The Chimeras
Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1984. 1st Edition Thus. Octavo, publisher’s sage cloth, spine and upper board gilt, dove endpapers, original illustrated dust jacket.
Bilingual edition of 19th-century French writer, poet, and translator Gérard de Nerval’s cycle of visionary sonnets. Garnering early acclaim for his translation of Goethe’s Faust, Nerval later penned influential works such as Sylvie and Aurélia, his hallucinatory account of mental collapse. Impoverished and plagued by psychotic episodes, he hanged himself in 1855. Underappreciated in his lifetime, he was later recognized as a key precursor to modernist and avant-garde literature. Originally published in 1854 as the final section of Les Filles du Feu, Nerval’s sequence of twelve sonnets, drawing on mythology, Christianity, the occult, and his own mental crises, is now considered a masterpiece of 19th-century French poetry. Illustrated in black-and-white; with a biographical note, essays by critics, and a selected bibliography of translations. Fine in unclipped dust jacket. Item #13087
$75.00