Description

“If ever a writer...sought to define himself painstakingly to himself, to grasp and bring light to the murky shadings, the deepest laws and most elusive impressions of the human soul, it was Gérard de Nerval.”—Marcel Proust

“Every intelligent English-speaking reader must be grateful to Richard Sieburth and Archipelago Books for rescuing from oblivion this gem of factual fiction, revealing a Nerval poised somewhere between the subversive Diderot and the
vitriolic Voltaire. The Salt Smugglers now has pride of place in my ideal library.”—Alberto Manguel

Originally published as a serial work in the 1850s, The Salt Smugglers is a biting and hilarious satire of the politics and censorship of literature; it is an unearthed pre-postmodern classic. By writing a first-person narrative text in which he himself is in search of a lost book containing the history of the Abbé de Bucquoy, Gérard de Nerval is able to evade the French censorship law forbidding fiction newspaper serials while at the same time underscoring its ludicrousness. With its innumerable quotations and tangential citations, The Salt Smugglers leads the reader into a dizzying spin, making way for all experimental and postmodern fiction since.

Gérard de Nerval was a poet, visionary, short story writer, autobiographer, and translator. His works include Aurelia, a memoir of madness; Sylvie, a novella of love and memory; and the hermetic sonnets of The Chimeras; as well as many fantastic tales and experimental fictions. His Selected Writings (translated and edited by Richard Sieburth) was recently release in the Penguin Classics series.

Richard Sieburth’s translations include the work of Friedrich Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin, Henri Micheux, Georg Büchner, and Michel Leiris. His English 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 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

About the Author

Gérard de Nerval was a poet, visionary, short story writer, autobiographer, and translator. His works include Aurelia, the memoir of his madness; Sylvie, a novella of love and memory; and the hermetic sonnets of The Chimeras; as well as many experimental fictions. Nerval's translation of Goethe's Faust, earned him a reputation as a noted translator. Richard Sieburth's translations include Friedrich Holderlin's Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary, Gerard de Nerval's Selected Writings, and Henri Michaux's Emergences/Resurgences. His English edition of the Nerval won the 2000 PEN Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize.

Praise for The Salt Smugglers…

"An unjustly forgotten proto-modernist chef d’oeuvre by a French nineteenth-century master now splendidly Englished for the first time by one of our finest translators … what more could anyone ask for?"
—Ian Monk

"What an amiably digressive tale, à la Laurence Sterne! The Salt Smugglers leads off with an irresistible hunt for a rare book and continues full of high adventure, often involving collisions with an absurdly wrong-headed judicial system. Yet the narrator's tongue-in-cheek sincerity and his jibes at the government are startlingly modern. Richard Sieburth has rescued a lovely book from obscurity or perhaps even virtual oblivion."
—Lydia Davis

"There are individuals who are illuminated by the absolute and who flood the universe of relations with light. … Gérard de Nerval points us to the bold trajectories of these human meteors while at the same time opening our ears to the voices of legends and folksongs. … Love, the spirit of revolution, adventure, a certain form of mysticism—he takes all this and makes it converge toward a single point and an ultimate liberation, which he discovered first in madness and then in suicide."
—Michel Leiris