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1 000 €

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Edgar Allan POE & Charles BAUDELAIRE

Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires

Michel Lévy frères, Paris 1857, In-12 (11,2x18cm), 287pp., relié.

First edition.
Bound contemporary brown half-shagreen. Spine decorated with gilt fillets. Gilt title. Traces of rubbing to edges. Scattered foxing. A good copy.
This translation of Poe was published a few months before Baudelaire's first collection of poems, Les Fleurs du mal.
While we know how much E.A. Poe owes to Baudelaire, whose superb translation is known to even surpass the original work, we often overlook Baudelaire's own literary debt to his American model. More than an exercise in translation, Baudelaire found in reading Poe's extraordinary stories the very soul of his poems, which we still being written at the time.
Following the success of his first translation of Les Histoires Extraordinaires in 1856, Baudelaire added a unique preface to his Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, which goes far beyond a simple presentation of Edgar Allan Poe's "dark and strange genius", and proves to be a true tribute to Poe by his humble translator who was about to become one of the greatest poets in history.
"From the bosom of a greedy world, starved of materialities, Poe darted into dreams. Smothered as he was by the American atmosphere, he wrote at the head of Eureka: "I offer this book to those who have put their faith in dreams as in the only realities!" [...] Poe, an Aristocrat by nature even more than by birth, a Virginian, a Southern man, a true Byron lost in a bad world, always retained his philosophical impassivity, and, whether he was defining the nose of the rabble, mocking the fabricators of religion, or mocking libraries, he remains what the true poet was and always will be, - a truth dressed in a bizarre way, an apparent paradox, who doesn't want to be elbowed by the crowd, and who runs to the far east when the fireworks go off at sunset." (Baudelaire in his foreword to his Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires)
Henry de la Madelène, a writer and friend of Baudelaire's, made no mistake when he urged his contemporaries to discover the poet through his translations of Poe: "Read them carefully, and you will at once have the secret of Baudelaire's soul and the secret of his works".



 

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