Question: What language do both writer Harry Mathews and poet Robert Desnos know?
Context: Eric Robertson is Professor of Modern French Literary and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London.  His research focuses primarily on 20th century French literature, especially poetry, and the visual arts, with particular emphasis on European Modernism and the avant-gardes.  He is the author of "Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor" (2006), "Writing Between the Lines", a study of the bilingual novelist and essayist René Schickele (1995), and various articles and chapters on 20th century French literature, especially poetry, and visual arts.  He is also the co-editor of "Yvan Goll - Claire Goll: Texts and Contexts" (1997), "Robert Desnos: Surrealism in the Twenty-First Century" (2006), "Dada and Beyond Volume 1: Dada Discourses" (2011) and "Dada and Beyond Volume 2: Dada and its Legacies" (2012).  Professor Robertson recently completed a monograph exploring the writings of Blaise Cendrars in the light of his interactions with artists, photographers and filmmakers, including Sonia Delaunay, Robert Delaunay, Robert Doisneau, Abel Gance, Fernand Léger and Léopold Survage.  Further ongoing projects include a study of avant-garde art and virtual technologies. Robert Desnos (] ; 4 July 1900 – 8 June 1945), was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement of his day. Chantefleurs et Chantefables is a song cycle for soprano and orchestra set to the poems of Robert Desnos by the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski.  The work was composed from 1989 to 1991 and was first performed at The Proms by the soprano Solveig Kringlebotn and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of the composer on August 8, 1991.  The piece is Lutosławski's second composition set to the poetry of Robert Desnos, following 1975's "Les Espaces du sommeil". Georges Alexandre Malkine (10 October 1898 – 22 March 1970) was the only visual artist named in André Breton’s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto among those who, at the time of its publication, had “performed acts of absolute surrealism."  The rest Breton named were for the most part writers, including Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, and Benjamin Peret.  Malkine's 1926 painting "Nuit D'amour" was the precursor of the lyrical abstract school of painting. Michel Murat is best known as a specialist of twentieth-century French literature, with an emphasis on modernity, style, poetics, and versification.  He is also a specialist in surrealism.  He has published several major studies of Julien Gracq's stylistics and poetics, in particular on the role of names and analogy in "The Opposing Shore", as well as books on Robert Desnos and André Breton. Max Morise (1900-1973) was a French artist, writer & actor, associated with the Surrealist movement in Paris from 1924 to 1929.  He was friends with Robert Desnos and Roger Vitrac before they joined the Surrealist movement.  He contributed articles to "La Revolution Surrealiste" and took part in a series of round table discussions held by the group, regarding the nature of sex.  He also participated in several Surrealist games, most famously the "exquisite corpse".  André Breton quotes Morise twice in the first "Surrealist Manifesto"; after saying "We do not have any talent", Breton provides a quote by Vitrac and Paul Éluard, then says "Ask Max Morise" and provides this quote: Pierre Martory (December 1, 1920 – October 5, 1998) was a French poet whose influence on New York School poets was quiet but profound.  His work was admired by Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, Harry Mathews, and others, and translated extensively by John Ashbery, with whom he shared his life in Paris for nearly a decade.  His work has appeared in many books in both England and the United States, as well as in "The New Yorker" and "Poetry".  Martory’s personal “charm,” the poet Ann Lauterbach once said, “devolved back to the original meaning of ‘spell. ’” However, as Ashbery has noted, “Both the humor and the sadness in his poems are always rendered with an unemphatic clarity that is certainly Mozartian.” Laura Duke Condominas (also known as Laura Duke, born in Boston April 1951) is the daughter of French artist and film-maker Niki de Saint-Phalle and American novelist Harry Mathews.  As an actress she is most notable for her portrayal of Guinevere in Robert Bresson's film "Lancelot du lac" (1974). Harry Mathews (February 14, 1930 – January 25, 2017) was an American writer.  He is the author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays.  Mathews was also a translator of French. L'Étoile de mer (English: The Sea Star) is a 1928 film directed by Man Ray.  The film is based on a script by Robert Desnos and depicts a couple (Alice Prin and André de la Rivière) acting through scenes that are shot out of focus.
Answer: French