SOURCE: "Traveling from the Orient to Aurélia: Nerval Looks for the Words," in Acts of Fiction: Resistance and Resolution from Sade to Baudelaire, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, pp. 101-24.

In the following excerpt, Carpenter draws a connection between translation, language, and madness in Nerval's works, focusing on "Aurélia."

Nerval was sensitive to the limitations inherent in translation even before he undertook to introduce his readers to the world of delirium in which he often sojourned. Entering the literary scene in 1828 with a new rendering of Faust, he prefaced his version of the epic with comments pertaining to the ultimate impossibility of translation: "Here is a third translation of Faust; and what is certain is that none of the three can say, 'Faust is translated!' It is not that I wish to cast any aspersions on the work of my predecessors, the better to conceal the...