Théodore de Banville. Prolific poet and writer, frequenter of the most anti-conformist Parisian circles. Proponent of ‘art for art’s sake’: « Il n’y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien, tout ce qui est utile est laid. » [There is nothing truly beautiful except that which serves no purpose; everything…
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One of the stories by Jean Lorrain that I’ve translated over the years is La Mandragore (The Mandrake). Recently I put a couple of images on a unique Facebook page, The Golden Age of Illustration. My contribution was from the original illustrated version of 1899 of La Mandragore, and got hundreds of ‘reactions’, as they’re…
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Back in 2016 I had a translated story published by The Cossack Review. I’ve just learnt that this journal exists no more, it has gone the way of a good percentage of literary journals. The story is ‘Joseph Olenin’s Coat’ by Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, a quirky tale about a lonely man in an isolated wintry…
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Never would I have translated Jean Lorrain if I knew then what I know now. But that’s the beauty of reading a good book. The reader’s relationship is with the book and the story it tells, not with its author. There’s much I could write about Jean Lorrain that would turn you away from all…
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A few weeks ago I wrote about the French author, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, whose stories I’ve translated (at least, a few). Today I’ll give you some titbits on de Vogüé’s contemporary and fellow countryman, Catulle Mendès, a turn-of-the-century writer who believed in the wonder of imagination to help readers through the barren polluted landscapes of…
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My translation of Jean Lorrain’s little book, Stories to Read by Candlelight, will be published in the next few months by Odyssey Books, a small independent publisher run by an Australian in New Zealand! The stories will stay with you long after reading. I first read them in Lorrain’s 1897 collection, Contes pour lire à la…
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For the past eight years I’ve been translating the writings of a small handful of French authors, and I’ve come to know them quite well. On my ‘Translated Short Stories’ page (see above) there’s a list of titles mostly from 19th-century metropolitan France, with a few from 21st-century New Caledonia. I took a look at…
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