The Salt Smugglers - Couverture souple

De Nerval, Gerard

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0980033063 ISBN 13 : 9780980033069

Editeur : Archipelago, 2009

Synopsis

First published as a feuilleton in a left-wing newspaper in 1850, The Salt Smugglers provides a political satire of the waning days of France’s short-lived Second Republic. With nods to Diderot and Sterne, this shaggy-dog story deals less with contraband salt smugglers than with the subversive power of fiction to transgress legal and esthetic boundaries. By writing what he claimed was a purely documentary account of his picaresque adventures in search of an elusive book recording the true history of a certain seventeenth-century swashbuckler, Nerval sought to deride the press censors of the day who forbade the serial publication of novels in newspapers – and in the process he provocatively deconstructed existing distinctions between fact and fiction. Never before translated into English and still unavailable as a separately published volume in French, The Salt Smugglers is a pre-postmodern gem of experimental prose. Richard Sieburth’s vibrant translation and illuminating afterword remind us why Gérard de Nerval’s blend of sly irony and acerbic social criticism proved so inspiring to authors as various as Baudelaire, Proust, and Leiris.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Poet, storyteller, autobiographer, translator, and visionary, Gérard de Nerval (1808–55) explored the blurry boundaries between dream and reality, fact and fiction, imagination and madness in his groundbreaking writings. Nerval was a pioneering modernist, a precursor of the French Symbolists, and a vital influence on writers such as Marcel Proust, André Breton, and Antonin Artaud. His works include Voyage en Orient ( Journey to the Orient), Sylvie – which Umberto Eco deemed a "masterpiece," Les Filles du Feu (The Daughters of Fire), Les Illuminés (The Illuminati), and Aurélia – which opens with "Dream is a second life." Richard Sieburth’s translations include Gérard de Nerval’s Selected Writings, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, Henri Michaux’s Emergences/ Resurgences and Stroke by Stroke, Gérard de Nerval’s The Salt Smugglers, Michel Leiris’ Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Gershom Scholem’s The Fullness of Time: Poems. His edition of Nerval’s Selected Writings won the 2000 PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. His recent translation of Maurice Scève’s Délie was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld Prize.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

I fear it was quite foolhardy on my part to have promised you a few details concerning a curious figure who lived toward the end of the reign of Louis XIV. I know that contributors to the National are required to observe a virtually military precision, and I am accordingly determined to honor my commitment to the fullest of my capabilities; but unfortunately my resolve has been somewhat sidetracked by unforeseen circumstances. Only a month ago, I happened to be passing through Frankfurt. I had two days to kill, but being already acquainted with the place, there was little for me to do but wander through its principal streets which, as so happened,

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Archipelago
• Date d'édition: 2009
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0980033063
• ISBN 13: 9780980033069
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 147
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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