As far as I can tell, there has only ever been one English translation of Aloysius Betrand’s mysterious work Gaspard de la Nuit (1842), which appeared from an academic press and is long out of print. The absence of a version for the general reader is strange, because Gaspard is widely regarded as a founding text of prose poetry as a genre — Baudelaire cites it admiringly in the preface to Paris Spleen — and also a highly original work in its own right, ranging from evocations of Dutch painting to lightning-flash Gothic horror. So when translations of individual Bertrand pieces appear, I treasure them. In my anthology, I used “The Madman”, by the American horror writer, Thomas Ligotti, the text of which appeared in a little magazine, once available online, but now [candle blows out] vanished. It featured Bertrand’s demonic gnome Scarbo, as does this piece, which Maurice Ravel set to fiendishly jittery piano music, and which Patrick McGuinness translated for his Penguin Book of French Short Stories (2022). McGuinness, a prose writer and poet, brings a beautiful mix of magic and precision to Bertrand’s hallucinatory sentences, which glitter like Ravel’s glissandos: “How often have I seen him land on the floor, pirouette on one foot and roll through my bedroom like the spray from a sorceress’s wand!”

First published in French in Gaspard de la Nuit, 1842; translated into English for The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: From Marguerite de Navarre to Marcel Proust, 2022, Volume 1