Blending levity and malaise, carnival and apocalypse, sudden death and swarming vitality, the fatrasies and fatras are a small group of “impossible” poems, written between 1250 and 1330 in Northern France. In the 1920s, these poems caught the interest of André Breton and the other Paris-based Surrealists, who published George Bataille’s translations of some of the fatrasies in La Révolution surréaliste no.6. More than any other works of their time, the fatrasies and fatras created a new poetic language, one that captures, as Bettina Full writes, “the fullness, fleeting and mortal, of all human life.” Often compared with avant-garde poetry of the twentieth century, these small marvels from the medieval world have never before been translated into English
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