Originally published in 1992, this bilingual anthology represents the vigor, diversity, and originality with which the Symbolist movement was grafted in Belgium. Cultivating an aesthetics of hallucination and spatial paradigms of the inner world, the fin de siècle Belgian poets transformed the canal cities and landscapes of their homeland into lasting magnets of the imagination. The Belgian Symbolist poems are vessels of passage to visionary realms, demonstrating the permeability of inner and outer reality.

The Editor and Translator: Donald Flanell Friedman is a comparatist and a distinguished professor in the Department of Modern Languages at Winthrop University, Rock Hill, South Carolina. He is founder of the Belgian Francophone Library. His most recent translation/edition was devoted to Marguerite Yourcenar’s dream recitations and reflections on dream, Dreams and Destinies. He is a recipient of the Prix du Rayonnement des Lettres from the Belgian Ministry of Culture.