Translating Desire: The Erotic-Macabre Poetry of Joyce Mansour Introduction by Emilie Moorhouse In 1966, the first English-language account of the desire-filled, erotic-macabre poems of cigar-smoking Egyptian surrealist Joyce Mansour appeared, perhaps fittingly, in the section of the journal Books Abroad called "Not in the Reviews." In this article, "The Poetry of Joyce Mansour," pioneering British scholar of surrealism J. H. Matthews laments Mansour''s lack of recognition from literary critics who seemed intent on ignoring her. Even today, a half-century later, Joyce Mansour''s work remains underappreciated in France and virtually unknown in the rest of the world. Given the entrenched sexism of literary circles, the fact that a woman''s shameless and provocative writing on sex and death--what Matthews terms her "cries of uninhibited desire"--has been shunned by the literary establishment for so long is hardly a surprise. In the fall of 2017, I was looking for poems in preparation for a literary translation workshop. A few days after I began my search, the #MeToo movement went viral, putting a new spotlight on sexism and the abuse of power in our cultural industries.

What I found most striking among the ugly stories of assault, harassment, silencing, and coercion that were breaking on a daily basis was the extent to which our culture continually dismisses and denies the needs and desires of women, while centering the importance of male desire in so many narratives. I set new parameters on my search: I decided I needed to translate the writing of a woman who spoke openly and shamelessly about her desires. I knew that, as I looked further back in time, almost any woman who spoke her truth was likely to have been ignored, forgotten, dismissed, or worse. After all, if so many prominent women were experiencing abuse and silencing in 2017, how many prior works of art by women were relegated to the dark corners of history? Without a doubt, there were works that had been shelved and forgotten for the sole reason that they had been held to different standards than those written by men; women''s writing has often been judged as "too much": too sultry, too frigid, too hysterical. If the pre-2017 world had not been ready for these voices, perhaps we had finally reached a moment where our culture could embrace them. France, of course, has experienced periods of exceptional openness in publishing that benefited women writers; French-Canadian poet Anne Hébert, for example, moved to Paris in 1954 when her work was considered too dark for the same Canadian publishers who embraced Leonard Cohen''s brooding poetry only a few years later. Yet French culture also remained fiercely loyal to its romanticized ideas of female submission and male domination. This dichotomy meant that, while certain controversial literary female authors were indeed published--such as Renée Vivien, an openly lesbian British poet who wrote passionate love poems in French at the turn of the 20th century--women''s voices were still subjugated or eclipsed by those of men.

Such was the perceived misogyny of France''s highest literary award, le Prix Goncourt, that in 1904, a year after its creation, 22 literary women launched an alternate prize, le Prix Femina, awarded by an all-female jury. To this day, the jury for the Prix Goncourt hasn''t taken the hint: A mere 12 women have received the prize since it was created. It was in this context that I came across the poems of Joyce Mansour, born Joyce Patricia Adès (1928-1986). Her work is defiant; even by today''s standards, it smashes taboos around female expression and desire. Like her poetry, Mansour''s life is fascinating. Born in England in 1928, she was raised in Cairo in a wealthy, cosmopolitan family of Jewish-Syrian descent. Early on, she experienced two tragedies that would haunt the rest of her life: When she was 15, her mother died of cancer. The teenager was deeply affected by this loss; although surrounded by a loving father and siblings, she was inconsolable.

As an escape from her grief, she immersed herself in the world of sports, where she excelled at the long jump and sprinting. As she began to slowly find meaning in her life again, she met and fell in love with a young athletic man, Henri Naggar. The two formed a perfect couple who seemed to have everything life could offer: youth, good looks, and wealthy families. They could only have a bright future ahead and were married when she was 18 and he 21. But only six months after their wedding, following a long honeymoon during which they traveled through Europe, Naggar died very suddenly of cancer. This second loss was almost too much for her to bear. She locked herself away and refused to see anyone, including her father, and suffered from night terrors and sleepwalking. She cut herself off from her friends, accepting only the company of her sister-in-law, whom she stayed with.

It was during this time she began composing poetry. Plunged into a deep depression, she turned to poetry as a way to cope and "remove the blood from [her] dreams." Her very first lines were "Improvised poems in the bathtub. Alone, she would talk, scream as though to cover the sound of the water. It was a kind of revolt." Mansour''s earliest poems were composed in English, and she later described them as "Crazed with rage . exclusively insults . In fact, no one has ever seen them.

" Indeed, none of these poems have ever been found. As such origins suggest, Mansour''s poetry lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from the concept of art for art''s sake. For her, aestheticism in poetry expresses nothing. She described poetry as "a scream," illustrating her assertion with the following anecdote: "I went to the cemetery for a Muslim funeral. Suddenly a woman started to scream. The scream began, at first very deep, in the belly and became more and more shrill, deafening; it seemed to come from the top of the skull, you know, the fontanel, from which religions often say that the soul escapes at the moment of death. It''s terrifying. That is poetry.

I write between two doors, all of a sudden, like that woman who started to scream." Her work became a kind of exorcism for the pain that came from the unbearable early loss of these two first loves. Years later, when asked why she did not have the violent character of her poetry, she answered: "If I did not write, perhaps I would embody my words. It''s a kind of conjuration ." Mansour remained very private about her life and mostly refused to publish poems that were too directly autobiographical, such as the following one on her mother: Since yesterday you are dead my mother Deliver me from your suffering You are frozen with dread under your glass mask Deliver me from your maternal kisses That crawl on my kneeling body Like slugs For my eyes are stuck in the swamps of desire Deliver me from your heavy shadow My silted ovaries suffocate between your hands Deliver me from your absence Deliver me from the rain Autobiographical elements in the poems she did publish were much more encrypted, with the crab often representing the cancer that had ended her mother''s life: The crabs were fighting over your flesh Nothing remained of your chubby breasts. In Mansour''s work, love and death are inseparable. Rather than running from the dual traumas of her youth, she explored them, writing toward the demons that haunted her. A native English speaker, Mansour switched to writing in French when she met and married her second husband, Samir Mansour, a handsome and athletic Franco-Egyptian who was almost twice her age and of whom her family disapproved, due to his reputation as a womanizer.

"I met a man who refused to speak anything other than French. So I dropped English and I started reading, writing, and trying to think in French. I started a new life with new thoughts. When I re-read the things I had written in English, it had nothing to do with anything, as though someone else had arrived at that moment." With a new husband, a new language, and a new life, Joyce Mansour tried to rid herself of the pain that was too much for her to bear. She never spoke of her first husband with Samir. The couple divided their life between Egypt and Europe, with properties in Cairo, Paris, and Alexandria, at the edge of the desert. "We would crisscross the desert in a Jeep, looking for archeological sites.

We would sleep outdoors. We would divide the tasks." Through this newfound love, Mansour seemed to have escaped the worst of her despair. The Mansours led a worldly life in Cairo, occasionally attending extravagant receptions hosted by Egypt''s ruler, King Farouk. They also mixed with the diplomatic and business communities of the city. Joyce Mansour first encountered surrealism through a close friend of her husband, Marie Cavadia, who hosted the most important salon in Cairo and was a longtime patron of the Egyptian parasurrealist group "Art and Liberty," founded in 1939 by Georges Henein, Ramses Younane, and Fouad Kamel. At Cavadia''s salon, circa 1950, Mansour met Henein, who had recently broken with the French surrealist group, which was struggling to maintain its pre-war vigor. Over the years, Mansour would meet many significant artists and writers at the salon, including the novelist André Pieyre de Mandiargue and the science journalist Gérald Messadié, both of whom encouraged her to publish her work.

In Paris, Mansour found her most decisive ally for publishing her work through the visual artist George Hugnet, a veteran.