English translation from French
TEXT
BY
SALVADOR DALI
TEXT I IMAGE 8 DRESSED IN THE NUDE IN A SURREALISTIC FASHION
A tribute to the Spanish architect Emilio Piñero whose geodesical dome is designed to protect the most surrealistic of all genetic structures discovered so far. (The dome is that of the Dali Museum at Figueras.) This genetic discovery has been made by two Nobel Prize winners, Crick, an Englishman and Watson, an American biologist: the double helix is an anticipated representation of nothing less than continuity between heaven and earth in Jacob’s ladder, based on molecular structures of desoxyribonucelical acid—but perhaps, and even probably also of the structures that are going to defeat, in an ultrasurrealistic way, the flood of cancer on our earth.
TEXT II IMAGE 4 SPACE ELEPHANT
In the text of picture 8 we refer to the famous stork leg. Now in order to make it legitimate and monumental I shall proceed to give it a shape; not the shape of a crutch but of a true stork leg in the legs of the famous Dalinian elephant. This can only be a true Triumphal Arch, since Boulle, the great cabinet maker of Louis XIV, had always thought that he should erect this elephant, which, thanks to Dali, will forever have stork legs, in the exact place of the present Arc de Triomphe in Paris, built from Chalgrin’s plans, dedicated on July 29, 1836, etc. (After a mile of prose on the Arc de Triomphe, full stop.)
TEXT III IMAGE 1 ANGEL OF SURREALISM
He does not hold back his laughter since this is nothing but a poster and posters are the most serious epitomes of the objective amalgams of the ideas of our time. The angel of melancholy will obviously remain melancholy with its black wings but the picture itself is like a piece of gruyere cheese in an advanced state of putrefaction, or rather like a roquefort cheese as painted by Valdès Léal in the “Triumph of the Cross” at the Charity Hospital in Sevilla, or in the “Two Corpses”. Valdès Léal, painter, sculptor, engraver and architect was born and died in Sevilla, 1622-1690; he has, with constant complacency, pictured the most repulsive horrors of death: thanks to this poster he is sure to become one of the foremost surrealistic figures with the help of Mr. Rosenberg who wants to publish it. The work is now ready, it is the sweet at the end of the meal; a tribute to Juan Valdès Nica Léal who said that life is a bitter experience: death, after all, is only perhaps a sweet experience.