The Salt Smugglers (Paperback)

Gerard de Nerval

ISBN 10: 0980033063 / ISBN 13: 9780980033069

Edité par Archipelago Books, New York, 2009

A propos de cet article

Paperback. 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 Gerard de Nerval's blend of sly irony and acerbic social criticism proved so inspiring to authors as various as Baudelaire, Proust, and Leiris. Major "undiscovered" experimental novel of nineteenth-century France. A hilarious satire of life, literature, and politics. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

N° de réf. du vendeur 9780980033069

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: The Salt Smugglers (Paperback)
• Éditeur: Archipelago Books, New York
• Date de parution: 2009
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0980033063
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780980033069
• Reliure: Paperback
• État de l'article: new

A propos de ce titre

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.

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.