George Reavey
Encyclopedia
George Reavey was a Russian-born Irish
surrealist poet, publisher, translator and art collector. He was also Samuel Beckett
's first literary agent. In addition to his own poetry, Reavey's translations and critical prose helped introduce 20th century Russian poetry to an English-speaking audience. He was also the first publisher to bring out a collection of English translations of the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard
.
Perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of Reavey's literary career was his claim, made to New York press and to British editor and publisher, Alan Clodd
, that he had written The Painted Bird for Jerzy Kosiński. http://www.maggs.com/pdfcatalogues/wholegrain.pdf
engineer from Belfast
and his mother, Sophia Turchenko, was Russian. He was born in Vitebsk
and the family moved to Nizhni Novgorod in 1909, where the young poet was educated and became a fluent Russian speaker. When Daniel was arrested in 1919, during the Russian Civil War
, mother and son fled to Belfast.
Reavey attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution
until 1921, at which point the family moved to Fulham
, London. Here he attended the Sloan School. He spent the summer holidays in Belfast, where he recorded folk ballads and Gaelic
poetry in a series of notebooks. In 1926, he entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
, where he studied history and literature
. The became associated with the group of Cambridge writers associated with the magazine Experiment
, including William Empson
, Jacob Bronowski
, Charles Madge
, Kathleen Raine
and Julian Trevelyan
. He contributed prose and poetry to Experiment along with translations from Boris Pasternak
.
, who introduced him to Beckett, James Joyce
, Brian Coffey
and Denis Devlin
and to many of the writers who published in transition
. He also became a regular contributor to Samuel Putnam
's The New Review. Putnam published Reavey's first book, Faust's Metamorphoses in 1932, a series of twenty vers libre monologues based on Christopher Marlowe
's Faust with illustrations by S. W. Hayter who worked with Trevelyan at Atelier 17.
Around this time, Reavey started his literary agency the Bureau Littéraire Européen
(later the European Literary Bureau) and his Europa Press
imprint. The first three books from the press, Reavey's own Nostradam (1932) and Signes d'Adieu and Beckett's Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (both 1935).
, Herbert Read
, Roland Penrose
and E. L. T. Mesens made similar moves. As a result, London became a hub of surrealist-related exhibitions and publishing. Reavey found himself extremely active in this scene, collecting paintings, contributing to Read's Surrealism (1936) and representing authors via the Bureau. His most notable client was Beckett, whose novel Murphy Reavey (unsuccessfully) attempted to place with a publisher.
To coincide with the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, Europa Press published Thorns of Thunder, the first collection of English translations of poems by Paul Éluard to appear. The book featured a drawing by Pablo Picasso
and a preface by Read, and the translators included Reavey, Beckett, Devlin, Gascoyne, Man Ray
and Ruthven Todd
.The press produced four more books, one each by Devlin, Coffey and Charles Henri Ford
and Reavey's Quixotic Perquisitions (1939).
With the outbreak of World War II, Reavey first went to the Soviet occupied zone of Poland
to rescue his mother. He then closed down the press and bureau and joined the Foreign Office, serving in Madrid
and the Soviet Union. Returning to London in 1945, he published Soviet Literature Today (1946) and on the back of this book he was able to move to New York
to teach Russian literature
.
's New Life: A Day on a Collective Farm (1963), the bilingual anthology The New Russian Poets 1953 – 1968 (1968) and contributions to Yevgeny Yevtushenko
's Stolen Apples (1972).
As a poet, Reavey fell more or less out of the public eye after moving to the States, however, he continued to publish collections including Colours of Memory (1955) and Seven Seas (1971). This latter was issued by Coffey from his Advent Press imprint. A group of seven Reavey poems were printed in the 1971 1930s special issue of The Lace Curtain
and he was represented in John Montague
's Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974).
Irish poetry
The history of Irish poetry includes the poetries of two languages, one in Irish and the other in English. The complex interplay between these two traditions, and between both of them and other poetries in English, has produced a body of work that is both rich in variety and difficult to...
surrealist poet, publisher, translator and art collector. He was also Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
's first literary agent. In addition to his own poetry, Reavey's translations and critical prose helped introduce 20th century Russian poetry to an English-speaking audience. He was also the first publisher to bring out a collection of English translations of the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
.
Perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of Reavey's literary career was his claim, made to New York press and to British editor and publisher, Alan Clodd
Alan Clodd
Alan Clodd was an Irish publisher, book collector, and dealer. Edward Clodd was his grandfather. Born in Dublin, Ireland, Clodd went to Bishop's Stortford College and later worked with the insurance firm Scottish Widows. During World War II he was a conscientious objector and worked with the...
, that he had written The Painted Bird for Jerzy Kosiński. http://www.maggs.com/pdfcatalogues/wholegrain.pdf
Early life and work
Reavey's father, Daniel Reavey, was a flaxFlax
Flax is a member of the genus Linum in the family Linaceae. It is native to the region extending from the eastern Mediterranean to India and was probably first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent...
engineer from Belfast
Belfast
Belfast is the capital of and largest city in Northern Ireland. By population, it is the 14th biggest city in the United Kingdom and second biggest on the island of Ireland . It is the seat of the devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly...
and his mother, Sophia Turchenko, was Russian. He was born in Vitebsk
Vitebsk
Vitebsk, also known as Viciebsk or Vitsyebsk , is a city in Belarus, near the border with Russia. The capital of the Vitebsk Oblast, in 2004 it had 342,381 inhabitants, making it the country's fourth largest city...
and the family moved to Nizhni Novgorod in 1909, where the young poet was educated and became a fluent Russian speaker. When Daniel was arrested in 1919, during the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
, mother and son fled to Belfast.
Reavey attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution
Royal Belfast Academical Institution
The Royal Belfast Academical Institution, is a Grammar School in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Locally referred to as Inst, the school educates boys from ages 11–18...
until 1921, at which point the family moved to Fulham
Fulham
Fulham is an area of southwest London in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, SW6 located south west of Charing Cross. It lies on the left bank of the Thames, between Putney and Chelsea. The area is identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London...
, London. Here he attended the Sloan School. He spent the summer holidays in Belfast, where he recorded folk ballads and Gaelic
Irish language
Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...
poetry in a series of notebooks. In 1926, he entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Gonville and Caius College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The college is often referred to simply as "Caius" , after its second founder, John Keys, who fashionably latinised the spelling of his name after studying in Italy.- Outline :Gonville and...
, where he studied history and literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
. The became associated with the group of Cambridge writers associated with the magazine Experiment
Experiment
An experiment is a methodical procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments vary greatly in their goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results...
, including William Empson
William Empson
Sir William Empson was an English literary critic and poet.He was known as "燕卜荪" in Chinese.He was widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, fundamental to the New Critics...
, Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowski was a Polish-Jewish British mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor...
, Charles Madge
Charles Madge
Charles Madge , was an English poet, journalist and sociologist, now most remembered as a founder of Mass-Observation.As a sociologist, he co-founded Mass-Observation with Tom Harrisson in 1937, an endeavour which would occupy more of his time than literature...
, Kathleen Raine
Kathleen Raine
Kathleen Jessie Raine was a British poet, critic, and scholar writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founder member of the Temenos Academy.-Life:Raine was...
and Julian Trevelyan
Julian Trevelyan
Julian Otto Trevelyan, RA was a British artist and poet.Trevelyan was the only child of Robert Calverley Trevelyan and his wife Elizabeth van der Hoeven...
. He contributed prose and poetry to Experiment along with translations from Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language...
.
The Paris years
In 1929, Reavey moved to Paris with his friend Trevelyan. Ostensibly, this was so that he could improve his French for the entry examinations for the Indian Civil Service, but in fact he was in search of an entry into the avant garde artistic circles based in that city. He met Thomas MacGreevyThomas MacGreevy
Thomas MacGreevy was a pivotal figure in the history of Irish literary modernism. A poet, he was also director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963 and served on the first Irish Arts Council .-Early life:MacGreevy was born in County Kerry, the son of a policeman and a primary...
, who introduced him to Beckett, James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, Brian Coffey
Brian Coffey
Brian Coffey was an Irish poet and publisher. His work was informed by his Catholicism and by his background in science and philosophy, and his connection to surrealism. For these reasons, he is seen as being closer to an intellectual European Catholic tradition than to mainstream Irish Catholic...
and Denis Devlin
Denis Devlin
Denis Devlin was, along with Samuel Beckett and Brian Coffey, one of the generation of Irish modernist poets to emerge at the end of the 1920s. He was also a career diplomat.-Early life and studies:...
and to many of the writers who published in transition
Transition (literary journal)
transition was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by poet Eugene Jolas and his wife Maria McDonald and published in Paris...
. He also became a regular contributor to Samuel Putnam
Samuel Putnam
Samuel Putnam was an American translator and scholar of Romance languages.His most famous work is his 1949 English translation of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote...
's The New Review. Putnam published Reavey's first book, Faust's Metamorphoses in 1932, a series of twenty vers libre monologues based on Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death.A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May...
's Faust with illustrations by S. W. Hayter who worked with Trevelyan at Atelier 17.
Around this time, Reavey started his literary agency the Bureau Littéraire Européen
(later the European Literary Bureau) and his Europa Press
Europa Press
The Europa Press was a publishing house founded and run by the Irish surrealist poet George Reavey. The press was based in Paris from its inception in 1932 until 1935, when Reavey moved to London...
imprint. The first three books from the press, Reavey's own Nostradam (1932) and Signes d'Adieu and Beckett's Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (both 1935).
London and the Second World War
Just after publishing Echo's Bones, Reavey moved this agency and press to London. This move can be placed in a context of a general surrealist exodus from the French capital. Between 1934 and 1936, Trevelyan, David GascoyneDavid Gascoyne
David Gascoyne was an English poet associated with the Surrealist movement.-Early life and Surrealism:...
, Herbert Read
Herbert Read
Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC was an English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner....
, Roland Penrose
Roland Penrose
Sir Roland Algernon Penrose CBE was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom.- Biography :...
and E. L. T. Mesens made similar moves. As a result, London became a hub of surrealist-related exhibitions and publishing. Reavey found himself extremely active in this scene, collecting paintings, contributing to Read's Surrealism (1936) and representing authors via the Bureau. His most notable client was Beckett, whose novel Murphy Reavey (unsuccessfully) attempted to place with a publisher.
To coincide with the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, Europa Press published Thorns of Thunder, the first collection of English translations of poems by Paul Éluard to appear. The book featured a drawing by Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
and a preface by Read, and the translators included Reavey, Beckett, Devlin, Gascoyne, Man Ray
Man Ray
Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
and Ruthven Todd
Ruthven Todd
Ruthven Campbell Todd was a Scottish poet, artist and novelist, best known as an editor of the works of William Blake. He wrote also under the pseudonym R. T. Campbell.-Background:...
.The press produced four more books, one each by Devlin, Coffey and Charles Henri Ford
Charles Henri Ford
Charles Henri Ford was an American poet, novelist, filmmaker, photographer, and collage artist best known for his editorship of the Surrealist magazine View in New York City, and as the partner of the artist Pavel Tchelitchew...
and Reavey's Quixotic Perquisitions (1939).
With the outbreak of World War II, Reavey first went to the Soviet occupied zone of Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
to rescue his mother. He then closed down the press and bureau and joined the Foreign Office, serving in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
and the Soviet Union. Returning to London in 1945, he published Soviet Literature Today (1946) and on the back of this book he was able to move to New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
to teach Russian literature
Russian literature
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union...
.
Later life and work
Apart from occasional trips to Paris, London, Dublin and Belfast, Reavey lived out his life in the United States, where he published a number of important translations, including Aleksandr Sergeyevich Yesenin-Volpin's A Leaf of Spring (1961), Fyodor AbramovFyodor Abramov
Fyodor Aleksandrovich Abramov was a Russian novelist and literary critic. His work focused on the difficult lives of the Russian peasant class. He was frequently reprimanded for deviations from Soviet policy on writing....
's New Life: A Day on a Collective Farm (1963), the bilingual anthology The New Russian Poets 1953 – 1968 (1968) and contributions to Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko is a Soviet and Russian poet. He is also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, actor, editor, and a director of several films.-Early life:...
's Stolen Apples (1972).
As a poet, Reavey fell more or less out of the public eye after moving to the States, however, he continued to publish collections including Colours of Memory (1955) and Seven Seas (1971). This latter was issued by Coffey from his Advent Press imprint. A group of seven Reavey poems were printed in the 1971 1930s special issue of The Lace Curtain
The Lace Curtain
The Lace Curtain was an occasional literary magazine founded and edited by Michael Smith and Trevor Joyce under their New Writers Press imprint...
and he was represented in John Montague
John Montague
John Montague may refer to:*John Montague , Irish poet and writer*John Montague , baseball relief pitcher*John Montague , golfer and con man...
's Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974).