Salvador Dali – Oui: Writings 1927-1933

Salvador Dalí’s writings from the period in which he was most closely allied with the Surrealists have never before been translated into English. These short fictions, essays, and poems contain all the egotistic brio one might expect from Dalí, but they also reveal an earnest and even sentimental artist. They document Dalí’s friendships with fellow Spaniards Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca, his entry into the world of the Parisian Surrealists, his passion for the emerging arts of photography and cinema, and the development of his “Paranoid-Critical Method,” the theoretical basis for Dalí’s work throughout his life. In 1934, Dalí and André Breton would break forever — “The only difference between me and a Surrealist is that I am a Surrealist,” he later said — but in the period 1927-1933, such distinctions were unnecessary.

“The world that Dalí… conjures up is so luxuriously infused with the metaphysical, the oneiric and the uncanny that it can only be described as Surrealism in practice.”
— from the Introduction by Yvonne Shafir

“Oh Salvador Dalí, of the olive-colored voice!
I do not praise your halting adolescent brush
or your pigments that flirt with the pigment of your times,
but I laud your longing for eternity with limits.”
— Federico García Lorca