3 - French Translations and Translators of Stevenson

Summary

On continue à se disputer les traductions de Stevenson.

When Stevenson died, only three of his books had been published in France, but there was not much time for more to have appeared. Treasure Island was translated very quickly – within two years as a book, which is acceptable even by twenty-first-century standards. Stevenson died a mere four years after the first metropolitan French translation of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was published only four years after the novel had appeared in English. Even so, Stevenson appeared to think he was an unknown quantity in France. In a wellknown comment to Marcel Schwob, he claimed that he ‘might write with the pen of angels or of heroes, and no Frenchman be the least the wiser’. Echoing this sentiment, early French critics made frequent claims that Stevenson’s literary qualities were undervalued except by the most culturally aware. Confusingly, though, while some commentators suggested that because of his literary talents Stevenson ought to have been better known in France, others sought to establish his credibility and importance by highlighting how many books he had already sold and how solid his reputation was. In 1895, the Journal des voyages called him ‘à coup sûr le plus renommé parmi les littérateurs anglais’. In 1897, Le Gaulois drew attention to the fact that Stevenson’s books had sold by the thousands in France. By the 1920s, Jules Romains could declare that Stevenson had been ‘copiously’ translated into French, with French versions of almost all his notable works. Contradiction was in the air in terms of how to assess his reception in France. While there are gaps in Stevenson’s French publishing fate, the fact that many people were – as the epigraph to this chapter intimates – ‘fighting to translate his books’ proves that Stevenson was a known quantity in literary circles and that critics, translators and publishers wanted his books to be available in France. It also means, however, that no definitive textual version of ‘RLS’ was being presented to the French. This allowed his books to be marketed to very different reading publics.

The fact that Stevenson did not have one dedicated translator or publisher promoting his work likely contributed to confusion about his French presence.