Saturday, December 17, 2011

New Issues of LE VISAGE VERT

The year 2011 has brought us not one but two new issues of the excellent French magazine on the fantastic, Le Visage Vert.  Issue 18 came out this summer, and issue 19 has just recently appeared.

one of the supplementary cards

Issue 18 (June 2011) begins with a translation by Anne-Sylvie Homassel of Howard Pyle's "The Salem Wolf", with the original illustrations from the December 1909 appearance in Harper's Monthly Magazine. This is followed by Michel Meurger's essay on the Salem witches in American literature. Other work translated from English into French include Robert Barr's "The Vengeance of the Dead" (with illustrations from its English Illustrated Magazine appearance in May 1894) and Amelia B. Edwards's "A Railway Panic" (1856). Two stories reprinted in their original French are "Une heure d'express" and "Le Roi du Léthol", both by Georges Price (1853-1922), from his volume La Rançon du sommeil (1910). The first story seems a direct descendant of the Amelia Edwards story.  And two stories by Alexander Moritz Frey (1881-1957), along with an essay on him by Robert N. Bloch, are translated from the German. A full contents-listing for this issue can be found here.  

A supplementary envelope that comes with this issue includes three cards, printed in color on both sides, showing some of the dynamic illustrations in full color, including three pages with illustrations by Howard Pyle for his own story.  


Issue 19 (November 2011) is another bountiful volume.  It includes stories by René Thévenin (French, 1867-1967), Harry de Windt (British, 1856-1933), Rhoda Broughton (British, 1840-1920), Ernst Raupach (German, 1784-1852), and the contemporary H.V. Chao (American, the pseudonym of translator Edward Gauvin). Criticism by Michel Meurger and François Ducos.  A full list of contents can be found here.  And there is similarly a supplementary envelope with colored cards.   

Personally, the item of greatest interest to me is the fantasy story by the forgotten German dramatist Ernst Raupach, whose famous vampire story "Wake Not the Dead" (published 1822, translated into English without attribution in 1823) has long---in English---been misattributed to Ludwig Tieck.  Raupach's story, "Die Wanderung", is a fairy tale very much like the ones that would be written afterwards by George MacDonald. 

All of the publications of Le Visage Vert are elegantly and tastefully produced.  You can see a full list (and order via Paypal) at this link.  (Scroll down for the current and back-issues of Le Visage Vert).  

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