Nadja

By: André Breton, Mark Polizzotti - translator

Narrated by: Peter Noble

In Paris, during the fall of 1926, André Breton met a young woman from the provinces who called herself Nadja because, she said, "in Russian it's the beginning of the word for hope, and because it's only the beginning." Their love affair was brief, intense, and intensely self-conscious. They both talked exuberantly of the book that Breton would make out of their days and nights. And indeed a year later (after Nadja was institutionalized and Breton had moved on to other love affairs) he began to write Nadja—a book of memory and analysis taking its cue in part from Freud's case studies, but also a book of ingeniously intercut images, drawing on Surrealist ideas to portray a soul whose very way of being approaches, in Breton's words, "the extreme limit of the Surrealist aspiration."

In this, the first new translation of Nadja in more than sixty years, Mark Polizzotti captures the youthful excitement, the abiding strangeness, and above all the freshness of Breton's prose. He also provides an illuminating introduction about the fate of the real Nadja, whose identity remained jealously guarded until the twenty-first century. A gripping tale of infatuation and a meditation on the surrealism of everyday life, Nadja is still a thing of convulsive beauty, impossible to pin or put down, a precursor to works of Julien Gracq, Julio Cortázar, and W. G. Sebald.

©2025 Mark Polizzotti (translation and introduction) (P)2025 Tantor Media

a good translation of a difficult text

This work starts and ends with two of the most iconic lines ever written in French literature. Their impact is blunted and somewhat lost in translation, but the material between, which comes across as stodgy and pretentious in the original is here translated into a version of the main story (Breton meets a woman by chance on the streets of Paris who becomes his muse, then discovers she is a mental patient) shines through with clarity and legibility. This translation should help anyone struggling to read the text in the original.