Mitteleuropa Surrealism isn’t what it was when the Balkans, the Orthodox Church, and the Ottoman Empire brooded in the background. Surrealist poems, those uncompromising, gritty, erotic protests against logic or meaning, were once the dreams Kafka suffered, the dreams of an insurance clerk. In America, Surrealists like Charles Simic write like this:
They had already attached the evening’s
tears to the windowpanes.
The general was busy with the ant farmin his head.
The holy saints in their tombs were burning,all except one who was a prisoner of a
dark-haired movie star.
Fanciful, mild-mannered (you’re in danger of stubbing your toe on the meaning), the poems in Walking the Black Cat[1] often sound like translations, or merely like translators. (Many American Surrealists seem to know the originals only in translation—why shouldn’t they sound like translators?) Surrealism isn’t the same in a land of Burger Heaven, Frito Banditos, and drive-in movies.
Simic’s poems favor whimsical, offbeat subjects: bad TVreception, kitchen implements that talk back, a charm-school proprietor, a garden of barbed wire. Or they’re about wives, playing cards, cats (a lot of cats), ghosts, any old thing, as long as it can be treated in easy-chair fashion. At worst the poems break down into a shudder of random statement and low-voltage detail: “The blue trees argue with the red wind.// The white mare has a peacock for a servant.” Who would have thought even Surrealism would