“Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie”: Nerval’s “El Desdichado”

Abstract

In lines 428–30 of The Waste Land we hear Dante’s Italian, the Latin of the Pervigilium Veneris, and then the French of Gérard de Nerval, a brilliant, eccentric nineteenth-century writer who, according to Arthur Symons, was institutionalized for the first time after having been “found in the Palais Royal, leading a lobster at the end of a blue ribbon (because, he said, it does not bark, and knows the secrets of the sea)” (71–72). Nerval was admired by Baudelaire and Proust; Harold Bloom includes him in his list of 100 geniuses, declaring him “a wild original” (468). Eliot quotes from “El Desdichado,” a sonnet Nerval composed in 1853 during a second hospitalization for mental illness. The poem is widely viewed as one of those on which Nerval’s reputation rests, but it is notoriously cryptic; Nerval himself remarked of the group of sonnets in which it was included that they “would lose their charm in being explained, if the thing were possible” (349). Here is Lawrence Rainey’s translation of the poem:

I am the man of gloom,—the widower,—the unconsoled,

The Prince of Aquitania, his tower in ruins:

My only star is dead, and my constellated lute

Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia.

In the night of the tomb, you who’ve consoled me,

Give me back Posillipo and the Italian sea,

The flower that so pleased my desolate heart,

And the arbor where the vine and rose are intertwined.

Am I Amor or Phoebus? … Lusignan or Biron?

My brow still burns from the kiss of the queen;

I have dreamed in the grotto where the siren swims…

And twice I have crossed Acheron victorious:

Modulating on the lyre of Orpheus

Now the sighs of the saint, now the cry of the fairy. (Rainey 123–24; ellipses in original)