Domesticating Decadence: Joris-Karl Huysmans, Pierre Louÿs, and Their Invisible English Translators

Decadence eludes definition, but critics tend to concur on the movement’s transgressive and uncommercial status in the British literary field. This essay questions those associations by exploring a current of archetypal decadent French novels translated by and marketed to a mainstream Anglophone audience: Joris-Karl Huysmans’s En Route (1895, trans. 1896) and La cathédrale (1898, trans. 1898) and Pierre Louÿs’s Aphrodite: Mœurs antiques (1896, trans. 1900 and 1906) and La femme et le pantin (1898, trans. 1908). By reading letters, memoirs, and prefaces alongside periodical reviews and a publisher’s archive, the essay sheds light on the novels’ invisible translators and reveals the fiscal and legal viability of “domesticated decadence.” Doing so models how translation studies and book-historical methods can revise deep-set tenets of literary history. These “poisonous” epitomes of the fin de siècle in fact circulated freely across the Channel, reaching more than the happy few.

Cavafy among the Modernists

Placing C. P. Cavafy among the modernists raises interesting questions. Which century can claim Cavafy? What does it mean to claim Cavafy for modernism? What space do we need to make for Cavafy in an approach to modernism that shapes and is shaped by his work? What re- and disorientations might that positioning require? Which nineteenth-century filiations does Cavafy carry over into his modernism? Is courage rather than contemporaneity a better guide in these orienteering exercises? This essay fleshes out these questions, asks a few more in the process, and attempts a set of triangulations and mediations between Cavafian and early twentieth-century words and worlds. This is not to trace influences or deep affinities but to deploy Cavafy as the “century's interlocutor,” in Paul's immodest but resonant phrase. Among the mediating or triangulated figures are F. T. Marinetti, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, George Seferis, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Vernon Lee, and Pierre Louÿs, with cameo appearances by Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Rimbaud, and Eugène Marsan.

Oleg Almeida discute traduções do russo para o português

Nascido na Bielorrússia em 1971 e radicado no Brasil desde 2005, Oleg Almeida é poeta, ensaísta e tradutor multilíngue, sócio da União Brasileira de Escritores (UBE/São Paulo). Autor dos livros de poesia Memórias dum hiperbóreo (2008; Prêmio Internacional Il Convivio de 2013), Quarta-feira de Cinzas e outros poemas (2011; Prêmio Literário Bunkyo de 2012), Antologia cosmopolita (2013) e de numerosas traduções do russo (Diário do subsolo, O jogador, Crime e castigo, Memórias da Casa dos mortos e Humilhados e ofendidos de Fiódor Dostoiévski; Pequenas tragédias de Alexandr Púchkin; Canções alexandrinas de Mikhail Kuzmin; Contos russos, vv. I-III) e do francês (O esplim de Paris: pequenos poemas em prosa de Charles Baudelaire; Os cantos de Bilítis de Pierre Louÿs).