Ralentir Travaux

Writing from Avignon in April 1930, Paul Éluard told Gala: “Breton, Char and I have made a fairly long book of thirty very fine poems, which Char’s printer is producing for us for free, in 200 copies.” The poems were composed during a difficult period for André Breton and Paul Éluard, both intellectually and emotionally, at the moment when the two poets rejoined René Char, newly won over to Surrealism, in the Vaucluse at the very end of winter 1930. Together they composed this legendary collaborative collection: “These were weeks of poetic fervor. At the end of that Provençal stay, the friendship was sealed, and Char joined Breton and Éluard as they returned to Paris, the manuscript of Ralentir Travaux in their luggage,” to entrust it to Char’s printer, none other than José Corti. This encounter is described in detail in Provisoirement Définitif, where the publisher recalls the moment and the collection as “one of the most luminous illustrations of the will to pool thought, one of the major axes of the Surrealist project (…) where each one’s contribution (…) is blended like sand into lime.”