Surrealist Women by Penelope Rosemont

Author:Penelope Rosemont
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 1998-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Nora Mitrani

Born in 1921 in Sofia, Bulgaria, of Spanish-Jewish and Italian parents, Nora Mitrani moved to Paris in her teens. A philosophy student at the Sorbonne, she completed a thesis on Malebranche and Maine de Biran, A Trotskyist during the war, she later frequented the anarchist milieu. For many years she worked at the Paris Center for Sociological Studies (directed by Georges Gurvitch).

She joined the Surrealist Group in 1947 and remained one of its most active militants and spokespersons until her death of cancer in 1961, shortly before her fortieth birthday. She collaborated on all of the group’s periodicals in those years—. Néon, Médium, Le Surréalisme, même, and BIEF —as well as several other collective publications, and she cosigned virtually every surrealist tract during those years.

In 1950 she contributed an important text, “Rose au coeur violet” [Violet-Hearted Rose], to the volume Hans Bellmer, 1934-1950, it included a series of anagrams (based on Mitrani’s title) coauthored with Bellmer. She traveled to Portugal the same year, where she encountered Portuguese surrealist poet Alexandre O’Neill and the work of the great presurrealist, Fernando Pessoa, which she was among the first to introduce to France.

Mitrani’s writings are not voluminous, but they cover a wide range; the Marquis de Sade, popular culture, Kierkegaard, film noir, and critical studies of technocracy, bureaucracy, and nuclear energy. Most of her contributions to surrealist publications were collected in 1988 under the title Rose au coeur violet (Paris: Terrain Vague), prefaced by Julien Gracq.

“Scandal With a Secret Face” appeared in the Almanach Surréaliste du démi-siècle (1950); “Blacker Than Black,” in Médium-, Informations surréalistes no. 4 (February 1953); “About Cats and Magnolias,” in Le Surréalisme, même no. 1 (October 1956); “Poetry: Freedom of Being,” introducing a letter of Fernando Pessoa’s and several of his poems, in Le Surréalisme, même no. 2 (1957), “On Slaves, Suffragettes and the Whip,” in Le Surréalisme, même no. 3 (1957), and the “Definitions” from the Succinct Lexicon of Eroticism included in the catalog of the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris (1959).

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