A harrowing document of a descent into madness, by France's defining
poet of bohemian romanticism
Aurelia is French poet and novelist Gérard de Nerval's account of his
descent into madness--a 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 Nerval's; and André Breton, who placed Nerval in the highest echelon
of Surrealist heroes. Geoffrey Wagner's translation of Aurélia 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 Duncan's version
of the sonnet cycle Chimeras, making this the most complete collection
of Nerval's influential oeuvre ever published in English.
