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Following yesterday's post, Jane Librizzi of The Blue Lantern asked for illumination on the texts incorporated in the engravings by Henri-Georges Adam. They are all from the 1853 sonnet sequence Les Chim�res by G�rard de Nerval, the man who used to take his pet lobster for walks on a lead in the gardens of the Palais Royal. These are densely allusive, complex poems, and although it occurred to me to try to translate one, good sense prevailed. But in the spirit of "Be careful what you wish for", here is the original French text of G�rard de Nerval's best-known poem, El Desdichado (famously quoted by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land), plus 7 English versions, the fashioning of which has gently whiled away a summer's morning.... The first version is a bare literal translation, the second an attempt at a rhymed equivalent, and the remainder wander steadily further and further from the source text. I would have just posted Martin Bell's translation, which I remember f