Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855)

At something of a low point in his life (he was recovering from a nervous breakdown, and Jenny Colon, the singer he had been in love with, married someone else and subsequently died), Gérard de Nerval followed the advice of his friends and went off to spend the whole of 1843 travelling around the Eastern Mediterranean. As was the custom, he turned this into a travel book when he got home, although Voyage à l'Orient took him about six years to write and came out looking more like a work of show more fiction than a simple record of a voyage. He rearranged his journeys to give a better sequence, tippexed out an inconvenient travelling companion, and interpolated several novella-length stories in the text, which he claims to have heard along the way but were obviously mostly his own work.

In this abridged translation, Norman Glass gives us two of the interpolated stories plus one of the more journalistic parts of the book, the story of how Nerval bought the Javanese slave Zetnaybia during his stay in Cairo. Glass tells us that in reality it was his companion, Joseph de Fonfrède (or Fonfride) who bought the girl, but in any case it's Nerval who takes the credit for this adventure, or, as far as any modern reader is concerned, the blame. The front cover tagline of the seventies paperback gives a pretty fair assessment of what we're in for "An exotic quest for women, hashish and Eastern mystery." We can't say they didn't warn us!

By 1843, even a romantic poet on the fringes of respectable society can't get away with pretending that slavery is just a quaint local custom, so the whole Zetnaybia story is hedged about with caveats and excuses: Nerval needs a woman in the house to get around the rule that unmarried foreigners in Cairo are supposed to live in hostels; Ottoman slavery is quite different from what goes on in the Americas; we're told that Zetnaybia herself is happy with the social standing it gives her, with more rights and legal protection than a "free" Ottoman woman. Nerval is careful to avoid ever saying that he's bought her in order to have sex with her, even though it's hard to imagine what else she could be doing: she has been brought up to look beautiful, and refuses to do any cooking and cleaning. And it's obvious how the situation appears to outsiders when the Greek captain of a ship they are travelling on offers to exchange his beautiful little boy for Zetnaybia for the duration of the voyage. The whole thing ends rather clumsily, mostly due to Glass's cuts, with Zetnaybia temporarily parked in a private boarding-school for young ladies in Beirut. But there's some quite unpleasant reading here, especially the descriptions of Nerval's repeated shopping expeditions to slave-dealers who never have quite the right thing in stock. And his unapologetically racist ideas of beauty. In bad taste when it was written, worse now.

The Tale of Caliph Hakem, supposedly told to Nerval by a Druze sheik imprisoned in Lebanon, is a romantic version of the life of the 11th century Fatimid ruler who is regarded by followers of the Druze religion as an incarnation of God. Nerval seems to be particularly interested in Hakem because of the way accusations of madness go together with his role as a religious martyr — in the story he is locked up in an asylum for claiming to be the Caliph, which in fact he is. And he has a Doppelgänger, in the best romantic tradition, who likes to eat hashish with the incognito Caliph...

The third part Glass translates is the tale of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, which Nerval claims to have heard in an Istanbul coffee-house. Where the Hakem story carefully sidestepped relying on supernatural elements, this includes all kinds of magic, including a full-on mythical section where Adoniram, Solomon's building contractor for the Temple project, is conducted on a tour of the earth's core by his ancestor Tubalcain. But its real charm is in the character of the Queen, who outwits Solomon repeatedly. Unfortunately, Solomon's inability to keep up with her in philosophical debate, and his poor taste in architecture and poetry seem to have more to do with Nerval's antisemitic prejudices than with any real notion of turning the Queen into a feminist hero.

Both the narratives were very entertainingly written, with all the exotic orientalist background carefully dosed not to get in the way of the action more than he needs to tease us a little. I also dipped a bit further into the parts of this very long book that Glass doesn't translate, and I had the feeling that he's doing Nerval a disservice by cutting out so much of the purely journalistic writing. There are obviously some lovely bits of description he's missing out. show less

I came to Gerard de Nerval's short novella Sylvie 1) through a comparison I heard made with Madame Bovary through its exploration of love as an end in itself, the state of being "in love with love" and the eternal and 2) through Proust's fascination with it - the influence it had is really obvious to see as this is a book absolutely obsessed with memory and the places, things, sensations etc. that go with them as well as the worldly sadness as we watch a world that feels most real and show more natural to us - that of our childhood, in particular - disappear or alter beyond recognition, places changing shape, people disappearing from our lives and so on. As I also suggested, it's very much a novel about a man and his lifelong intoxication and infatuations with women, specifically three of them - we begin with the actress Aurelie, but as it turns out this is but an illusion, a case of her being mistaken for a girl he saw only once in his childhood but who coloured every romance and the trajectory of his life ever since, Adrienne. She is contrasted with the Sylvie of the title who represents a more realistic love, one he at first ignores only to run back towards by which point it's all too late.

Adrienne is most interesting for her only appearance early in the book, one which is never forgotten as even while pursuing Sylvie our narrator seems to really be looking for her, as when he considers detouring into a convent, as Adrienne had disappeared from life when she was sent to a convent some years after the meeting (and perhaps his love for Sylvie is part of his attempt to relive and capture at least part of the memory of that unforgettable day). Maybe this is me projecting my own nature more widely but I feel like all of us have an Adrienne of kinds, a dream and ideal we're forever chasing after that lies just beyond and out of reach from wherever we go, an unquenchable desire for completion that is impossible in an imperfect existence; reading this brought out that side of me for definite, and the potent evocation of lost worlds and memories that exist as the only fragments of them made me feel a deep sadness for the same events and people in my own life. A beautiful, entrancing work. show less

Ma come potrebbe la saggezza umana, con i suoi angusti limiti, raggiungere l’INFINITO? (301)

L’essere nervaliano e’ sempre pronto a scivolare sul piano inclinato che dalla veglia porta al sonno, da cio’ che rassicura a cio’ che ossessiona, sfociando in una dimensione incerta dove sparsi elementi di realta’ coesistono con immemoriali figure, appunti cronachistici si volgono in racconti onirici, confondendo reminiscenze storiche e memorie personali in uno spazio divelto e show more frammentato. (introduzione, 11)

La donna e’ piu’ amara della morte; il suo cuore e’ una trappola e le sue mani sono catene. Il servo di Dio la fuggira’, e il folle si fara’ prendere. (Ecclesiaste, 83)

Si’ - continuo’ la sua guida; e’ un dio che ha meno forza che ingegno ed e’ piu’ geloso che generoso, il dio Adonai! Ha creato l’uomo dal fango, a dispetto dei geni del fuoco; poi, spaventato dalla sua opera e dalla loro condiscendenza per questa triste creatura, senza pieta’ per le loro lacrime, l’ha condannata a morire. Ecco la causa del contrasto che ci divide: tutta la vita terrestre che procede dal fuoco e’ attratta dal fuoco che sta al centro della terra. Avevamo voluto che in cambio il fuoco centrale fosse attratto dalla circonferenza e che si irradiasse all’esterno: questo scambio di principi avrebbe permesso la vita senza fine. (177) show less

There is difficulty in locating an edition of these exquisite sonnets in French or in English which contains only these sonnets, Les Chimères. I see the problem here – the sonnets alone make a very slim volume indeed and this is why they are almost always bundled with other works of Nerval such as Les Filles Du Feu or Aurélia.

This nicely produced hardback edition more than adequately solves the problem and presents Les Chimères with no other works by Nerval. Much as I love Nerval's show more other works, I have always felt that Les Chimères deserved a slim volume of their own.

What we have here is Les Chimères with translations by Peter Jay set on a facing page, which is convenient. It includes introductory text and a detailed exchange between Jay and Richard Holmes about the translations. It is also tastefully illustrated with some carefully chosen images. Even with a bibliography it only runs to 73 numbered pages, thus pleasingly slim.

Peter Jay’s translations are generally more than acceptable with some elegant solutions. He approaches with care and attention. There are no truly radical departures such as those of Derek Mahon and Andrew Hoyem. His approach is comparable to that of Will Stone. If anything, Jay is conservative but he is subject to the inevitable translation woes and impediments, as he frankly discusses. He is not unduly literal, he is generally seeking a broadly poetic resolution which yet steers as close as possible to Nerval.
It remains largely impossible, though, to render even one line without getting into difficulty.

Take for example the apparently simple lines from El Desdichado:

Dans la nuit du tombeau, toi qui m’as consolé
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie

The literal rendering is:

In the night of the tomb, you who consoled me
Give me back Posilipo and the sea of Italy

Jay renders these lines as:

You who consoled me in the tombstone night
Bring back my Posilipo, the Italian sea

Peter Jay made several readily noticeable decisions here. He inverted the order of the ideas of the first line from

In the night of the tomb, you who consoled me

to:

You who consoled me in the tombstone night

Why did he do that?

Then we might pause to grapple with Jay’s translation of the French word ‘tombeau’ as ‘tombstone’.

To begin with, tombeau does not mean tombstone.
Tombeau, wherever you look, Robert or Larousse or anywhere else, means a tomb.

The French for a tombstone is unquestionably une pierre tombale.

So, Peter Jay made a decision here – to reject the English word tomb and to substitute a related but strictly inaccurate translation of his own devising.

Why did he did he do this?
One could endlessly speculate. I discuss these two lines simply to illustrate the difficulties of translating poetry and not as a criticism of Peter Jay.

Neverthless, overall, he succeeds in communicating in English the essentially mysterious nature of these profoundly allusive and alluring poems. show less