Mark Polizzotti’s books include Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Highway 61 Revisited, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, Why Surrealism Matters, andJump Cuts: Essays on Surrealism, Film, Music, Culture, and Other Utopian Topics. His writings have appeared in Apollo, Bookforum, The Brooklyn Rail, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. His translations of works by André Breton, Marguerite Duras, Gustave Flaubert, Patrick Modiano, Scholastique Mukasonga, and Arthur Rimbaud, among others, have won or been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, the International Booker Prize, the English PEN Award, the NBCC/Gregg Barrios Prize, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, he lives in New York, where he directs the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mark Polizzotti
Author & Translator
Director of the Publications Program, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Participant In These Roundtable Discussions
Sat
Dec 6th
2014
Dec 6th
2014
Watch
French Surrealism: A Revolution of the Mind
This roundtable will explore French Surrealist poetry in translation, situating it within the broader history and activities of the Surrealist movement from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Sat
Nov 21st
2015
Nov 21st
2015
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Translation Matters
This roundtable will explore translation as a fundamental cultural, psychic, and aesthetic process that extends beyond its traditional role as a technical linguistic practice, shaping how meaning is displaced, exchanged, and renewed across contexts.
Sat
Apr 21st
2018
Apr 21st
2018
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Boredom
This roundtable brings together scholars from literature, psychiatry, neurology, cultural history, and law to examine boredom as an aversive yet compelling psychological and cultural state. It explores how boredom is defined, experienced, and understood across disciplines, and invites participants to deepen and expand their perspectives on its meaning and significance.
Sat
Nov 8th
2025
Nov 8th
2025
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Fail Again, Fail Better
This roundtable explores the meaning and value of failure, examining whether persistence leads to growth, success, or its own kind of reward. It considers how cultural, psychological, and philosophical perspectives frame failure as an essential part of the human experience.