On the unpredictable path of life I’ve ended up translating French literature from different hemispheres and different centuries. I’ve written about authors from 19th-century France who’ve taken my fancy with their fairy tales and fantasies, and now I want my readers to become acquainted with an author from 21st-century New Caledonia, Claudine Jacques. My first…
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What to do, what to do, when a small achievement cheers you but someone in the world says Bah? There are writers out there who pooh-pooh the Pushcart Prize which honours the best poetry, short fiction and essays published in the American small presses over the previous year. One such writer has a piece that…
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My latest translation to be published is a short story by the New Caledonian author, Claudine Jacques: ‘Other People’s Land’ (La Terre des autres). The editor of the journal, Sunspot Lit, very kindly offered to publish it in September for their Fall issue. The protagonist in the story is a half-Kanak half-white woman who becomes…
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It’s what authors have to do. Get reviews. I’ve tried it for my previous two books and only ever managed to get one solitary review in spite of asking bloggers around the world. Now since the release of Stories to Read by Candlelight, I’ve been offered advice from my publisher, Michelle Lovi at Odyssey Books,…
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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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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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