Mailer in Translation

The Naked and the Dead

Authors

  • Jeanne Fuchs Hofstra University Author

Keywords:

translation, Jean Malaquais, The Naked and the Dead, French literature, friendship, Les Nus et les Morts

Abstract

By divine intervention, pure chance, or karma, Norman Mailer and Jean Malaquais met in Paris in 1948 for the first time. It was the beginning of a fruitful friendship, one that would benefit and enrich both writers in many ways and on many different levels. At that time, Mailer was on the threshold of fame, and Malaquais was an established “French” intellectual. Malaquais is a wizard—a Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov rolled into one. Not a native speaker of either English or French, he achieves a tour de force in his translation of Mailer’s immense novel.

Author Biography

  • Jeanne Fuchs, Hofstra University

    Jeanne Fuchs is Professor Emerita in the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages at Hofstra University. She published an essay “George Sand: Notorious Woman, Celebrated Writer” in The Lincoln Center Theater Review (Fall/Winter 2006) devoted to Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. She is co-editor with Ruth Prigozy of Frank Sinatra: The Man, The Music, The Legend (URP 2007) and has a monograph on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Pursuit of Virtue: A Study of Order in La Nouvelle Héloïse (Peter Lang 1993). She has also written on Molière, Marivaux, Alfred de Musset, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Mailer. Her memoir, The Road to Epidauros was published by Author House in 2011.

Downloads

Published

2019-10-10

Issue

Vol. 13 No. 1 (2019)

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Fuchs, Jeanne. “Mailer in Translation: The Naked and the Dead”. The Mailer Review, vol. 13, no. 1, Oct. 2019, pp. 143–150, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/691.