Petrus Borel

Borel was the sun, said Théophile Gautier, who could resist him? Indeed, who? A lycanthrope, necrophile, absurd revolutionary, Paris dandy with a scented beard, flamboyant sufferer: a man with no grave and no memorial. His once celebrated red mouth opened briefly like an exotic flower to complain of injustice and bourgeois vulgarity; of his frustration in love and reputation; of poverty and blighted fate. Then he withered in the minor officialdom of Algeria, where he died because he would not wear a hat, leaving a haunted house and a doubtful name. And now, says his only biographer Dame Enid Starkie, he is quite forgotten.Rhapsodies 1831 includes all the poems Borel wrote when he was twenty and twenty-one. The poems, he said, are the slag from my crucible: the poetry that boils in my heart has slung its dross. It is a fabulous, fiery, black-clouded dross: captains and cutlasses, castles, maidens, daggers, danger; calls to arms, imagined loves, plaints and howls of injustice. Never did a publication create a greater scandal, Borel said, because it was a book written heart and soul, with no thought of anything else, and stuffed with gall and suffering. It was not reviewed. Now it is back.

Madame Putifar, la novela negra por excelencia de la literatura francesa, describía las desdichas e infortunios de otro personaje prácticamente desconocido, al tiempo que abría una ventana a situaciones historicas del Antiguo Regimen: la existencia del Parc-aux-Cerfs, especie de haren de Luis XVI, las cartas selladas que condenaron de por vida a muchos a la mazmorra perpetua sin otra justicia que el deseo del rey y de su entorno, ni mas crimen cometido por el reo que el de desagradar al poder por mil motivos arbitrarios. Paul Eluard situaba admirablemente entre el marques de Sade y el conde de Lautreamont a este escritor perseguido por el infortunio, cuya obra posee, segun el poeta surrealista, el mismo caracter de absoluto y de audacia que la suya. Borel encarna la sombra malefica de un romanticismo no domesticado, una puerta por la que irrumpen la pasion, un desorbitado deseo de venganza, el delirio y la locura: ademas, Madame Putifar, traducida ahora por primera vez al castellano, traza el mapa donde los crimenes de la monarquia van señalando las etapas de la llegada de la Revolucion Francesa.