Mad Love

Breton, father of the surrealist movement, saw that the basic problem of making a living could interfere with love as well as poetry. Love, for the French poet, had to be transformed into a powerful emotion that put the lover in touch with the marvelous. The focus of this transformation, in his own case, was artist Jacqueline Lamba, with whom he lived in New York, Mexico and Marseilles. L'Amour fou (1937) is convoluted and stilted when it sets forth his surrealist philosophy of ""mad love,'' romantic and sometimes incandescently lyrical when it presents autobiographical reminiscences. Included is a moving letter Breton wrote to his daughter (``I want you to be madly loved''). This first English-language translation of the surrealist text is also the first volume in the French Modernist Library. (July 8)