Toad in the Hole: Tristan Corbière
Geoffrey Wall, 16 July 1998
Tristan Corbière’s only book, Les Amours jaunes, has been lost and found and lost again, ignored and praised, forgotten and rediscovered, in happy rotation, ever since it first appeared in 1873. Originally published at the author’s expense, it was discouragingly overpriced and quite out of place among the colourful wares of the Paris publisher Gladys frères, which ‘specialised’ in sentimental erotic fiction. Even the title may well have been a joke at the expense of early readers who would have been expecting something more conventionally carnal for their 7.50 frs. Corbière, true to form, is missing from the Harvard New History of French Literature, but this official banishment has gone unheeded, for he is back again, almost as good as new, in a parallel-text translation by Christopher Pilling.‘