Louis [Aloysius] Bertrand, Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot. Translated by Gian Lombardo. Niantic, CT: Quale Press, 2022. xxxiii + 258 pp., ill.

Abstract

<p>This imaginative new English translation of Louis, alias Aloysius, Bertrand's <i>Gaspard de la Nuit</i> — published posthumously in 1842 and often considered the first collection of prose poems in France — is a radical experiment in authorial intentionality (for those who still believe in it). As the 'Translator's Afterword' makes plain, its 'chief aim […] is to present to the reader <i>Gaspard de la Nuit</i> as Louis Bertrand envisioned it' (p. 241). The task is ambitious, as Bertrand wanted to produce 'Un livre fait pour exciter vivement la curiosité', and instructed the typesetter to 'blanchir comme si le texte était de la poésie' and for the space surrounding his texts to be 'le plus large et le plus historié qu'il se pourra' (in <i>Œuvres complètes</i>, ed. by Helen Hart Poggenburg (Paris: Honor é Champion, 2000), pp. 377, 373, 374).</p>