Ideas Have No Smell: Three Belgian Surrealist Booklets

Translated by M. Kasper

Ugly Ducking Presse, 2018

The beauty of M. Kasper’s translation of this collection is its seamlessness, its bold possession-thus-replacement of the original. The text appears handwritten, facsimile-like below each page’s illustration. With this edition in hand, the reader might even forget to lament for an original, might forget to look out for its specter, hovering just beyond these neat, pocket-sized little pages. M. Kasper follows this protocol for each of the three booklets included in Ugly Duckling Presse’s timely sampler, Ideas Have No Smell: Three Belgian Surrealist Booklets.

In Paul Colinet’s Abstractive Treatise on Obeuse, we have a hyper-leavened artist’s book, a playful manifesto, a Kenneth-Patchen-meets-Henri-Michaux (fellow contemporary Belgian) somersault of whimsy. What is obeuse? Obeuse is masculine (with feminist proclivities). Obeuses are many. To totally nourish Obeuse, “you need to blow hard.” At one point, we see “Obeuse shattering / some porcelain/ lutes / in the castle of / night / (these lutes belonged to Marshal Foch),” in which three dots, forming a near equilateral triangle, sit just above and to the left of what we’ve come to see as obeuse—a little misshapen, shaded-in circle.

Featured next is Paul Nougé’s Transfigured Publicity, which reminds us of the movement’s generative appropriation (and pop art’s later indebtedness to it); a tongue-in-every-cheek plagiarism doubling as a site for fecund commentary. Each page plays into itself as a self-conscious ‘advertisement,’ from one of which the collection takes its title (“IDEAS / HAVE / NO / SMELL”).

Kasper concludes with his translation of Louis Scutenaire’s For Balthazar. In each of these three pieces, pastiche, wit, aphoristic profundity, and irreverence as post-war anodyne abound (“At the root of every active truth, a theoretical lie.” “Big statue of happy, big flag of sad.”), making this collection a rapid read. Accompanied by an introduction from Mary Ann Caws and a poster reproduction of the 1926 handwritten panneau of Nougé’s visual poems, this candy box collection of surrealist poetry from Ugly Duckling Presse will certainly leave readers wanting more.