Edouard Roditi is best known for his interviews with European artists such as Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Oskar Kokoschka, Philippe Derome and Hannah Höch but he was also a translator and prose poet. Choose Your Own World published by Greg Boyd at Asylum Arts collects over thirty prose poems from this international man of letters who was very much part of the literary and art scene in Paris during the 1930s and 1940s. Here's a sampling of the stunning surreal imagery from Edouard Roditi's outlandish prose poems:
A MOST MAGNIFICENT ORATION
Believe it or not, nothing really matters because nothing is real. Or rather, because everything is equally real, equally true and false, equally a fact and an illusion. In memory, our illusions are as real as our real perceptions, our dreams as real as our daily-life experiences. In fact, each of us lives in his own reality, through our various realities often overlap so as to give us an illusion of agreement, which, in turn, is real too, like any other illusion.
THE TEMPTATIONS OF A SAINT
I often think of moving away from here, wondering too how I ever came to be living in a city that is so utterly unfamiliar, with no memory of my first surprised arrival. Besides, I appear to have no other occupation here than to watch from my window and consign to my diary my few impressions of my increasingly lonely and monotonous days. But everything here is made so easy for me that I hesitate to move.
As the days go by, the quality of my dreams becomes increasingly weird and sordid, and the monsters that people them have developed a habit of penetrating my daytime life too. This morning, I found a kind of penguin in my living room, with human feet, human flippers and hands like those of a thalidomide baby, but the head of a hideous and toothless old witch. When it saw me, it greeted me with an ominous leer, then screeched and flew at me, but I fought it off until it tried to fly out the window, which was closed, so that it struck its head violently against the glass pane and fell stunned on the carpet. As I tried to practice first-air on it, it regained consciousness and bit my hand viciously. Finally, I opened my front door and chased it onto the landing, where I saw a whole crowd of other hideous monsters greet it excitedly. I can still hear them chatting malevolently on the landing, some of them even calling me by name and insulting me shrilly.
Another day has dawned, with another monster, even more indescribably ghastly than yesterday's, likewise spawned by my dreams and awaiting me again in my living room. This time, I've barricaded myself in my bedroom, no longer daring to face the monster if I try to cross my living room on the way to my kitchenette to prepare my morning coffee. Must I starve here? Should I jump out of my bedroom window, twenty-four stories above the murderous pavement? Or should I try to phone for help? But I don't even know what language they speak in this utterly strange city, and who would be likely, if they understand me, to believe my story?
This morning I woke up to find myself imprisoned in a huge sealed teapot from which I can escape only through the spout. As I crawled up it, I discovered that the spout becomes increasingly narrow, until I could no longer crawl any further. I then tried to turn back, only to find that the pot had meanwhile been filled with boiling water. Right now, my whole body is bathed in hot steam, like that of a Turkish bath, and I can barely manage to breathe the very little air that reaches me down the spout.
I scarcely dare imagine the scalding death that threatens me, should some giant, unaware of my predicament, suddenly wish to pour himself a cup of tea. I wonder how I ever managed, in my sleep, to land myself in this absurd situation, in fact, what forgotten nightmare of mine has now materialized in real life. Can I still hope to find my way back to my little old suburb of concrete highrise towers, and to the relatively harmless monsters that haunted me there? Or is this new predicament a punishment for having failed to appreciate the privileges of my former estate?
THE ADVANTAGES OF HABIT
i live in a house that is always growing or shrinking. It sometimes has over a hundred huge rooms or even more than I can ever count or explore, but then it can also become overnight a small one-room shack. i often forget something, a book that I've been reading or my wallet full of money, in one of its many rooms that I can never find again if I go back to seek what I've mislaid. But everything that I've ever lost turns up again, thought generally in a new room that I can't remember ever having seen before. A long time ago, I was still confused by having to live in such a home, but one becomes accustomed, in the long run, to anything and everything. Now nothing could convince me that I might be happier elsewhere.
ODTAA: ONE DAMN THING AFTER ANOTHER
Have you ever woken up in the morning to find yourself afflicted as I am now, with a third leg, thigh, knee, shin, calf, ankle, foot and all? And with no shoe to fit it, since the shape of its tos reveals that it's obviously neither a right nor a left foot? Such is indeed my predicament, as I clumsily try in my apartment to learn to walk on three legs instead of two. Once I've mastered this difficult task, i may discover that my apparently monstrous peculiarity offers some advantages too: between the new leg that appears to have grown overnight out of my groin and what used to be only my right leg, I find that I now have a second penis, another scrotum and two more testicles, thought I haven't yet managed to distinguish very clearly my older sexual organs from my new ones.
Poet and all around international man of letters, Edouard Roditi, 1910 - 1992
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