<DIV><P>During the early days of the Second World War, the Catalán painter Joan Miró created a startling series of twenty-three gouaches, his Constellations, works redolent with the nightmare of contemporary events. In 1958 the French poet André Breton composed his own "Constellations," a set of hermetic prose poems meant to "illustrate"-that is, not simply to shed light on, but to lend luster to-Miró's paintings, and to resume a peripatetic dialogue about exile. In "Constellations of Miró, Breton" Paul Hammond unravels some of the mysteries of the call-and-response of these two Surrealists by reading the pictures against the poetry, the poetry against the pictures, and both against the madness of a history that none of us has left that far behind.<p>Featured in this edition are reproductions of the complete series of Joan Miró's Constellations and a translation of André Breton's "proses parallèles." Also included is André Breton's essay, "Constellations of Joan Miró," as well as documentary illustrations and photographs.<p><B>About the Author</B><P>Paul Hammond is the author of <I>Marvellous Méliès, "French Undressing, Upon the Pun: Dual Meaning in Words and Pictures</I> (with Patrick Hughes), and a monograph on Luis Buñuel's <I>L'Âge d'or.</I> He is the editor and translator of <I>The Shadow and Its Shadow:Surrealist Writings on the Cinema</I> (a new edition published by City Lights Books in Fall 2000), and the coeditor, with Ian Breakwell, of <I>Seeing in the Dark: A Compendium of Cinemagoing</I> and <I>Brought to Book: The Balance of Books and Life.</I> His translations include <I>Whatever</I> by Michel Houellebecq and <I>The Virgin of the Hitmen</I> by Fernando Vallejo.</DIV>