Misfortunes of the Immortals

‘Misfortunes of the Immortals’ was Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s second Surrealist collaboration - their first being ‘Repetitions’, a poetry collection. In ‘Misfortunes of the Immortals’ the image was no longer relegated to the function of mere illustration; Ernst and Éluard reversed the process, so that instead of starting with a text that needed an illustration, Ernst created collages and Éluard then wrote texts based on the images. The publication of ‘Misfortunes of the Immortals’ in 1922 coincided with the transition of Dadaism to Surrealism in Paris. This is the first twenty-first century English translation of ‘Misfortunes of the Immortals’ and it reveals that the collaboration between Éluard and Ernst was a successful attempt to create surprising juxtapositions, and to negate the notion of the singular author.