• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

SOLD

Réf : 68482

Set an alert

A question about this book?

Add to my virtual collection

Edgar Allan POE & Charles BAUDELAIRE

Histoires extraordinaires. Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires

Michel Lévy frères, Paris 1856 - 1857, In-12 (11,5x18cm), 330pp. et 287pp., 2 volumes reliés.

first editions of these two volumes of Edgar Poe's tales rarely presented in a uniform binding.
Bindings in half red shagreen. Back to nerves adorned with 4 small irons, jewels for extraordinary stories , stars for new extraordinary stories . title labels of red shagreen. Plates of black marbled, marble marbled paper on the contreplats. Aside from the burns on the table of contents of the New Extraordinary Stories, all together fresh, freckles free. Fine copies.

This translation of Poe is published a few months before Baudelaire's first collection of poems: The Flowers of Evil .
If we know what EA Poe owes to Baudelaire, whose superb translation goes beyond the original work, we often forget the literary debt of French towards his American model. Because, more than a translation exercise, Baudelaire has found in the reading of extraordinary stories , the very soul of his poems still just sketched.
After the success of his first translation of the Extraordinary Histories in 1856, Baudelaire adds to his New Extraordinary Histories , a unique preface that, far beyond a mere presentation of Edgar Allan Poe's "dark and strange genius," reveals itself a true profession of artistic faith of this humble translator who is about to become one of the greatest poets of world literature.
" From the heart of a greedy world, hungry for materialism, Poe has thrown himself into dreams. Smothered by the American atmosphere, he wrote at the head of Eureka: "I offer this book to those who put their faith in dreams as in the only realities! »[...]
Aristocrat of nature still more than of birth, the Virginian, the man of the South, the Byron lost in a bad world, has always kept his philosophical impassibility, and either he defines the nose of the populace, or he mock the fabricators of religions, or he flouts libraries, he remains what was and what will always be the true poet, - a truth dressed in a bizarre way, an apparent paradox, who does not want to be crushed by the crowd, and running to the far east when fireworks are fired at sunset. "
Henry de la Madelene, writer and friend of Baudelaire is mistaken, when he enjoins his contemporaries to discover the poet through his translations of Poe: "Read them carefully, and you will have the same blow the secret of the soul of Baudelaire and the secret of his works "

Beautiful and rare copy set in a sober and elegant binding of time.

• 
• 
• 
• 
•