Latest Translations

One's recent translations include a charming comedy by Marivaux, a short novel and a story by Federico De Roberto (The Wedding Mass and "The Rosary"), two short stories by Italo Svevo ("Death" and "Argos and His Master"), and one by Machado de Assis ("A Fire"). All are available--or will be very shortly--on the usual bookselling sites. Next up? Maybe Ganivet. Maybe more Machado, more Wedekind, more Stendhal (Mémoires d'un touriste?). Maybe nothing at all.

Stendhal, Wedekind, and Others

One keeps forgetting to plug one's more recent translations (the purpose of this blog, after all). They are available as ebooks on most of the usual online bookselling sites. Authors translated include Stendhal, Marià Vayreda, Leopoldo Alas, Federico De Roberto, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Heinrich Mann, and Frank Wedekind.

The Catalan Vayreda seems never to have been translated into English before; on looking up Wedekind to see what English translations of his work had been published, one is somewhat surprised to find oneself in what one might not have been inclined to consider good company. Oh well.

Soon to be published are English translations of Marivaux's play Les Fausses Confidences and of Nerval's Les Confidences de Nicolas (on the eighteenth-century libertine and printer Rétif de la Bretonne, whose books the 1911 Britannica encyclopedia describes, not altogether inaccurately, as "unfit for general perusal.")

The Jew

From Stendhal's note "to the curious" preceding his story "The Jew":

"Not having anything to read, I write. It's the same kind of pleasure, only more intense."

From Filippo Ebreo, Stendhal's narrator:

"The fact is, gentlemen, that I no longer loved anything but money. Ah! How I loved it!"

Ebreo recalls his past as a peddler in Venice and a follower of the coalition armies invading France in the wake of Napoleon's defeat.