Little Castles of Bohemia: Prose and Poetry

Fully translated into English for the first time, Nerval's autobiographical anthology encompasses his complete literary career, which influenced such authors as Marcel Proust, André Breton and Antonin Artaud Though Gérard de Nerval had originally intended it to be a small anthology of his early poetry, his 1853 Little Castles of Bohemia ended up as something more. As could be said of all his last works, the book was an effort at stability: worn out and financially impoverished, Nerval gathered his past writing in an attempt at assembling some sort of posterity. The melancholic, wandering castles presented here are gathered from the range of Nerval's literary life, from his autobiographical reminiscences of the bohemian neighborhood of Le Doyenné to the lyrical "odelettes" that established Nerval as a poet early on, the one-act Corilla and the mystical sonnets of madness that concluded his career. This bilingual volume containing the first full English translation (together with the original French verse) includes woodcut illustrations by Alfred Prunaire from a rare 1912 edition. Gérard de Nerval (1808–55) was a writer, poet and translator who wedded French and German romanticism and transformed his research into mystic thought and his bouts of mental illness into such visionary works as Aurélia, or Dream and Life.