L’Aumonyme: an annotated transsonambulicreation of five poems by Robert Desnos

Abstract

This article aims to exhibit an annotated translation of five poems by Robert Desnos, present in his work L’Aumonyme (1999), first published in 1922 in the surrealist literary magazine Littérature. We will discuss his peculiar literary procedure, the experimentation with hypnotic sleep, which resulted in a powerful exploration of symmetry in sounds. Also, it will be presented the historical and biographical contexts surrounding the production of this work and, finally, aligning Haroldo de Campos’ (2013) transcreative proposal with Susan Sontag’s (2020) counter-interpretative approach, we will propose a translation strategy called “transsonambulicreation”, which aims to transpose into Portuguese, the “sonoroniric” procedure adopted by the poet.