Philippe Soupault

Soupault, Philippe (1897-1990). French poet and novelist, but also essayist, critic, anthologist, translator, journalist, and broadcaster. He was a Dadaist and the co-author with Breton of the first Surrealist text, Les Champs magnétiques (1920). He published his first collection of poems, Aquarium, in 1917, followed by Rose des vents (1920), Westwego (1922), and Georgia (1926), all marked by a febrile modernism. Also in the 1920s he embarked on a succession of novels, including Le Bon Apôtre (1923), Les Frères Durandeau (1924), and Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (1928), where, as in many of his other writings, there is an almost obsessive oscillation between movement and immobility. During roughly the same period he produced a series of studies devoted to the Douanier Rousseau, Apollinaire, Lautréamont, Blake, Lurçat, Uccello, Charlie Chaplin, and Baudelaire.

After his expulsion from the Surrealist group in 1926 his wanderlust was partly satisfied by a new career as an international reporter, especially in the 1930s. In 1938 he was appointed director at Radio-Tunis and during the war he held a similar post with the Free French station in Algiers, where his contributions to the review Fontaine included the poem ‘Ode à Londres bombardée’. After the war he combined his radio work with writing.

[Keith Aspley]

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Philippe Soupault (2 August 1897, Chaville, Hauts-de-Seine – 12 March 1990) was a French writer and poet, novelist, critic, and political activist. He was characterized by the Dadaist style and later initiated the Surrealist style with André Breton. Soupault initiated the periodical Littérature together with the writers Breton and Louis Aragon in Paris during 1919, which, for many, dates the beginnings of Surrealism ^[1]. The first book of automatic writing, Les champs magnétiques (1920), was co-authored by Soupault and Breton. After imprisonment by the Nazis during World War II, Soupault traveled to the United States but returned subsequently to France. His works include such large volumes of poetry as Aquarium (1917) and Rose des vents [compass card] (1920) and the novel Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (1928; tr. Last Nights of Paris, 1929).

During 1957, he wrote the libretto for Germaine Tailleferre's Opera "La Petite Sirène", based on Hans Christian Andersen's tale "The Little Mermaid". The work was broadcast by French Radio National during 1959.

In 1990, the year Soupault died, Serbian rock band Bjesovi recorded their version of his poem Georgia in Serbian.

References

1. ^ Montagu, J. (2002). The Surrealists. Revolutionaries in Art and Writing 1919-35. London: Tate Publishing

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