A few days before Christmas 2024 – 16 months ago – my translation of Marcel Aymé’s story “Le Mouton” was accepted by Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature at the University of Florida. This week the translation, “The Sheep”, has at last been published. Patience is rewarded.
The French story was first published in 1940, but this, I believe, is the first translation of “Le Mouton” in English. And it’s the second from Les Contes du chat perché by Aymé that I’ve translated and had published. The other is “The Wolf” published in 2018, also by Delos Journal.
“The Sheep”, plus my commentary on the translation process, can be read here: https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/delos. You have to pay to get in. However, the editors have kindly sent me a pdf of the issue and asked me to share it with colleagues and others who are interested.
Since I don’t have colleagues, I can share it with you, my readers. Let me know if you’d like a copy by clicking “Contact me” at the top of this page.
The sheep in the story is the unfortunate victim of an exchange between some self-serving farming parents and a moronic soldier who arrives in the first paragraphs riding a fine black horse on his way to war, but ends up trying to ride the sheep. He leaves the story on foot, after the sheep returns in an extreme rescue by the farmers’ two little daughters and a duck.
Marcel Aymé said when he published his children’s stories that he wrote them for readers from 4 to 75 years old. And so “The Sheep” appears at first as a story for the young but soon reveals something also for the adult.
Header photo of a French sheep courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
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