Nights As Day, Days As Night (Eridanos Library) [Paperback]

Michel Leiris (Author), Richard Sieburth (Translator), Roger Shattuck (Introduction), Maurice Blanchot (Foreword)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This collection of dream entries, most no more than a paragraph or two, and reflections titled "half-asleep" and "real-life" span a period of 37 years. Referred to by the translator as "prose poems," they loosely mirror Leiris's own eclectic career. A member of the Surrealist set in the '20s, he later became an anthropologist. The early entries draw heavily on surrealist obsessions and seem labored, reworked. Later fragments are more intimate, especially those from World War II and his frankly admitted extramarital affair in 1934. Entries from the late '40s and '50s reflect his fascination with ethnology. Although friendships with such tantalizing figures as Simone de Beauvoir and Andre Masson are mentioned, we meet them only as shadowy characters in dreams. Leiris's fascinating life is covered in his lengthy autobiography and African journal. These vignettes hold little interest, except as an adventure into introspection. A foreword by Maurice Blanchot and an introduction by Roger Shattuck are both informative.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

The strategy of these prose poems of onetime Surrealist Leiris is stated in Maurice Blanchot's foreword: "These were once dreams; they are now signs of poetry"; they share our common compulsion to tell our dreams and thereby assert mastery over our self, the "similar though eccentric being who was us over the course of the night." These dreams, dating from just before March 15, 1923 to November 6-7, 1960, eerily transform representative events and major personalities. Covering the Occupation, they allude to much violence. Sieburth's translation is flawless; and with Blanchot's foreword and the excellent introductions, this English edition is superior to the French original. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY at Binghamton
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 198 pages
• Publisher: Marsilio Pub (May 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 094141907X
• ISBN-13: 978-0941419079
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,339,691 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "These were once dreams; they are now signs of poetry", March 9, 2003

By 

Scott (The Cult of Isis) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nights As Day, Days As Night (Eridanos Library) (Paperback)

"Our dreams are a second life."-Gerard de Nerval
"Dream---a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows---is essentially poetry."-Michel Leiris

Michel Leiris' "Nights as Day, Days as Night": In the introduction to Leiris' forty year collection of dreams, Maurice Blanchot asks, "Who dreams in dreams? Who is the "I" of dreams? Who is the person to whom this "I" is attributed, admitting that there is one? Between the person who is sleeping and the person who is the subject of dream events there is a fissure..." The dislocation which seems to be the source of who exactly we are in dreams may spring from the fact that in our dreams everything takes on an almost theatrical aspect, sometimes we are spectator & sometimes we are actor, other times we are a combination of the two. One of Leiris earliest poetic mentors was Max Jacob, & two of the dreams related in the book involve him. In fact the manner in which Leiris records some of his dreams are reminiscent of certain of Max Jacob's prose poems. The following one by Jacob, "Literary Standards" would not be out of place in Leiris' book: "A dealer in Havana sent me a cigar wrapped in gold which had been smoked a little. The poets sitting with me said he'd done it to mock me, but the old Chinese who was our host said it was the custom in Havana when one wished to show great honor. I brought out two magnificent poems a scholar friend had written down translations of for me because I admired them when I heard them read. The poets said they were well-known and worthless. The old Chinese said they couldn't have known the poems because they only existed in a single manuscript copy in Pehlvi, a language they didn't know. Then the poets started laughing loudly like children while the old Chinese gazed at us sadly." As Blanchot stated in the introduction, "These were once dreams; they are now signs of poetry."

The greatest of the recorded events to be found in Leiris' book are the pages dedicated to dream elements overflowing into his waking life, communicating vessels. In the page dated May 4, 1943 Leiris describes a middle-aged man lurking around who seems to be nightmarishly fake, "A real cop or a mere civilian? Or nobody in particular? I asked myself the question but could not resist considering this shady character to be some sort of specter or macabre merrymaker who, having donned a terrifyingly contemporary disguise, was waiting for some shadowy carnival to begin."

In a few of the recorded dreams he notes that he realized he was dreaming & tried to wake himself up, he tells us it is usually by falling. This is a common dream phenomenon, & it may appear to be simple. We are having a nightmare, realize it is a dream, & then struggle to wake up. The interesting thing though is that it is usually after the realization we are having a dream that things in our dream become even more concrete & real, it is not just about waking up, it is almost as though we are trying to cheat death. Leiris records something similar which Blanchot called a turning back upon himself, "A movement anologous to the one that often tends to elicit similar screams from me just as I am about to awake. But in this case the movement was considerably more frightening; instead of those interminable pangs one experiences when emerging with difficulty from a dream, I was in a sense being precipitated downward by my dream, plunged into a sleep from which I would never escape, and which would be my death."

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Life in Dreams., January 10, 2001

By 

"sleepofreasonbooks" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nights As Day, Days As Night (Eridano's Library, 5) (Hardcover)

This book, first published in 1961, is commonly considered to be a companion to Leiris' great autoethnographic work, _Manhood_. It is simply a collection of recorded dreams spanning a couple decades. Beyond the fact that Leiris' dreams are interesting, what adds value to the work is that is that it's historical and biographical context can be reconstructed through Leiris' other work. Highly recommended for those interested in Leiris, surrealism, or the social network surrounding Georges Bataille.