EMBIRICOS, Andreas.

£135 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Amour Amour: writings or personal mythology. First edition, first impression, remarkably uncommon, apparently the first appearance in English - translation by Nikos Stangos and Alan Ross - of the premier Greek surrealist, Andreas Embiricos (1901-1975). "In this book of twenty-four stories... His characters, defying all convention, behave like the ancient gods in their murderous or pleasure-seeking expeditions, fulfilling instincts latent in everyone. The almost Victorian mood and formal language of these stories is brought into focus by their startling and uninhibited eroticism" (jacket blurb). Embiricos came from a wealthy family of shipowners but, after working at the London branch of the business, threw it up and moved to Paris, where he came under the influence of André Breton and the surrealists, and studied psychoanalysis with René Laforgue. "When he returned to Greece in 1932, he not only set up practice as the first psychoanalyst in Greece, but he also lectured on surrealism and in 1935 published Blast Furnace, prose poems in automatic writing of the purest surrealist cast. Eleven years later he published Hinterland (which may be a deliberate response to the Greek title of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, translated into Greek by George Seferis), surrealist poems in free verse, and throughout his life remained true to the main tenets of an inspiration that wells up primarily from the subconscious" (Poetry International website, retrieved 8 December 2020).

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