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| transition (literary magazine) | |
|---|---|
| Title | transition |
| Editor | Eugene Jolas |
| Category | Literary magazine |
| Firstdate | 1927 |
| Finaldate | 1938 |
| Country | France, United States |
| Based | Paris, New York |
| Language | English, French |
transition (literary magazine) was an experimental international review founded in Paris in 1927 and later published in New York, noted for avant-garde prose and poetry, linguistic innovation, and serialization of major modernist works. It became a nexus for émigré writers, visual artists, and translators linked to the interwar networks of Paris, New York City, Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. The magazine influenced trajectories of Modernism, Surrealism, Dada, and Cubism through cross-disciplinary exchanges with writers and artists from Ireland, France, Germany, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Eugene Jolas launched transition in Paris amid post-World War I cultural realignments involving figures from James Joyce, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and communities around Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Vladimir Nabokov, and émigré circles in Montparnasse. Early issues reflected interactions with manifestos and salons tied to André Breton, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, and expatriate networks connecting to publishing houses like G. P. Putnam's Sons, Faber and Faber, and Farrar & Rinehart. Political and aesthetic upheavals—such as the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles and the rise of movements in Moscow, Rome, and Madrid—shaped readership that included contributors based in Prague and Vienna. In 1939 the journal's run effectively ceased as editors and contributors dispersed across United States institutions including Columbia University and Harvard University.
Under the editorship of Eugene Jolas, with collaborators linked to Pablo Picasso-era circles and translators associated with Constance Garnett and Valery Larbaud, transition curated submissions from a cosmopolitan roster: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, André Breton, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, Carl Einstein, Kurt Schwitters, Man Ray, Pierre Reverdy, Antonin Artaud, Jean Cocteau, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Höch, Max Jacob, and Marcel Duchamp. Translators and critics connected with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, John Middleton Murry, Vladimir Nabokov, and editors from The Little Review also engaged in editorial exchange. Jolas promulgated experimental editorial positions echoing debates from Surrealist Manifesto-adjacent circles and editorial practices seen in journals like Littérature, BLAST, and The Criterion.
transition published fragmented prose, stream-of-consciousness narratives, cut-up experiments, and visual-verbal hybrids reminiscent of Ulysses episodes, The Waste Land-era collage, and Les Champs Magnétiques-style automatic writing. The magazine foregrounded translation experiments involving texts by James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Éluard, Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire, juxtaposed with manifestos from André Breton, theatrical excerpts by Antonin Artaud, and plays by Bertolt Brecht. Themes included linguistic destabilization associated with Dada practice, visual poetics tied to Cubism, exile and diaspora linked to authors from Russia, Ireland, and Germany, and formal experiments paralleling developments at institutions like Black Mountain College and departments at Columbia University.
The magazine adopted an avant-garde layout integrating typography, collage, and lithographic reproductions echoing work by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, and Max Ernst. Issues featured multilingual texts in English and French with visual contributions from artists associated with Surrealism, Dada, and Constructivism, often invoking design strategies employed by Vorticism and publications like BLAST and Merz Magazine. Transition's format included serialized novels, manifestos, critical essays, experimental poetry, and photographic plates, sometimes invoking mise en page techniques used by editors of Littérature and printers collaborating with Graham Greene–era presses.
Contemporaneous reception linked transition to polemical debates involving T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, André Breton, and editors of The Dial and The Little Review, eliciting commentary from critics and academics at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Sorbonne, and later scholars at Yale University and Princeton University. The magazine influenced later avant-garde journals and movements including Black Mountain College pedagogues, the Beat Generation milieu around City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, and postwar experimental editors tied to J. D. Salinger-era circles and small presses like New Directions Publishing and Grove Press. Academics and critics from Harvard University, University of Chicago, and Columbia University later traced transition's role in shaping modernist translation practices, intermedia art, and transatlantic literary networks.
Published from 1927 through the late 1930s with intermittent revivals and expatriate relocations, transition's runs appeared in Paris and New York via presses connected to expatriate printers and avant-garde publishers in Paris and Greenwich Village. Major archival holdings reside in special collections at University of Pennsylvania, New York Public Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, and the Harry Ransom Center. Microfilm, facsimile editions, and scholarly anthologies have been produced by academic presses such as Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, and University of California Press.
Category:Literary magazines Category:Modernist magazines Category:Publications established in 1927