Two French Symbolists in new translation

During one of my routine checks for French Symbolist writers in translation, I learned that Brian Stableford had translated a fat anthology of short fiction by the poet Henri de Régnier. Aside from a stray story or poem appearing in an anthology, this 19th-Century writer had one novel (The Libertines) and one slender volume of poetry (The Winged Sandal) translated into English— and those were done well before World War II.

Stableford's collection, A Surfeit of Mirrors, is of great interest because it contains the complete contents of two separate story collections: one published in the 1890s at the height of the Symbolists' heyday, the other in the 1920s, when Symbolism was yesterday's news.

You might expect that the later collection would be a tired retread of the ground covered in the earlier tales, but this is not the case. While the stories of The Black Trefoil are ornate and consciously poetic attempts at myth making, the later tales are more studies in psychological states—and the longest of these, a splendid ghost story set in Venice, seems ideal for filming. One can only wonder what Mario Bava might have done with it.

Not since the '20s

In delving a bit deeper, I learned that Stableford had also translated a symbolist novel by Gustave Kahn. The Tale of Gold and Silence may not be Kahn's greatest work, but to have anything by Kahn available in English is a feat.

The only book-length translation of Kahn that I knew of previously was a monograph of an essay Kahn wrote on Fantin-Latour. And that was published in the 1920s!

Having translated single pieces by both Kahn and de Régnier, I can attest that they are not easy writers to tackle. That Stableford could produce book-length versions of both left me green with envy.

A "'scientific romance'

But my amazement didn't end there. Upon receiving these two volumes, I became aware of the full list of Black Coat's translations. Stableford has translated a "scientific romance," The Wing by Jean Richpin—another forgotten member of the Symbolist school— as well as two volumes of tales and novellas by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and a bookshelf of fantasy and science-fiction novels by 19th-Century French writers heretofore unknown to English-speaking audiences.

Really, now— have you heard of Paul Feval? Yet Feval published a trilogy of vampire romances in the 1850s that anticipated the modern school of Anne Rice and her imitators.

He may have gone Rice one better by buffering his horrors with an undercurrent of sly humor and some off-the-wall plotting. (One novel in his trilogy, Vampire City, has the English Gothic fiction writer Anne Radcliffe journeying with her Irish sidekick to the city of Selene to rescue a friend being held there.)

Audacious bet

Previously, if you had mentioned "19th Century French fiction" and "vampires," I would have come up with Gautier's novella Le Morte Amoureuse, and that would have been that.

(Stableford explains that Feval owed his exclusion from the English-speaking literary marketplace to his oft-expressed hatred of English pirate-publishers, who regularly sold unauthorized translations— so they just chose to ignore him.)

Stableford and Black Coat Press have rather audaciously bet that they can create a market for these re-discovered authors. I can only hope that their gamble pays off.