The Salt Smugglers (Paperback)

"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 Gerard de Nerval."--Marcel Proust

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 Abbe de Bucquoy, Gerard 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.

Gerard 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 Holderlin, Walter Benjamin, Henri Micheux, Georg Buchner, 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 Sceve's Delie was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.