Les Chimeres

Nerval (1808-1855) is one of the most important writers of nineteenth-century France, both in prose and in verse. A precursor of the symbolists and the surrealists, Nerval has fascinated many major literary figures, including Proust and Breton, Eliot and Apollinaire, Michaux and Leiris. The great sonnet cycle, Les Chimères, in its marvellous combination of spell, quest and dream, continues to fascinate writers, readers, and that special category of writerly readers, translators. The translator of this volume is the gifted poet Will Stone, who explains his work in a strongly-worded essay: "like a partly submerged crocodile, with one amber eye half open the foreign line sits, waiting for the anxious translator to make a move." The book contains three other texts: a foreword by the poet, Anne Beresford, a general introduction to Nerval by Michael Hamburger (published for the first time in the previous edition of this book, some fifty years after it was written), and an afterword and notes on Les Chimères by Professor Norma Rinsler, the doyenne of English Nervaliens.