Mademoiselle Perle u Aktar
Translated by Toni Aquilina. Published by Horizons
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Guy de Maupassant’s work carries the imprint of his own image: prolific, brilliant, full of paradoxes. The man learnt his ropes at the hands of the best masters. He was a disciple of Gustave Flaubert, and participated in the soirées de Médan in the company of Zola.
If he left his native Normandy to triumph in Paris, as did Georges Duroy, the protagonist of Bel-Ami, if he travelled little, compared to many of his contemporaries, he was first of all a tireless worker. He is the author of more than 300 short stories, half a dozen novels, and as many plays (although forgotten), as well as some major critical texts.
Anthony (Toni) Aquilina, translator of Alphonse Daudet, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Albert Camus, André Gide, Samuel Beckett, Yasmina Reza, Sébasteien Thiéry, Eric-Emanuel Schmitt, Daniel Rondeau, Annie Ernaux, Jean Anouilh and now Maurice Maeterlinck, has been applying his talents for several years to translate into Maltese as much as possible of the work of Guy de Maupassant, who is one of our greatest prose writers, by providing several collections of short and long stories, reflecting of course his personal choices: Marroca et autres contes (2003), Le Donneur d’eau bénite et autres contes (2007), L’Inutile Beauté et autres histoires (2012), and the latest Mademoiselle Perle. I know he has many more in the pipeline.
Like a goldsmith he knew how to perfectly chisel the French language in such a way as to give the brilliance of a diamond to the simplest of his stories
De Maupassant himself produced several collections including The Contes de la bécasse, and Le Horla et autres fantastiques, regrouping a substantial number of those stories he had published earlier in newspapers and magazines like Le Gaulois, Gil Blas and Le Figaro, enabling him to earn a lot of money along the way. Then there are other collections regrouping Maupassant’s stories at the whims of various publishers.
In the four collections of Maupassant’s tales in Maltese published by Aquilina, the latter produces a jubilant panorama that enables his target audience to appreciate the different facets of the art and talent of the French 19th century storyteller.
The tales comprise short and long stories reflecting the diversity of the original writer’s topics: Norman farces, legends, family stories, Parisian tales, those about the Franco-Prussian war, peasant stories, wonderful tales of the fantastic and the supernatural, exotic stories in the Corsican, Spanish, Italian or North African vein.
We find in the carefully selected and artistically translated stories by Aquilina, the tenderness, the derision, the cynicism and the ferocity of De Maupassant’s genius. If the French author has successfully passed the test of time, it is because like a goldsmith he knew how to perfectly chisel the French language in such a way as to give the brilliance of a diamond to the simplest of his stories, even those with the flimsiest subject matter.
It is likewise like a goldsmith that Aquilina has worked in the solitude of his office to deliver to Maltese readers the consummate art of one of our most brilliant short story writers, in all thedazzle of his impulses, the power of his images and the violence of his passions.
Ethnologist and anthropologist Dominique Lanni is a doctor of French language and literature at the University of Paris IV Sorbonne, and also lectures at the University of Malta. He works on modes of representations of otherness in literary and scientific cultures of the classical age as part of the work of the Research Centre on Travel Literature directed by François Moureau.