The Salt Smugglers

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“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 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.