Aurelia & Other Writings

A harrowing document of a descent into madness by Frances defining poet of bohemian romanticism Aurelia is French poet and novelist Grard de Nervals account of his descent into madnessa condition provoked in part by his unrequited passion for an actress named Jenny Colon. One of the original self-styled bohemians Nerval was best known in his own day for parading a lobster on a pale blue ribbon through the gardens of the Palais-Royal and was posthumously notorious for his suicide in 1855 hanging from an apron string he called the garter of the Queen of Sheba. This hallucinatory document of dreams obsession and insanity has fascinated artists such as Joseph Cornell who cited passages from it to explain his own work; Antonin Artaud who saw his own madness mirrored by Nervals; and Andr Breton who placed Nerval in the highest echelon of Surrealist heroes. Geoffrey Wagners translation of Aurlia was first published by Grove Press in 1959 but has remained out of print for nearly 20 years. Also included in this volume are previously untranslated stories by Marc Lowenthal and poet Robert Duncans version of the sonnet cycle Chimeras making this the most complete collection of Nervals influential oeuvre ever published in English.