TRANSITION: A QUARTERLY REVIEW
No. 25 – Fall, 1936
Eugene Jolas [Editor]
Eugene Jolas [Editor]: TRANSITION: A QUARTERLY REVIEW [No. 25 -Fall, 1936]. New York: Eugene Jolas, Fall, 1936. First edition. Octavo. Thick printed wrappers with yapped edges. 216 pp. Black and white plates and text illustrations. Wrappers separated from textblock, with expected edgewear to the yapped edges. Interesting pencil illustration to title page [see image], otherwise interior unmarked a clean. Cover Art by Joan Miró. A fair to good copy only.
6 x 8.25 softcover book with 216 pages and a wide variety of content. Transition was intended as an outlet for experimental writing and featured modernist, surrealist and other linguistically innovative writing and also contributions by visual artists, critics, and political activists. It ran until spring 1938, with a total of 27 issues produced.
Contents include:
- VERTIGRAL: Harry Brown, Dennis Devlin, Pierre Guegen, Eugene Jolas, Norman McCraig, Alfonso Reyes, J. L. Sweeney, Dylan Thomas, Charles Tracey and Oliver Wells.
- PARAMYTHS: Dylan Thomas: The Mouse and the Woman; the first part of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis; Thomas Newman and Christopher Young.
- THE EYE: Images by Piet Mondrian, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Cesar Domela, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse; DADA 1916-1936: Hugo Ball's Fragments of a DaDa Diary and Richard Huelsenbeck's DaDa Lives; Photos by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Francis Bruguiere, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Matthew Brady and others; Painting and Reality:a discussion between Aragon, Fernand Leger and Le Corbusier.
- INTER-RACIAL DOCUMENTS: Gustavo Barroso, etc.
- THE EAR: Scherzo: an unpublished score by Henry Cowell.
- CINEMA: Redes by Paul Strand.
- VERTIGRAL WORKSHOP: Sound Poems by Hugo Ball, etc.
- ARCHITECTURE: Siegfried Giedion and R. Maillart.
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. They were later assisted by editors Elliot Paul (April 1927- March 1928), Robert Sage (October 1927-Fall 1928), and James Johnson Sweeney (June 1936-May 1938).
While it originally almost exclusively featured poetic experimentalists, it later accepted contributions from sculptors, civil rights activists, carvers, critics, and cartoonists. Editors who joined the journal later on were Stuart Gilbert, Caresse Crosby and Harry Crosby.
In an introduction to the first issue, Eugene Jolas wrote: “Of all the values conceived by the mind of man throughout the ages, the artistic have proven the most enduring. Primitive people and the most thoroughly civilized have always had, in common, a thirst for beauty and an appreciation of the attempts of the other to recreate the wonders suggested by nature and human experience. The tangible link between the centuries is that of art. It joins distant continents in to a mysterious unit, long before the inhabitants are aware of the universality of their impulses . . . .”
“We should like to think of the readers as a homogeneous group of friends, united by a common appreciation of the beautiful, - idealists of a sort, - and to share with them what has seemed significant to us.”
The journal gained notoriety in 1929 when Jolas issued a manifesto about writing. He personally asked writers to sign "The Revolution of the Word Proclamation" which appeared in issue 16/17 of transition. It began: “Tired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism, and desirous of crystallizing a viewpoint... Narrative is not mere anecdote, but the projection of a metamorphosis of reality" and that "The literary creator has the right to disintegrate the primal matter of words imposed on him by textbooks and dictionaries.”
The Proclamation was signed by Kay Boyle, Whit Burnett, Hart Crane, Caresse Crosby, Harry Crosby, Martha Foley, Stuart Gilbert, A. Lincoln Gillespie, Leigh Hoffman, Eugene Jolas, Elliot Paul, Douglas Rigby, Theo Rutra, Robert Sage, Harold J. Salemson, and Laurence Vail.