Mark Polizzotti
Mark Polizzotti’s books include Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Highway 61 Revisited, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, and Why Surrealism Matters. His translations of works by Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, and others have won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the International Booker Prize, and the NBCC/Gregg Barrios Prize. He is 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.
If you’re about to kill someone and they laugh at you, does it make you feel better or worse? Let’s imagine some run-of-the-mill totalitarian scenario: firing squad, bound targets, pocked wall.