Kover’s New Translation of Dumas’ Georges Delights

Alexandre Dumas is remembered largely for three books, The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask and The Count of Monte Cristo, and it is hard to argue that they aren’t memorable. There’s even a chocolate bar named after the former. However, Mr. Dumas left behind over 300 works, novels, plays and more. Because he wrote in French, and because translation of literature is a tricky business, few of his other works are accessible to Anglophones. To fill a part of this gap, Tina A. Kover has translated Georges, which has been out of print in English for years and the only work of the mixed-race Frenchman to address the issue of race in the nineteenth century.

The story itself is pure Dumas, and there is no praise greater. A young man from Mauritius (Ile de France to Dumas) Georges Munier, a mulatto, suffers an insult as a young man, flees his tropical home for France. There he grows into an accomplished fellow, he returns to his homeland to seek revenge, and then, the adventures begin. There is a young woman, a prison break, a sea battle, and just what one expects of French Romanticism done by the greatest of them all (pace Victor Hugo).

Another feature to which one must pay attention is the forward by Jamaica Kincaid, who provides a lit crit discussion of just where Georges fits into the Dumas canon. No doubt the work would have been remembered better had it not appeared the year before D’Artagnan broke upon Parisian society. Also, she explains what Dumas meant to African-American writers, and interestingly, even his greatest fans in the US missed this novel.

This is an exciting time in literature because the internet is making it almost cost free to publish public domain works. Works that are long out of print are can now be revived and translated without the expense that Modern Library undertook to get this printed and into bookstores. Finding a largely unknown work by such a literary giant is beyond exciting. Thanks to electronic publishing, it may become routine. And in any case, thanks to Modern Library and Ms. Kover.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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