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Our new translation of Aloysius Bertrand's series of prose poems, Gaspard de la Nuit is now available here.

Louis Bertrand (1807-1841), better known by his pen name Aloysius Bertrand, was born in Ceva, Piedmont (then in France, now in Italy). He studied at the Collège Royal in Dijon, from 1818 to 1826. Praised for his early writings by Hugo and Saint-Beuve, he moved to Paris in 1828 but was relatively unsuccessful there, returning to Dijon in 1830 where he became editor of a Republican newspaper, Patriote de la Côte-d’Or. In 1833, he was back in Paris where the manuscript of Gaspard de la Nuit was accepted for publication, though the work was not printed until after his death. In Paris, he led a financially precarious life as a poet and playwright, contracting tuberculosis which resulted in his death in 1841.

In Gaspard de la Nuit Bertrand is credited with inventing the prose-poem, which later inspired Baudelaire to pen his set of prose-poems Le Spleen de Paris, while Bertrand was also admired by Mallarmé and the Symbolists, and later the Surrealists. Gaspard de la Nuit inspired a painting by Magritte, and three piano solos by Ravel.

Gaspard de la Nuit is a lively and brilliant evocation of both Dijon his native city and the French Middle Ages; one of those highly personal and gloriously unique works of which French literature can boast so many.