BENJAMIN PÉRETDo not allow anyone to be condemned to undo bronze chignons.
***We bombed them with sa√ron shells. Given the state we’d reached...
***It was at the stage where the little boat withdraws into the obelisk.
***As children in Pretoria we spent our days watching a fat, fat hippopotamus grow
fatter, a hippopotamus su√ering from a gassy degeneration that grew fatter and
fatter, and our hearts were full of fear he would burst and he grew fatter, each day
grew fatter forever. I wonder what’s become of him over the last twenty years?
***How one would hate men less if they didn’t all have faces.
***Why should it matter if you steal the eardrum of a deaf man? But that is how
dishonesty begins. After dishonesty comes the desire for gain, the taste for com-
merce, and that gives rise to the taste for calculations, then measure, and at last
analysis, and one thing leads to another so you end up leaving the deaf man
nothing but his bones.
—rosemary lloyd
Benjamin Péret 1899–1959
rezé, france
A
member of the Surrealist movement from its inception, the irreverent
and imaginative Péret was André Breton’s most faithful companion
and remained active in the group until his death. His first poems wereprinted in Littérature, and his Au 125 du boulevard Saint-Germain (1923) is often
considered the first Surrealist work of fiction. He cofounded and directed the