The first time I picked up Rimbaud’s Illuminations as a teenager it blew my mind. I loved it, but still I couldn’t help wondering What is this? Where did this come from? As I got more context and read people like Baudelaire I understood more. But, as Lear says, nothing comes from nothing, so I then had to wonder where Paris Spleen came from. Even knowledgeable people like Edward Kaplan, editor of the great volume of Baudelaire’s prose poems called The Parisian Prowler, are quick to credit Charles with being the inventor of the prose poem, but he was just the first to coin the name. As is true for many things, the true innovator is unknown even today and died penniless and largely unpublished in his own time. His name is Aloysius Bertrand.
Thank god for library and garage sales, they’re almost a counter-academy, where the books people actually read and enjoy like Kerouac and Burroughs are more prized than the stuff they make you swallow in school like Henry James. Things will wash ashore there that have never found enough commercial success to be in new McBookstores or enough academic cachet to be required course work. There’s still a literary counter-tradition out there, a lot of it flowing up through Villon and the like into what we now know as rock and roll. Dylan and Patti Smith have spread the word about Rimbaud as much as anybody and I can just see them going through the books haphazardly piled in boxes next to me at the used book sales. I always look for the strange, the weird, the pornographic, the valueless and the priceless. Just a subtle difference of the type on the spine, or a title that wouldn’t cut it with Oprah is enough for me to give a volume a second look.
When I first saw Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit in the Black Coat Press edition it screamed out FANTASY to me, which is not exactly music to my ears, but when I read on the jacket copy that it had "inspired Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, the Surrealist Movement and composer Maurice Ravel, who wrote a suite of virtuoso piano pieces patterned after it" those same ears pricked up. It’s great when small presses, rather than playing the glorified vanity press game, unearth treasures from the past. I’ve been into Rimbaud and Surrealism since I was a teen and I’d never heard of Gaspard before that day.
I think because it was so very different for the 1840’s, Bertrand subtitled the book Fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Callot and provided a very long framing preface, which help to obscure its originality. It’s not really descriptions of art work at all but the first set of prose poems, little vignettes of life in a romanticized Middle Ages, extremely subtle, learned and clever.
Baudelaire freely admitted that his own prose poems were the result of a failed attempt to imitate Bertrand, and that they only came to life when he transposed them to his own time. That’s his genius, of course, as he was one of the first to realize the poetry, beauty and dangerous, dirty and quite possibly evil magic of the modern metropolis. Rimbaud took it a step farther, making a symbol of his illumination, a hieroglyphic both modern and gothic, which could contain the past and the present, the real and the dream. Like a drug he allows us to see the same world in a different way.
Rather than the hipster or academic presses that bring us Rimbaud and Baudelaire, the English edition of Gaspard is, as my ever discerning eye realized, by an outfit that specializes in fantasy. I can see the attraction to the William Morris/Renaissance fair contingent of that motley band, but Gaspard is far from a Frodoesque gambol down precious twee paths, but a nostalgic desire for more romantic days in the dawn of the triumph of the bourgeoisie. There are sprites and monks, but they are seen through the grimy lens of those days, when such things were commonplace. It’s very fitting that the hermit genius of horror T.E.D. Klein supplies a foreward, as he is a poetic master making a slight distortion of the normal to produce an abnormal effect. Seeing that the odds of you being as lucky as I was to find it for fifty cents at a book sale are slim I would recommend going to www.blackcoatpress.com where it is still available. Kudos should also go to Donald Sidney-Fryer for his labor of love in its translation.
Gapard de la Nuit is not only valuable for its historical primacy, but is a sublimely realized work in its own right, as Bertrand’s contemporaries Hugo and Sainte-Beuve were quick to realize. In many ways Bertrand was an emblematic Romantic artist, ill-starred and just plain ill, a somewhat unearthly creature who died early of consumption and left just one exquisite work, a figure who is to be especially cherished now that the bell jar of Classicism is again sucking the air out of the world. He lacks the epigrammatic grandeur of Baudelaire or the heightened lyricism of Rimbaud, but the following will hopefully convey some of his subtle genius:
V. Evening on the Canal
Shores where Venice is queen of the sea
.
Andre Chenier.
The black gondola went gliding past the marble palaces, like a bravo hurrying forth to some nocturnal adventure, a stiletto and a lantern underneath his cape.
A cavalier and a lady aboard the gondola were speaking of love: "The orange trees are so heavenly sweet, and you are so indifferent! Ah! Signora, you are a statue in the garden!"
"This kiss, is it from a statue, my Georgio? Why do you sulk?" "You love me then?" "There is not a star in the sky that does not know, but you do not know?"
"What is that noise?" "Nothing, no doubt just the splashing of the waves rising and falling on some steps along the Giudecca."
"Help! Help!" "Ah, Mother of the Savior, someone is drowning!" "Move aside. He has confessed his sins," spoke a monk who came into sight on the terrace.
And the black gondola quickened its pace, gliding past the marble palaces, like a bravo returning from some nocturnal adventure, a stiletto and a lantern underneath his cape.
