On Homo rodans and Other Writings

An updated, expanded edition of Remedios Varo’s translated writings, including pieces never before published in any language

With the 2018 publication of Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings, Wakefield Press introduced the writings of Surrealist painter Remedios Varo into English for the first time. These texts, never published during her lifetime, present something of a missing chapter, and offer the same qualities to be found in her visual work: an engagement with mysticism and magic, a breakdown of the border between the everyday and the marvelous, a love of mischief and an ongoing meditation on escape in all its forms. This new, expanded volume brings together the painter’s collected writings, an unpublished interview, letters to friends and acquaintances, dream accounts, notes for unrealized projects, a project for a theater piece, whimsical recipes for controlled dreaming, exercises in Surrealist automatic writing and prose-poem commentaries on her paintings. It also includes her longest manuscript, the pseudoscientific "On Homo rodans": an absurdist study of the wheeled predecessor to Homo sapiens (the skeleton of which Varo had built out of chicken bones). Written by the invented anthropologist Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, the essay utilizes eccentric Latin and a tongue-in-cheek pompous discourse to explain the origins of the first umbrella and in what ways “Myths” are merely “corrupted Myrtles.” Also included are newly discovered writings, including three short stories, never before published in any language.
Remedios Varo (1908–63) was a Surrealist painter who worked in Spain, France and Mexico. Her paintings were influenced by Old Masters such as Bosch and El Greco, as well as Jungian philosophy and occult writings. While living in Mexico she became close friends with fellow Surrealist Leonora Carrington.