Translators, Tricksters and Traps: The Correspondence between Paul Solanges and Henry Handel Richardson as Life-Writing Project

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 1910, Paul Solanges wrote to Henry Handel Richardson, author of Maurice Guest (1908), offering to translate the novel into French. Solanges had been deeply moved by the music novel recounting the story of a piano student’s attraction to a femme fatale. Throughout the translation process, which went on for over three years and was never completed due to the translator’s death, Richardson and Solanges exchanged some 300 letters. Initially Solanges was unaware that he was corresponding with a woman and although he soon began to suspect that this was the case, he never confronted her with his suspicion. Instead, the correspondents were in implicit agreement that they were setting traps for each other, a feature that has been given some scholarly attention in the study of Richardson’s creation of her male persona. However, in the present article, the ‘story of traps’ is approached primarily from the point of view of Solanges’s life-writing project. It is claimed that due to its liminal character, the correspondence sits neatly within the trickster genre. The argument is built on Jacques Derrida’s notion of the archive as a phenomenon to be understood from a point in the future. As such, the existence today of the meticulously edited correspondence testifies to the triumphant outcome of Solanges’s painful suffering from archive fever in the writing of his life.