New Translations of Surrealist Women: Joyce Mansour and Valentine Penrose

Mia X. Pérez is from Seattle, Washington. They are a founding editor of the online literary journal Psychopomp, and their work has been published or is forthcoming in The Brooklyn Review, Closed Eye Open, AGON, Vestiges, mercury firs, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. Currently a PhD candidate of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center, CUNY, their research focuses on Romantic literature, ecological thought, and representations of decay. The complete poems of Valentine Penrose, Of Thorn and Wing, is their first full-length translation and will be available from World Poetry Books in November 2026.

C. Francis Fisher received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Yale Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Her poem, “Self-Portrait at 25”, was selected for the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize. She has been supported by fellowships from The Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. She curates Colloquy, an event series that provides a forum for translators to engage with live audiences in an exploration of the art of translation. In the Glittering Maw is her first book of translations.

Mark Polizzotti’s translations ofworks by Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, Scholastique Mukasonga, and Patrick Modiano, among others, have won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and been shortlisted for the National Book Award and the International Booker Prize. He is the author of twelve books, including Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, Why Surrealism Matters, and Jump Cuts: Essays.

Egyptian exile Joyce Mansour was one of the most important writers to join André Breton’s Paris Surrealist group after the Second World War. This exciting collection is a milestone in the ongoing rediscovery of one of the most powerful voices of 20th-century Surrealism. Known during her lifetime primarily as a poet, Mansour also published a small but significant body of prose and Satisfied Sarcophagi collects her complete short stories.

Mansour portrays a universe of constant transformation and constant violence, weaving an eroticized surrealist texture from unsettling areas of the psyche. With Satisfied Sarcophagi –brought into English by noted Mansour translator C. Francis Fisher–Joyce Mansour rightly claims her place as a take-no-prisoners bad-girl progenitor of a growing body of women’s writing known in the 21st century as “fantastic/erotic horror.”

Of Thorn and Wing translated by Mia X. Pérez first English-language translation of the collected poems of Valentine Penrose, one of the earliest contributors to the Surrealist movement of the 1920s, and, in the words of Paul Éluard, “one of the most eminent French women poets.”

Though Penrose’s poetry partakes in the liberatory potential of Surrealist literary technique, her uniquely lucid automatism and incantatory lyricism deviated significantly from the movement’s typical imagery and theoretical modes. A rebel in every area of her life, Penrose refused to conform to any social or literary convention. Infusing her poems with arcane mysticism, sapphic eroticism, literary erudition, and revolutionary politics, Penrose challenges the signature gendered tropes of Surrealism like the femme-enfant and the passive female muse. Increasingly crafted yet paradoxically and relentlessly mutable, Penrose’s poetry presents an alchemical labyrinth where one is no longer forced to suffer the distinction between subject and object, self and other.