It has been a long wait for a new translation of André Breton’s Nadja (1928), the quintessential Surrealist narrative. Breton’s often tortuous and highly idiomatic prose style presents an enormous challenge to translators. Richard Howard’s version, which appeared in 1960, was a valiant attempt, but it suffered from too many errors. Mark Polizzotti, the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (1995) as well as the translator of a number of books by the Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, has now produced a much more readable and accurate rendering of this classic work (though even he stumbles now and then). Yet to call Nadja a classic is in a sense to betray it, for the Surrealists despised “classics,” whether in art or politics. Officially founded in 1924 with the publication of the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” (written by Breton) and the launch of the journal La Révolution surréaliste, the Surrealist movement defined itself as a revolutionary enterprise. Its proclaimed intention was not merely to change the ways of art and literature but …