https://www.full-stop.net/2023/11/02/features/joyellemcsweeney/yet-another-dagger-pulsing-under-the-rain-why-we-need-joyce-mansour-and-surrealism/ So-so review and overview of Mansour's work, with from some very silly remarks like Breton's approval making her "an absolute exception among Surrealist women". But since hardly anyone talks about Mansour in English at all, I'll take what I can get. I had the much larger edition translated by Serge Gavronsky and have to say I found his translations sometimes flat; what I've seen from Moorhouse looks better and I'll be getting a copy of this edition when I can. ...The latest in this starry cavalcade of Surrealists to return to (Anglophone) earth in this late, accursed hour is Syrian-Jewish Anglo-Egyptian poet Joyce Mansour, thanks to the new volume Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems, translated by Emilie Moorhouse, selected and edited by Moorhouse with Garret Caples and published by City Lights. The title Emerald Wounds already spasms with evocative contradiction, inscribing Mansour as the capital-S Surrealist she is. Not only are emeralds and wounds seemingly polar opposites in terms of their positive and negative cultural valences, but also, as jewels, emeralds scatter dazzling light outwards while wounds draw the sick vision perversely in. In this sense, perhaps jewels are literally repulsive, as they repel light beams, while wounds are attractive, as they morbidly absorb the gaze. Closely considered, the poles of attraction and repulsion evoked by this title reverse, forming a voltaic cell of paradox, of the type Surrealism holds to be foundational—”as beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table,” as the catechism of orthodox Surrealism goes...
