Smarra & Trilby E-Book

Charles Nodier

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Smarra is a highly charged vampire novel & Trilby a fairy tale set in the Scottish Highlands

Das E-Book Smarra & Trilby wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

COPYRIGHT

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

email: [email protected]

www.dedalusbooks.com

ISBN printed book 978 0 946626 79 3

ISBN e-book 978 1 909232 50 1

Dedalus is distributed in the USA & Canada by SCB Distributors,

15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248

email: [email protected] www.scbdistributors.com

Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd.

58, Beaumont Road, Mount Kuring-gai, N.S.W 2080

email: [email protected]

Publishing History

First published in France 1821/22

First published by Dedalus in 1993

First ebook edition in 2013

Translation & introduction copyright © Dedalus 1993

Printed in Finland by Bookwell

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. Listing for this book is available on request.

THE TRANSLATOR

Judith Landry was educated at Somerville College, Oxford where she obtained a first class honours degree in French and Italian. She combines a career as a translator of works of fiction, art and architecture with part-time teaching.

Her translations for Dedalus are: The House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga, New Finnish Grammar and The Last of theVostyachs by Diego Marani, The Mussolini Canal by Antonio Pennacchi, The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte, Prague Noir:The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague by Sylvie Germain and Smarra & Trilby by Charles Nodier.

She is currently translating God’s Dog by Diego Marani for Dedalus.

CONTENTS

1 Introduction

2 Smarra

3 Trilby

INTRODUCING CHARLES NODIER

Charles Nodier was born in 1780, just as it was beginning to become clear that the Ancien Régime had a false bottom. He died in 1844, in Paris, having lived through a succession of governances of the world, each of which had dissolved in turn, exposing another false bottom to reality. He was briefly imprisoned in 1803 for publishing a rhyming pamphlet satirical of Napoleon, but generally eschewed active politics. He became a man of letters, and during the course of an industrious life published much fiction, an 1820 melodrama about a vampire, histories, bibliographies, studies in entomology, much else. If he was a significant figure in early French Romanticism (as indeed he was), he was significant in part for his literal embodiment – from 1824 to his death he was librarian for the Bibliothèque de I’Arsenal – of the essential bookishness of the movement.

At the Bibliothèque, Nodier soon established a kind of male salon or ‘cenacle’, frequented by fellow devotees of Romantic sensibility, including Alfred Vigny, the Deschamps brothers, Victor Hugo and Charles Sainte-Beuve. The tradition of the cénacle – the term means upper chamber, with specific reference to the room used for the Last Supper – could not be described as expressing any revolutionary confrontation with the world or the world’s politics. Nor did the cénacle – though both Hugo and Sainte-Beuve later convened their own versions – generate any notable Romantic doctrines. One supposes that it may best be described as an affinity group, structured around the ‘discipleship’ of its invitees, and focused on appropriate aesthetic responses to a singularly insecure world. Nodier was himself perhaps the ideal guru for a conclamation of men of books. He was a man of skills, with a fresh and invigorating mind, but not dangerous to know. His fiction was much admired. But it was not dangerous.

Or so it has seemed. One hundred and fifty years after his death, none of his adult fiction had yet appeared in English, or so it is easy to believe. Nodier has become a footnote in literary history, and the unavailability in English (till now) of any of his mature fantasies once again demonstrates the sidebar status still allotted to non-mimetic literary genres as they developed during the nineteenth century. If not forgotten entirely, authors of non-mimetic fiction tend to be demonized, dismissed as artists manqués, or trivialized as writers for children. Nodier was clearly neither a demon nor a manqué, but it is interesting to note that before 1993 only two Nodier fictions were published in book form in English, and that both Trésor des Fèves etFleur des Pois (translated 1921 as The Luck of the Bean-Rows) and Le Chien de Brisquet (translated 1922 as TheWoodcutter’s Dog) were released in formats ostensibly designed to appeal primarily to children.

On examination, this seems slightly odd, certainly when one looks at The Luck of the Bean-Rows, whose cover proclaims it ‘a fairy-tale for lucky children’, but whose structure and style make it very close kin indeed – though shorter and simpler in its compass – to the two short novels now finely translated by Judith Landry. Smarra, ou les Démons de la nuit (1821), here given as Smarra or the Demons of the Night, and Trilby, ou le lutin d’Argail [‘Trilby, or the Imp of Argyll’] (1822), here presented simply as Trilby, are two full-fledged tales from Nodier’s prime, sleek and flowing and highly unsafe. What is interesting is how precisely the smaller fable encapsulates the techniques and the dangerousness of the longer ones. The Luck of the Bean-Rows is an ideal lesson in reading Nodier.

Once upon a time an old man and his wife discover a tiny child in their bean field, christen him Luck of the Bean-Rows, and raise him as their own. From the moment of his arrival, good luck glistens through their lives, and their bean field grows – without impinging on neighbouring fields – until it has become a flourishing plantation. Soon it becomes time for Luck of the Bean-Rows to make his first journey to the big City. The old man and his wife give him three pots of precious beans to do with as he wishes, beg him to return before nightfall lest they die of anxiety, and he leaves. As usually happens in fairy tales, three supplicants beg him for help en route. The first two are worthy, and he gives them each a pot; the third is a patently disingenuous and smarmy wolf, but Luck gives him a pot as well. He then comes upon Pea-Blossom, whose carriage – a chick pea – proves magically large enough to carry him round and around the world at great speed just after she tells him she has decided on a marriage-partner and gives him three gifts. Years later – though the time has passed as though in a dream – the great steam carriage finally halts in a desert land, which Luck transforms with his three gifts from Pea-Blossom into an Eden. The wolf and its minions fail in their attempt to invest the great palace. Luck sees in a mirror that he has become a man. He grieves for his parents, but after more profound slumber awakens to see that the bean plantation has been incorporated into Eden, the old man and his wife fall into his arms, as does Pea-Blossom, now a young woman, who welcomes them inside. “ ‘This is your son’s home,’ she says, ‘and it is in the land of the spirit and of day dreams where one no longer grows old and where no one dies.’ It would have been difficult to welcome these poor people with better news.” They live happily ever after.

The utter strangeness of this fable lies not in any one magical ingredient, nor in any of the characters involved: for they are of common currency.

The strangeness lies in the shape of the thing itself. As each fragment of the tale ends, we undergo a dream-like non-sequitur shift into the next fragment, as though Nodier had opened a false bottom in the world and dropped us through. Some elements of the tale may be retained through various shifts (the wolf, for instance, but not the previous recipients of Luck’s gifts), but their re-entry into the story will be conveyed with a sense of oneiric discontinuity. It is as though (like the reader) they fall deeper and deeper into the entrails of the dream. And, at the end, there is an epiphany. Through it, Nodier may be claiming to announce the triumph of Faerie; but (like the Faerie of significant fantasy writers from Lord Dunsany through John Crowley) Nodier’s Faerie bears a strong taste of death.

The Luck of the Bean-Rows is written, as one might put it, in clear. It is a fairy story. But it is not children’s fare: not in the precariousness of the realities it depicts; not in the hints of sexual subtext that well upwards whenever Pea-Blossom offers to split the vertical smile of the lining of her pod; not in Faerie as a Kingdom of Death. But because it is so clear, and perhaps because it lacks the liebestod intensity of the two mature works, it is a perfect introduction to Smarra and Trilby. This is not to say that either of these tales is merely a Luck of theBean-Rows written in code. They differ in other ways as well. In both of these tales of profound entrapment, Nodier’s language – in its metaphoric density, and in unrelentingness of its attempts to make higher reality visible through the mists of night – conveys an almost visceral sense of the coils of dream. And both tales differ in another way, as well, from the fairy story. Both are deeply imbrued in learning. Each of them is a book through which other books dream.

Smarra in particular is studded with allusions, some opaque, some fairly clear, some perhaps no more than wrong turnings in the labyrinth. The story is, perhaps, simple (if Tristram Shandy is simple). A young man named Lorenzo – long banned by the evil tricks of genies from gaining his beloved Lisidis – lies beside her in the bed which had been the site of so many dreams: visions of Apuleius, for instance, whose Golden Ass is a fable of transformation which contains within it further fables, a tale of unending night which lightens only when Lucius, the sorcerer’s apprentice, is changed back into human shape through supernatural intervention. But now Lisidis sleeps beside him, and he himself begins to drowse downwards into a land of swarming pollen, will-o’-the wisps, and Dream.