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Superb profile of Lawrence Ellsworth, Translator of Classic Dumas Novels

Readers of this blog may recall that in years past I’ve written about Lawrence Ellsworth, a client of my literary agency, who is translating all six* novels in Alexandre Dumas’s classic Musketeers Cycle. Three volumes have already published by Pegasus BooksThe Red Sphinx, The Three Musketeers, and Twenty Years After—with a fourth volume, Blood Royal, due out later this year.

Amazing as Ellsworth’s enterprise is, I should point out that it is actually a pen name, and that under his real name, Lawrence Schick, he has an equally impressive résumé. Both of his names are featured in a superb profile and interview that journalist and novelist Andrew Ervin has recently published in the Brooklyn Rail. The profile portion begins like this:

As far as I can tell, Lawrence Ellsworth is responsible for one of the biggest literary projects happening right now in the English language. Like William T. Vollmann’s “Seven Dreams” series of novels about the European occupation of the New World and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts, an interlocking and cross-referencing “poem of a life,” Ellsworth is working on a massive and daunting scale. He’s translating the entirety of Alexandre Dumas’s stories of The Three Musketeers (1844), all 1.5 million words of it. The third volume, Twenty Years After, appeared late last year.

Twenty Years After restores a chapter that Dumas once serialized in his native French but which has never before appeared in English. It also, as with the previous and future volumes, moves past the Victorian-era translations that were, per Ellsworth’s introduction, for an “audience that was uncomfortable with frank depictions of violence and sexuality.” Those old translations, he reminds us, “employed a style of elevated diction that was deemed appropriate for historical novels of the 19th century, but seems stiff, long-winded, and passive to today’s readers.” In Ellsworth’s hands, these stories of swashbuckling and all-for-one-and-one-for-all friendship feel new again. The Three Musketeers is an enormously entertaining tale for the ages.

A few paragraphs later, Ervin brings up the Schick side of his persona:

It so happens that Lawrence Ellsworth is the pen name of Lawrence Schick, who was an early employee of TSR, the company that created Dungeons & Dragons [the role-playing game]. There, he wrote White Plume Mountain (1979), which I personally regard as the greatest D&D adventure module of all time. He’s also the co-creator of the earliest version of the D&D setting Mystara, in which my own long-running campaign is set even now. Since then, among other pursuits, Ellsworth served as Loremaster for the Elder Scrolls Online games and now lives in Dublin, where he is hard at work writing a new mobile game.

Ellsworth was generous enough to correspond with me via email in January and February, during which time we discussed world-building, how to write an epic role-playing game (RPG) adventure, and the challenges of adapting Dumas for current audiences. There’s a unique and profound joy in getting to pick the brain of a multi-talented writer whose work I’ve known since I was a kid and who’s had such a huge impact on my own creative life.

When the piece moves in to the interview portion, Ervin asks how Lawrence undertook the mammoth task of translating Dumas:

We were looking for a subject for our next game when I remembered Dumas and his musketeers. It turned out to be a great choice, and in the process of doing the research for [what became] The King’s Musketeers I got hooked on the characters and the period all over again, so much so that I started doing independent study into Early Modern Europe and France in the 17th century. I decided that I wanted to write historical fiction in that setting and began collecting materials. 

I was teaching myself French and rereading Dumas, and began to realize that his writing wasn’t creaky and old-fashioned, but his Victorian English translations were. Reading Dumas in the original French was a revelation: dynamic prose, crackling dialogue, vivid scenes, plus he was funny as hell. Most of the English translations of his work paled in comparison. 

By this time I was reading beyond Dumas’s famous novels and into his more obscure works, and I kept coming across references to a musketeers-period swashbuckler from late in his career called The Comte de Moret, but there was no extant English translation and it was impossible to find. Finally I came across French reprint copies of its two volumes in the bouquiniste stalls in Paris, and though the novel was unfinished, it was grand stuff, genuine Dumas bursting with all his color, humor, and joie de vivre. I’d done my own translation of The Three Musketeers as part of my learning-French project, and as I was flying back from Paris, it suddenly occurred to me that could translate Moret and from that idea was born the literary reconstruction that became The Red Sphinx.

Ervin’s last question is a good one:

Rail: Why is it that Dumas’s stories still feel so vital, especially right now?

Ellsworth: Dumas’s work remains vital and relevant over 150 years later because his best novels speak to the problem of courage, of how an individual can find the strength and means to do what’s right despite the constraints of society, family, and convention. This is a problem that never goes away, a matter that every generation has to face for itself. Unlike many of the heroes of historical fiction, Dumas’s characters are complex, three-dimensional humans of depth and contradiction, people for whom wrestling with these problems is no easy matter. Look at Cardinal Richelieu, an antagonist and seeming villain in The Three Musketeers, yet a protagonist in The Red Sphinx. Because his novels are exciting and plot-heavy, and because his early translators cut out the sex, softened the language, and dialed back the violence, in the early 20th century Dumas’s work was miscategorized as “Boys’ Adventures,” a label that has stuck for far too long. His best work is long overdue for a re-assessment, at least in the Anglophone world.

I recommend you read the whole profile and interview which combined are quite a bit longer than the excerpts I’ve provided here. I’m going to check out Andrew Ervin’s work, whose bio states:

Andrew Ervin is the author of the novel Burning Down George Orwell’s House and the novella collection Extraordinary Renditions. His most recent book is Bit by Bit: How Video Games Transformed Our World.

And if you’d like to know how a prominent critic assesses the new Dumas translations by Lawrence Ellsworth, please consider this in a review from the estimable Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda:

“En garde! In Lawrence Ellsworth’s excellent, compulsively readable translation, The Red Sphinx is just the book to see you through the January doldrums. And maybe those of February, too.

If your interest extends to other classic tales of adventure, I suggest you also check out the anthology Ellsworth edited for Pegasus The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, with tales by Rafael Sabatini, Conan Doyle, Baroness Orczy, and others.

*In the end, there will be eight novels in Ellsworth’s rendering of the Dumas canon in to English, because he is splitting some of the longer French versions in to two volumes.

“A rip-snorting new translation of ‘The Three Musketeers'”—Wall St Journal

I’m delighted to see a superb review in this weekend’s Wall St. Journal of my agency client Lawrence Ellsworth’s new translation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. It appears in the print paper under the headlines “Less than Perfect Heroes,” and to the left in a scanned mock-up of the review  Here are some of the choicest bits:

“A rip-snorting new translation of ‘The Three Musketeers’ by the American Lawrence Ellsworth captures all the excitement and flair of Dumas’s great historical adventure that spawned several sequels and numerous films, TV series and cartoons….

Mr. Ellsworth does a wonderful job of communicating the energy, humor and warmth of Dumas’s work. This was not always the case with the translations of the 1840s and 1850s—still the ones most likely to be found in American bookstores and libraries—which mimic the rather stiff, elevated diction of writers like Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. Mr. Ellsworth’s snappier approach, which included putting back all the racier scenes elided from the Victorian translations, suits Dumas much better.

It also helps to put an end to the lie, persistent in the English-speaking world, that Dumas’s brand of popular fiction does not deserve the same attention as more ‘serious’ works. It was not something that Robert Louis Stevenson, who knew a thing or two about writing romantic adventures, would have ever subscribed to. ‘I do not say there is no character as well-drawn in Shakespeare,’ he wrote of d’Artagnan. ‘I do say there is none that I love so wholly.’”

This first new English-language edition of The Three Musketeers to come out in many years book is published by Pegasus Books, and is listed here on their website, with click-thru options to buy it if you wish. Their handsome hardcover edition—priced well at $26.95 for a volume that’s close to 800 pages—includes an Introduction, Dramatis Personae: Historical Characters, and Notes on the Text assembled by translator Ellsworth, who also selected period illustrations by Maurice Leloir for the title page spread and chapter openers. It is also available in all ebook formats. Ellsworth is the translator of Book II in Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle, The Red Sphinx, and editor of the anthology, The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, both from Pegasus Books.

Lawrence Ellsworth, Ushering in a New Heyday for Classic Adventure Fiction

Readers of this blog may recall that one of the authors I represent on the literary agency side of my business is Lawrence Schick, who under the pen name Lawrence Ellsworth has served as anthologist and editor of The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, and translator of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Red Sphinx, an all but forgotten sequel to The Three Musketeers.

The two books were published by Pegasus Books in 2014 and 2017, respectively. The long-lost novel—which was praised by Washington Post critic Michael Dirda as an “Excellent, compulsively readable translation”—has been so successful that Pegasus later acquired from us the rights to Ellsworth’s new translation of The Three Musketeers, a sparkling, modern translation of Dumas’s classic adventure novel, which they will publish on January 2, 2018. 

With all the praise and interest that Ellsworth’s enterprise of reviving adventure fiction has attracted, Literary Hub assigned journalist Dwyer Murphy to do a profile of him for its readers. The result is a fascinating profile that touches on swords, fencing (author and interviewer visited a fencing academy in Harlem), knights errant, role-playing games (Schick was an original team member of the outfit that created Dungeons & Dragons), and other matters. Linked to here, you can also read the first few paragraphs in the screenshot below. I am delighted to be representing such a talented client as Lawrence. If you or someone you know enjoys adventure fiction, I recommend you check out his outstanding work.

“Sacre Bleu!” 1st Review of THE RED SPHINX, a Long-lost Sequel by Dumas to THE THREE MUSKETEERS

Readers of this blog may recall that last month, I wrote about my author client Lawrence Schick, who under his pen name Lawrence Ellsworth was soon to be publishing a new translation of a literary discovery he’d made, a long-lost novel by Alexandre Dumas titled The Red Sphinx. As I explained then, the publication date was to be January 3 of the new year, and we were hopeful the book, a veritable sequel to The Three Musketeers, would garner some significant reviews. I’m delighted to say that’s beginning, right on queue the day after pub date. The first review is by critic Steve Donoghue in the Christian Science Monitor, and it’s a rave, with this headline: 

Donoghue’s conclusion reads:

In his Afterword, Ellsworth confesses that translating Dumas is “a lot of fun,” but he need hardly have said it: Fun permeates this big book. The rest of 2017’s fiction will have to look sharp: An old master has just set the bar very, very high.

The whole review is linked to here. I’ll be sharing more reviews as we get them. Clearly, this swashbuckling epic, at 800 pages, is a winner for people who savor historical and adventure fiction. For friends in the D.C. area, please note that Lawrence Schick will be appearing at the popular bookstore Politics & Prose in Washington on Sunday afternoon, January 29. Meanwhile, below is last month’s post:
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On the literary agenting side of my editorial services and publishing consultancy, I’m very fortunate to have as one of my author clients the multi-talented Lawrence Schick. Our affinity starts with the fact that we’re both natives of northeast Ohio, me Cleveland, him the Akron-Kent nexus. Then there’s the fact that when I operated Undercover Books in Cleveland from 1978-85, with my two siblings and our parents, we stocked and sold the then-new role playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which somewhat improbably, was sold to bookstores by Random House sales reps. Years later, after I’d moved to NYC and become an editor, Lawrence and I became associated and I learned about his Ohio roots, and the fact that he was an original team member of the group of smart people that devised, produced, and marketed Dungeons & Dragons.

The first book we came together over was from one of Lawrence’s many areas of special knowledge—the world of adventure fiction, particularly from the Swashbuckler Era (from roughly the 1840s-the 1920s), which led him, under the pen name Lawrence Ellsworth, to edit and introduce a spirited anthology called The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, which Pegasus Books published in 2014. It featured selections from the work of Rafael Sabatini (best known for Scaramouche and Captain Blood), Anthony Hope (of Prisoner of Zenda renown), Johnston McCulley (creator of the Zorro character), Conan Doyle (he favored his adventure yarns more than his Sherlock Holmes stories), Pierce Egan (known for Robin Hood), Baroness Orczy (creator of the Scarlet Pimpernel), and Alexandre Dumas (there’s so much more Dumas than The Three Musketeers)—in all a total of twenty writers from what could be fairly be called the golden age of adventure fiction. I wrote about it here a few times

In the course of assembling the anthology, Lawrence, who also reads and translates French, made a surprising discovery: a long-lost Dumas novel, a veritable sequel to The Three Musketeers, which picks up the story where his most popular book had ended. It had a curious publishing history, even in French, and never had a proper edition in English. He’s translated it in to a rollicking new version that Pegasus is bringing out next month, with finished copies showing up in bookstores very soon. It’s called The Red Sphinx, and it features Cardinal Richelieu, a Machiavellian mastermind, who tangles with the hero, Count de Moret and his love, Isabelle. It’s already had a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and intriguingly, I saw yesterday in Lit Hub that Pamela Paul, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, harbors a great desire to finally read Dumas, so we’ll be sure she has the opportunity.

On publication date, January 3, Lawrence will publish a personal essay, “The Riddle of the Red Sphinx,” in Lit Hub which will explain how he came to piece together the novel, despite the fact that when he discovered it, the ending was separate from the bulk of the book, and he had to discover it, too. I’ll be sharing the essay and reviews in social media as they arrive. It’s all kind of amazing—a very good, full novel by Alexandre Dumas novel that was barely ever published in English at all, by a master of adventure fiction who’s been dead since 1870! It’s sorta like having a new book by Charles Dickens, who happened to die the same year as Dumas.

Lawrence Ellsworth will be reading from the novel and speaking about Dumas and the Swashbuckler Era at Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C. at 1pm on the afternoon of Sunday, January 29, 2017. I’m delighted to share the front and back cover of The Red Sphinx from the bound galley I have in my office. For those eager to pre-order, you can find the hardcover here on Amazon, and an unabridged audio edition from Blackstone Audio.