Gérard de Nerval’s sonnets Les Chimères were first published as a group in 1854, a year before his suicide at the age of 46. The poems were nearly a dozen years in the making, and their genius was slow to be accepted. Now they are generally regarded as a key work in nineteenth-century poetry, linking romanticism and symbolism. The tributes to Nerval come from writers as different as Proust, Arthur Symons and T.S. Eliot, who quoted him in the last lines of The Waste Land.

This edition presents the poems in French with a facing translation which, while aiming at an exacting verbal fidelity, is intended to be read as a poetic sequence in English. Both Richard Holmes, who contributes an essay on Nerval’s symbolic method, and Peter Jay, who responds with an account of the translation problems, consider that for all their renowned obscurity, the poems are direct and enormously moving. They believe that the spiritual quest at the heart of these twelve sonnets is as vital as ever.