Paul Eluard 1895-1952
biography
Born in 1895 at Saint Denis, on the outskirts of Paris, Paul Eluard published his first book of poetry at eighteen, when confined to a Swiss sanatorium for tuberculosis. There he met Gala, the beautiful Russian woman he would marry in the midst of the war, four years later.
Capital of Pain, comprising many of the poems written between 1921 and 1926, is widely considered Eluard's finest surrealist achievement. The collection was acclaimed as the unified exponent of Surrealism's creative intentions.
"Of all the surrealist poets, Eluard is unquestionably the clearest in his poetry and in his vision. He is in some senses a simple poet, and certainly he is a poet of a simple, luminious love in all its purity and its order. But more significantly, he is a surrealist poet, faithful until the end of his life to the play of dualities which give to surrealism its genuine profundity and its unlimited potentiality of expansion."
selected works in translation
Capital of Pain translated by Richard Weisman (Mushinsha/Grossman Press, 1973)
Shadows and Sun translated by Llyod Alexander and Cicely Buckley (Oyster River Press, 1995)
selected writing in The Dada Painters and Poets edited by Robert Motherwell (Belknap, 1981)
selected poems in The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry edited by Paul Auster (Vintage, 1982)
Selected Poems translated by Lloyd Alexander (New Directions, 1946)
poetry
lady love
She is standing on my eyelids
And her hair is in my hair
She has the color of my eye
She has the body of my hand
In my shade she is engulfed
As a stone against the sky
She will never close her eyes
And she does not let me sleep
And her dreams in the bright day
Make the suns evaporate
And me laugh cry and laugh
Speak when I have nothing to say
please click here for the french version of this text
at the window
I have not always had this certainty, this pessimism which reassures the best among us. There was a time when my friends laughed at me. I was not the master of my words. A certain indifference, I have not always known well what I wanted to say, but most often it was because I had nothing to say. The neccessity of speaking and the desire not to be heard. My life hanging only by a thread.
There was a time when I seemed to understand nothing. My chains floated on the water.
All my desires are born of my dreams. And I have proven my love with words. To what fantastic creatures have I entrusted myself, in what dolorous and ravishing world has my imagination enclosed me? I am sure of having been loved in the most mysterious of domains, my own. The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not touch the flesh of my love. My amorous imagination has always been constant and high enough so that nothing could attempt to convince me of error.
the river
The river I have under my tongue,
Unimaginable water, my little boat,
And curtains lowered, let's speak.
return to the library
return to kicking giants