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Imaginary Lives

Imaginary Lives (original French title: Vies imaginaires) is a collection of twenty-two semi-biographical short stories by Marcel Schwob, first published in book form in 1896. Mixing known and fantastical elements, it was one of the first works in the genre of biographical fiction. The book is an acknowledged influence in Jorge Luis Borges's book A Universal History of Infamy (1935). Borges also translated the last story "Burke and Hare, Assassins" into Spanish.

Most chapters had been published individually in the newspaper Le Journal between 1894 and 1895. For the collected edition he substituted "Vie de Morphiel, démiurge" with "Matoaka", which had appeared in 1893 in L'Echo de Paris and that he renamed "Pocahontas, princesse". The story "Lilith" about painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was provably the first one that he wrote in the genre of biographical fiction. It had already been collected in 1891 in the book Coeur double, and perhaps that is the reason it was not included in Imaginary Lives.

Originally translated into English in 1924 by Lorimer Hammond, Imaginary Lives was published in a new translation by Chris Clarke (Wakefield Press, 2018), a translation which was awarded the 2019 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Fiction.

Contents

References

Sources

  • Allain, Patrice. et al. Marcel Schwob: L’Homme au masque d’or. Nantes: Gallimard, 2006. Catalog of a major exhibition on Schwob at the Municipal Library of Nantes.
  • Borges, Jorge Luis. Miscelánea. Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2011.
  • González-Rivas Fernández, Ana, Francisco García Jurado, "Death and Love in Poe's and Schwob's Readings of the Classics". CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4. 2000, pp. 5–8 link to essay
  • Goudemare, Sylvain. Marcel Schwob ou les vies imaginaires. Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2000.
  • Jefferson, Ann. Biography and the Question of Literature in France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. pp. 200–214
  • Schwob, Marcel. Imaginary Lives, tr. Lorimer Hammond. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924.
  • Schwob, Marcel. Imaginary Lives, tr. Harry G. Hives. Wakefield, N.H: Longwood Academic, 1991.
  • Schwob, Marcel. The King in the Golden Mask and other writings, tr. Iain White. Manchester: Carcanet New Press Limited, 1982.
  • Schwob, Marcel.Oeuvres. Paris; Les Belles Lettres, 2002.
  • Villon, François. The Poems of François Villon Hanover, University Press of New England, 1965
  • Zieger, Robert. Asymptote: An Approach to Decadent Fiction. New York: Edition Rodolpi B. V. 2009