Gérard de Nerval

Gérard de Nerval, born Gérard Labrunie in Paris in 1808, translated Goethe's Faust at nineteen, in a version Goethe himself read and approved, and at twenty-two published a collection of translations from Klopstock, Goethe, Schiller and Bürger.

He made a choice that was unusual at the time: rendering the German ballads in rhythmic prose rather than verse, losing the rhyme in order to keep the speed. That decision, argued over when the book appeared, made these the most widely read French versions of the nineteenth century. He returned to the question all the same, publishing a verse translation of Lenore in 1848.

He went on to write Les Filles du feu, Aurélia and Les Chimères, and became one of the figures the twentieth century read most closely. He died in Paris in 1855.