Aloysius [Louis] Bertrand was one of the most experimental writers of the first-generation avant-garde, and was frequently cited as a precursor by Baudelaire, the Symbolists, and the Surrealists. Bertrand is often credited as the (paradoxically) unacknowledged inventor of the prose-poem; in fact discussions and experiments regarding the form had been going on since the late 18th Century, but in this book Bertrand systematically developed it to its full potential, and in his Preface to Paris Spleen Baudelaire states that Gaspar de la nuit, Bertrand's only book, was the inspiration and guiding model of his own collection of prose poems. Bertrand's work, like Nerval's, often seems to envelop a second discourse within it regarding his activity with occult, alchemical, and mystical research and practice.
Like many
Frenetic Romantics, Bertrand was deeply involved with philology and
linguistics, as reflected in the title; 'Gaspard' is an extremely rare
and archaic word with several possible meanings, ranging from the name
of one of the Three Magi to slang for 'rat'. Bertrand's
collection was set for publication in 1833, but stalled for years, for complicated reasons. During the entire course of its composition
he was slowly dying of tuberculosis, and when the book finally
appeared, it was a year after his death in a Paris pauper's hospital in
which he had taken refuge without informing his friends; only by chance
did the Romanticist sculptor David d'Angers stumble upon him there a few
weeks before his death. The book finally appeared, in a very small run,
the following year. It has been reprinted intermittently over the course of
the following century, but always by small underground presses in very
small editions.
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