COLLECTED FRENCH WRITINGS: Poems, Essays, Memories.

First edition, first printing. Original black cloth lettered in silver to the spine, in the dustwrapper designed by Christopher Cressey. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Light abrasion visible to the upper right corner of the front free endpaper, small ink mark to the upper edge of the page block. In the neatly price-clipped dustwrapper which, except for some toning, is in very good shape indeed. A nice copy of an unusually scarce volume.

Although best known for his sculpture, paintings and drawings, Jean or Hans Arp (1886–1966) also wrote poems throughout his long life. '[His] poetry, Herbert Read wrote, "is inseparable from his plastic work and a full understanding of his genius and development must take into account both." Much about Arp was ambiguous and liminal. His birthplace in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine, historically a site of cultural, political and linguistic turbulence, set the tone of his own multi-lingual life and career. To the French (and English), he is best known as Jean Arp, in German-speaking countries as Hans Arp. Born Hans, when Alsace became French (again) at the end of World War I, the law (apparently) required Arp to adopt a French name (while continuing to refer to himself as Hans when he spoke German). He signed his work variously as Hans, Jean, Hans Jean, or with his surname alone. This important volume is based on Marcel Jean's 1965 edition of Arp's French poems, which was edited in collaboration with the author. Joachim Neugroschel's translation, includes new material, exhaustive bibliographical notes, a memoir by the artist's widow, an introduction by Marcel Jean, and many examples of Arp's book illustrations. Neugroschel consistently consulted and compared French to German versions of works existing in both languages. There was to be a further volume of Arp's German writings which never materialised. "[Arp] seems to distil the purest essences of Dada and Surrealism. Not only was he in at the creation of Dada, 'which tzara and i gave birth to joyfully', but all Surrealist elements pervade his work: the dream, ('in dreams I learn how to paint'), the humour (in uncharacteristically French, Carroll-like nonsense), the verbal spasms, the onomatopoeia, the working of objective chance in 'papiers déchirés' and 'collage'." (Margaret Davies, 'Journal of Beckett Studies' [Autumn 1980]).