels around the globe, weave together dream, fantasy, and madness.

Mary Ann Caws, co-translator with Nancy Kline Earth

Born in 1925 in Transylvania into a Hungarian family, Lorand Gaspar grew up speaking Hungarian, Romanian, German and also French, which would become the language in which he wrote. Endowed with many gifts, all of which he grandly used, Gaspar is a surgeon, a poet, and a writer of scientific and lyric prose in addition to a translator of Spinoza, Rilke, Seferis and others. Sol Absolu et Autres Textes, edited and translated by Mary Ann Caws and Nancy Kline, contains abundant evidence of Gaspar's gifts: an autobiographical essay, a reflection on scientific and medical matters, and poems from diverse periods and places.

Food has always played a role in art, but how well and what did the artists themselves eat? Exploring a panoply of artworks of food, cooking, and eating from Europe and the Americas, Caws opens a window into the lives of artists, writers, and poets in the kitchen and the studio, from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. She examines the parallels between the art of cuisine and the visual arts and literature, using artworks, diaries, novels, letters, and poems to illuminate the significance of particular ingredients and dishes in the lives of the world's greatest artists. In between, she supplies numerous recipes from these artists-including Ezra Pound's poetic eggs, Cézanne’s baked tomatoes, and Monet's madeleines-alongside one hundred color illustrations and thought-provoking selections from both poetry and prose.

The great Pierre Reverdy, comrade to Picasso and Braque, peer and contemporary of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, is among the most mysteriously satisfying of twentieth-century poets, his poems an uncanny mixture of the simple and the sublime. Reverdy's poetry has exerted a special attraction on American poets from Kenneth Rexroth to John Ashbery, and this new selection, featuring the work of fourteen distinguished translators, most of it appearing here for the first time, documents that ongoing relationship while offering readers the essential work of an extraordinary writer. Among the translators are Caws and Marilyn Hacker (Prof. Emer., City, French). 

More than thirty years ago, Mary Ann Caws, then a young professor, moved to Provence to translate the poetry of Provençal poet René Char. What sounded like a simple romantic sojourn turned into a journey of self-discovery on the joys of living simply and enjoying the maxims of the Provençal good life-good company, good food, and great wine, preferably from your neighbor's vineyard. The process of preparing food and then sharing it with friends and neighbors came to embody the essence of their existence on the hillside of Mount Vertaux. Now, in this delightful and lyric meditation on Provence and its food, Mary Ann invites you to sit down at her table and share in some of her favorite recipes, the recipes of her neighbors, and her delicious memories of life in France. 

Drawing from the Yale University archive and offering a catalogue of over 150 illustrations of Picasso's work, Picasso and the Allure of Language documents the history of modernism and the influence literature and literary friendships had on the artist. Examples of Picasso's earliest collaborations with writers and poets like Max Jacob, Gertrude Stein, and Guillaume Apollinaire show how the artist marries text and image in his work to surprising effect. Distinguished authorities in art and literature investigate Picasso's connection to language from historical, linguistic, and visual perspectives and place Picasso's work within a literary context. Susan Greenberg Fisher is the Horace W. Goldsmith Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery.

“Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure—that of being Salvador Dalí.” A force unto himself, an icon of outrageousness, artistic brilliance, eccentricity, and unmistakable style, Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domènech, Marquis of Pubol, was one of the foremost artists of the twentieth century and, in this concise narrative, acclaimed art historian Mary Ann Caws provides a sharply written survey of his life and work, examining every twist and turn in Dalí’s long and multifaceted career and the pivotal artistic movements at whose center he stood. Caws also considers his relationships with his family, his lovers, and his friends; and his writings, drawings, photography, and painted works offer up new clues about the artist under Caws’s incisive eye, as she analyzes his lesser-known writings and creative works, as well as his Surrealist paintings and “hand-painted dream photographs” such as The Persistence of Memory. Mary Ann Caws is a distinguished professor of comparative literature, English, and French at the Graduate Center.

Caws tells us of her early life in North Carolina where she made her debut and began to struggle with accepted social values; of her educational experiences at Bryn Mawr, in Paris, and at Yale-where she weds a professor of philosophy; of the joys, small and large, of a complicated marriage that ends in divorce, after which she strives toward self-sufficiency and self-understanding; of her passion for writing, teaching, art, and poetry; of her friendships with the writers, artists, and intellectuals who provided sanctuary for her mind and heart; and of the many light-filled summers spent with her children at their house in Provence. Returning to visit the southern landscape and her hometown, she dwells on the steadying influence in her life of a singular place: the boathouse in New York's Central Park where for most of her adulthood she has retreated for peace and solace.

This revised edition (with additional poems) is the single most comprehensive critical edition of Breton's poems available in English. Other editions may claim to be "comprehensive," but none come close to the range of poems presented in this edition. Surrealist scholar Jean-Pierre Cauvin and Breton scholar Mary Ann Caws translate and edit this title with critical introductions, prefaces, commentary, bibliography, and notes. This title has remained elusive and expensive in the used market, as students and scholars have snapped up the few copies ever available through any book search. Like him or hate him, few have had as important an impact on twentieth-century artistic thought and culture as Breton and his Surrealist movement. 

This book explores the life and art of seven extraordinary women of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, who had a tremendous if not yet fully acknowledged impact on the modernist movement and its reception. Judith Gautier, Suzanne Valadon, Dorothy Bussy, Dora Carrington, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Emily Carr and Claude Cahun were powerful forces in their various fields. Each lived an unusual life, the eccentricity of which was in large part responsible for its creative intensity. Drawing on much unpublished material, the stories recounted here, often involving very famous men-including Utrillo, Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Wagner, Hugo, Rilke, and Gide-show a singular courage and determination. Whether as writers, translators, painters, or photographers, these innovators stood out among their contemporaries as remarkable contributors to modernism. 

This volume presents the text of Capital of Pain in its entirety in a bilingual format. Translator Mary Ann Caws also provides an insightful and in-depth survey of Eluard's poems and writings. 

Henry James was an intensely visual writer-in his notebooks he recorded the observation that "the scenic method is my absolute, my imperative, my only salvation." This concise illustrated biography of the master opens new doors to James's readers and students of his work by showing the vast scope of the master's visual imagination. The images collected in this book, some previously unpublished, depict the members of his illustrious and accomplished family; artwork that influenced him; as well as the friends and acquaintances who formed the inspiration for James's unforgettable protagonists and the places in Boston, London, and Venice that formed the settings for his novels.

In eight elegant chapters Caws reflects on translations that took her by surprise, and shows how the elimination of certain passages from the original-Stéphane Mallarmé translating Tennyson, Ezra Pound interpreting the troubadours, or Clara Malraux, Charles Mauron, and Marguerite Yourcenar rendering Virginia Woolf into French-often produces a greater and more coherent art. Alternatively, some translations-Yves Bonnefoy's of Shakespeare, Keats, and Yeats into French-require more lines in order to fully capture the many facets of the original. On other occasions, Caws argues, a swerve in meaning-as in Beckett translating himself into French or English-can produce a new text, just as true as the original. Imbued with Caws's personal observations on the relationship between translators and the authors they translate, Surprised in Translation will interest a wide range of readers, including students of translation, professional literary translators, and scholars of modern and comparative literature. 

'Approximate Man' and Other Writings is the only English language source for Tzara's majestic and powerful epic poem 'The Approximate Man.' This updated edition, translated and edited by renowned Dada/Surrealist scholar Mary Ann Caws, also contains an extensive collection of other writings by Tzara not often found in other English-language titles. Mary Ann Caws also provides an essay new to this edition that helps set the context of 'Approximate Man.' Originally published in 1973, the book has continued to be one of the true Tzara English-language rarities.

This book is a concise and lively study of the enormously productive and varied life and art of one of the twentieth century's most influential artistic figures. The author describes the artist's life thematically and chronologically, and also takes as focal points Picasso's relationships with his close friends and partners as they changed through the various periods of his life: in Barcelona, Paris, and Provence. She provides biographical context to Picasso's work, focusing on the time around Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and then Guernica, as well as the changes and consistencies in his oeuvre over the twentieth century. Throughout, the author examines Picasso's juggling of viewpoints, artistic strategies, loves, and friends, which she interprets as part of the expansion of the artist's genius and personality, represented by the figures of the Harlequin, the clown, and the acrobat. 

Surrealism is a survey of the twentieth century's longest-lasting and, arguably, most influential art movement. Championed and held together by André Breton for more than forty years, Surrealism was France's major avant-garde artistic tendency from 1924 onward, rapidly spreading around the globe to become an international phenomenon.  During World War II Surrealism's exiled artists and writers had a major impact on American art and were a primary influence for the Abstract Expressionist generation.  Caws is particularly qualified to write about the movement: she has translated many of Surrealism's major texts, and published extensively on Surrealist art and writings. 

The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry presents a comprehensive bilingual representation of French poetic achievement in the twentieth century, from the turn-of-the century poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire to the high modernist art of Samuel Beckett to the contemporary edgier verse of Michel Houellebecq. Caws has chosen work from more than 100 poets for this anthology; her deliberately wide-ranging selection includes work by Francophone poets, writers better known for accomplishments in other genres, and many more female poets than typically represented in anthologies of modern French literature. The anthology is arranged chronologically and broken into periods, beginning with the symbolist and post-symbolist poets (1897-1915) and ending with the contemporary scene (1981-2000). Short introductory essays set the tone for each section. 

Maria McDonald Jolas, member of a distinguished Kentucky family and cofounder with Eugene Jolas of the international literary journal transition, has been called, somewhat to her discomfort, the leading lady of Paris literati of the Thirties." The collection, edited and introduced by Professor Mary Ann Caws, demonstrates why Jolas deserved those accolades and takes full measure of her contribution to our understanding of modernism. Caws supplements Jolas' memoir with radio addresses, lectures, journal entries, and letters, giving voice to a woman whose legacy has too often been effaced by that of her colorful husband and famous friends.

Prolific author/editor/translator Mary Ann Caws-her books Manifesto, Surrealist Painters, and Picasso's Weeping Women were all published last year-edited this collection of Surrealist love poems, described as erotic, impassioned and necrophilic works [that] celebrate the idea of obsessive and transformative love" by Publisher's Weekly. Poems by the likes of art's original "bad boys," Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, as well as by Philippe Soupault, Octavio Paz, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Frida Kahlo, are gathered here, accompanied by fourteen lushly printed photos by Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Claude Cahun. ("The embrace of poetry like that of bodies / As long as it lasts / Shuts out all the woes of the world-Breton.)

This book is co-authored by Yves Bonnetoy, Jane Mayo Roos, and Jeanine Parisier Plottel.