A Flea the Size of Paris: The Old French "Fatrasies" and "Fatras"

Blending levity and malaise, carnival and apocalypse, sudden death and swarming vitality, the fatrasies and fatras are a small group of “impossible” poems, written between 1250 and 1330 in Northern France. In the 1920s, these poems caught the interest of André Breton and the other Paris-based Surrealists, who published George Bataille’s translations of some of the fatrasies in La Révolution surréaliste no.6. More than any other works of their time, the fatrasies and fatras created a new poe...