#his name is lawrence schick but his translations are under lawrence ellsworth

[pagesofkenna]

hyperfixation news: there's like a million d'Artagnan stories that Dumas wrote so I've been slowly reading through them, like I reread Three Musketeers years ago and just barely got to Vicomte de Bragalonne (the first part of the enormous book that includes the Man in the Iron Mask) last year, might read the next part later this year who knows

and I saw some textpost from the tumblr classic lit crowd making a joke about one of those books but it's been a few years since I read it so I don't remember the plot, so I went to wikipedia to give myself a refresher, and then i figured i'd give myself a refresher of the one i read last year to because my brain is a bucket full of holes

and the wikipedia page says theres a new translation of that book coming out this year!! i just read it but some guy is translating it like nowadaystimes and i LOVE newer translations, because the fact that so many Dumas (CLASSIC literary staple??) titles only have one translation and its the original one from two hundred years ago?? criminal!! we need more!!

so of course i look it up and its coming out in like a month BUT i notice something weird on this translator's goodreads page: he's got several Dumas translations, some are titles I recognize some aren't. so I look into THAT and it turns out he's been re-translating the entire d'Artagnan/Musketeers series for the past few years, he's like five books in (I eventually learn he's got NINE planned) and this is NEW. like he's writing them NOW

so i'm like ok WHAT is UP with this TRANSLATOR i've never heard of?? he's retranslating this whole series of historically popular books and one of them is an unfinished Dumas novel that this guy has basically worked into a finished novel and I can't figure out what the reading order is supposed to be or what so I google to see if he has like an author's website and thank heavens he does because yall

the goldmine

ok so this guy is born in either the 50s or 60s, i dont know where he was born but he lives in Ireland now, and basically falls so in love with swords (more-so) and sorcery (less-so) stories that he gets a job as a designer and writer for the company that makes Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s, a bunch of other tabletop games and then computer games, runs a huge LARP group, was a lead writer for the Elder Scrolls and loremaster for ESO???

but more notably (to me) is he learns French for the sole purpose of reading Dumas in the original language (a thing I really wanted to do for so long until I gave up on French!!) and like, by now is already a writer and editor and thinks to himself 'i could just like translate this for people though' and DOES. and so he's retranslating the entire series and retitling some of them too to be more interesting to modern readers. on the side he wrote his own books with his own OC with the musketeers doing their thing in the background. he still runs his LARP group. I don't think he works for ESO anymore and i think its cause he's too busy writing

I don't have anything meaningful to say here i'm just blown away at the existence of this dude who's been, like, super integral in a bunch of things i like a lot and also i didn't know who he was thirty minutes ago and his website is something he threw together in wordpress and most of the recent updates are his reviews of old swashbuckler movies he likes. just like peek nerd dad energy