Why We Begin with Loti

In the late summer of 1839 a French civil servant landed on Corsica with a ministry commission in his luggage. His name was Prosper Mérimée, and his job title, inspector of historical monuments, is one of the quiet jokes of literary history. He spent weeks riding through the interior as instructed, cataloguing chapels and standing stones and writing up his findings for Paris. Then he went home and wrote Colomba: a short novel about a young woman who meets her brother at the family threshold and will not let him rest until their father’s death has been answered in blood. The ministry got its report on the monuments. The rest of us got the vendetta.

France in the nineteenth century kept producing this figure, the trained observer whose notebook refuses to stay professional. Half a century after Mérimée’s commission, a naval officer named Julien Viaud spent the summer of 1885 in Nagasaki harbour while his ship was in port, kept a diary, and published it in 1887 as Madame Chrysanthème, under the pen name Pierre Loti. Different sea, different uniform, same species of writer. Neither man imagined a place from a desk in Paris. They went, they watched, they wrote down what they saw, and what they saw came filtered through everything they were: their errands, their prejudices, their homesickness, their employers.

This is the shelf Espresso French Classics is built on. The series opens with our new translation of Madame Chrysanthème, the first new English edition of it in over a century, and it continues with Mérimée. Notice what the books have in common. Not one of them is set in France. Japan, Corsica, Andalusia. The France we are collecting is the France that went out looking: the literature of the observer abroad, written by men whose day jobs put them in rooms that novelists at home could only invent.

The observer is not an innocent figure, and this is where the series takes its position. Loti condescends to the woman whose life he is renting; the coldness runs in the book’s bloodstream, and our translation keeps it there. Mérimée’s Carmen reaches most people now through Bizet’s opera, which adores her. The novella is a harder thing, told by a visiting French scholar who takes the story down from the condemned man himself and passes it along with the composure of someone cataloguing another man’s disaster. It would be easy, and it would be fatal, to tidy these books for modern company. An edition that corrects its author has stopped translating him. What the observer got wrong is part of what he saw, and the reader deserves the whole of it. What we owe you instead of a tidied text is a candid one, and the place for candour is the introduction, where an editor answers for the book in her own voice rather than quietly rewriting it in his.

As I write this, two of the three books are still ahead of us. Carmen comes next and Colomba after it, each in a new translation made the way the Loti was made: from the French, complete, with the author’s temperature intact. A series name is a small promise, and this is what ours promises. The same eye chose these books. The same standards made them. If the Loti persuades you, the Mérimée will not be a gamble, because the choices are connected, and the connection is a way of looking at the world that French fiction did better than anyone: closely, coolly, from the deck of someone else’s country.

Mérimée filed his monument reports, and they did their duty, and they sit in an archive. The novella needed no filing. He was sent to count the stones. He came back with the people.

Idara Crespi
Publisher, Espresso Publishing House