Cartomancy –– by André Salmon & Apa; translated by Olchar E. Lindsann

André Salmon (1881-1969) was one of the originators of literary Cubism, publishing more than twenty books of avant-garde poetry, around a dozen books of fiction, and among the first monographs of many of the Cubist and other modernist painters; very little of his work (especially his poetry and fiction) has been translated into English.

This densely enigmatic, yet pretty raunchy poem cycle reflects Salmon’s idiosyncratic involvement with hermeticism and the occult, using the standard playing deck rather than the Tarot. Salmon builds a dense collage of hermetic, mythological, and historical systems into these extremely compressed little stanzas, while the syntax becomes increasingly fractured as they progress.

The accompanying cubist card designs were designed in conjunction with Salmon’s text by the Spanish cartoonist Apa (Felíu Elías Bracons).

The poem and images were published in 1921 in Issue 2 of the Cubo-Dadaist journal Action, edited by Pierre Reverdy. Due to a printer’s or editor’s error, in all copies the sequence was truncated partway through the tenth poem, and apparently never reprinted. The remainder is lost to history.

13 pgs. on folded 8.5″x11″. Feb., A.Da. 103. (2019 Anti-Vulgar)
$1.50 + 0.75 s/h or trade