Alan Bernheimer

DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes poet/translator Alan Bernheimer, to the store to discuss and sign, Lost Profiles on Tuesday, November 15th at 7:00pm.

Poet Alan Bernheimer provides a long overdue English translation of the French literary classic, Philippe Soupault’s Lost Profiles. It is a retrospective of a crucial period in modernism written by Soupault, the co-founder of the surrealist movement. Opening with a reminiscence of the international Dada movement in the late 1910s and its transformation into the beginnings of surrealism, Lost Profiles ushers its readers into encounters with a variety of literary lions: We meet an elegant Marcel Proust, renting five adjoining rooms at an expensive hotel to “contain” the silence needed to produce Remembrance of Things Past; an exhausted James Joyce putting himself through grueling translation sessions for Finnegans Wake; and an enigmatic Apollinaire in search of the ultimate “objet trouve.” Soupault sketches lively portraits of surrealist precursors like Pierre Reverdy and Blaise Cendrars, a moving account of his tragic fellow surrealist Rene Crevel, and the story of his unlikely friendship with right-wing anti-Vichy critic George Bernanos. The collection ends with essays on two modernist forerunners, Charles Baudelaire and Henri Rousseau. With an afterword by Ron Padgett recounting his meeting with Soupault in the mid 70’s and a preface by Breton biographer Mark Polizzotti, Lost Profiles confirms Soupault’s place in the vanguard of twentieth-century literature.

Alan Bernheimer’s most recent poetry collection is The Spoonlight Institute. He has lived in the Bay Area since the late 1970s, where he was active in Poets Theater and produced a radio program, In the American Tree, of new writing by poets. He has translated works by Robert Desnos and Valery Larbaud.