My recently published translated book, Stories to Read by Candlelight, is excellently illustrated by Erin-Claire Barrow with silhouettes evocative of figures viewed by candlelight. Here are three of the five images to tempt uncertain readers. My very favourite, coincidentally accompanying my very favourite of the eight stories, is ‘Princess Mandosiane’. I love the sharp black…
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Odyssey Books has just published my translation of Contes pour lire à la chandelle – Stories to Read by Candlelight by Jean Lorrain, and today I received ten copies of a very well produced, postcard-sized book. As yet it’s available on Amazon only to pre-order, but will actually be available from next week, 16th September.…
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My translation of Catulle Mendès’ short story, ‘Tears on the Sword’, was published earlier this year in an anthology by the Agorist Writers Workshop. My contributor copies have just arrived in the mail, and I’m very pleased to see the quality of the books. It’s available for purchase on Amazon. *…
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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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