Valery Larbaud 1881-1957
biography
Larbaud was a passionate Anglophile who translated many writers including Samuel Butler, James Joyce (he translated Ulysses into French), and Sir Thomas Browne. In 1935 he suffered a severe stroke which incapacitated him for the remaining years of his life. His first literary effort was a translation of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge. Connected to American writers in Paris in the twenties, he helped support the founding of Sylvia Beach's bookstore Shakespeare and Company. In addition to poetry, Valery Larbaud wrote stories, novels and numerous essays.
selected works in translation
A.O. Barnabooth : His Diary translated by Gilbert Cannan (Quartet Books, 1991)
Childish Things translated by Catherine Wald (Sun & Moon Classicss, 1994)
Fermina Marquez translated by Hubert Gibbs (Quartet Books, 1988)
selected poems in The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry edited by Paul Auster (Vintage, 1982)
writing
excerpt from - Childish Things
And Marcel, who has come down to the garden, notices that he is walking among the things of heaven. A sunbeam visits the triangular island, from where civilization once spread through the rest of the world. He surprises three sunbeams leaning against the cypresses that guard the basin. One sunbeam is still sleeping stretched across the alley, and Marcel turns away so that he will not disturb it. Others venture into the thickness of the virgin forest. And there is one scaling the wall.
Marcel contemplates his empire, built up piece by piece with so much toil. A great era is coming to an end with this vacation. He thinks about his great leaders, who henceforth will be called emperors. Naturally, he will bring them with him to school. He will find some place to put them. But he wonders if these future emperors will be as heroic as their predecessors, who were all great leaders! ... Oh! The immortal sacrifice of Armeze the Great! Oh! The man who first stood on the edge of the iron-clad vessel where the water sings in the language of the Underwater People! ... Oh! the soldier who spent a whole night in the middle of the pond, exposed to sea monsters, stanging, sword in hand, on a water-lily leaf ....
return to the library
return to kicking giants