Published alongside the French original text, Conoley ’ s work is an act of devotion to this looming figure of international art and letters, and captures the uncanny and occasionally violent pilgrimage undertaken by the “ rationalist mystic ” artist. Minimal in size and length, Thousand Times Broken is an inventive and aptly hallucinatory collection of texts and images that offers a glimpse into the astonishingly un-minimal oeuvre of one of the twentieth century ’ s mysteriously obscure giants. All three texts in this volume return to Michaux ’ s sense of inadequacy, of falling short. And ineluctably feeling frustration and discontent with the results. Much like the project of translation itself, Michaux seems to be devoted to something for which failure is inevitable: translating the within of the inner self to the without of a medium, be it language or drawing.

But, as Conoley tells us in her indispensable introduction, Michaux felt that the human hand and even language itself was too slow to capture thought he rejects the notion of automatic writing as impossible, even as he continues to experiment with a version of it. While Michaux ultimately rejects the Surrealist movement as a viable answer to his desire for a form of linguistic universalism, it ’ s nevertheless tempting to view Thousand Times Broken as an extension of surrealist experimentation with automatic writing, undertaken a few decades after the fact all the texts in the book were created during Michaux ’ s multi-year experimentations with mescaline, and he seems to be trying to access his unconscious through drugs, and to illustrate it in as unfettered a way as possible. As an artist and writer, he is radically divided, torn and trying to unite all of his conflicting convictions and disparate aesthetic projects. In the newly translated Thousand Times Broken, a slender volume of poetry, prose, and black and white images (exquisitely translated into captivating, strange English by the poet Gillian Conoley), Michaux continues to explore his lifelong fascination and tormented investigation of whether the self can be accessed, whether words or drawings best capture meaning, and whether communication is possible at all. Michaux is often mischaracterized as a “ Surrealist ” he dabbled a little in the inescapable clan of writers and artists, and certainly shares their concerns about the failures of language and divisions of the self.

Henri Michaux, the Belgian-born writer and artist, arrived in Paris in 1924, the same year that Andr é Breton published the First Surrealist Manifesto.

Selected Writings by Henri Michaux