Ballade du pauvre macchabé mal enterré (Ballad of the Unfortunate Corpse Badly Buried)

Life and death mingle in the words and images of this collaboration between poet René Dalize and André Derain. Dalize’s poem is narrated by the titular “poor man badly buried,” who describes the experience of navigating his unfortunate condition. While the deceased narrator muses on things beyond the comprehension of the living, Derain’s woodcuts of flowers and clouds, depicted in rough but detailed woodcuts, anchor the viewer to the world we can see, touch, and smell. The melancholy tone of this collaboration was heightened by the inclusion of memorial pieces by Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon for Dalize, who passed away shortly before this work was published.