Lettres d’Arkham (1975) by H. P. Lovecraft & François Rivière

H. P. Lovecraft appartient corps et âme à la grande familie des écrivains puritans de Nouvelle-Angleterre. Névropathe exemplaire, il vécut à Providence—Arkham pour tes initiés—une existence tout entière vouée à l’exorcisme des démons de son imaginaire. D’où l’œuvre fantastique que l’on sait. Sa correspondance participle de façon à la fois ironique et passionnée à ce douloureux mais aussi fascinant combat : pour la première fois, les lecteurs français sont à même de pénetrer dans le labyrinthe le plus intime du créateur magique de Démons et merveilles et di La coouleur tombée du ciel. Ces Lettres d’Arkham les y invitent…

H. P. Lovecraft belongs body and soul to the great family of New England Puritan writers. Exemplary neurotic, he lived in Providence—Arkham for the initiates—a life entirely devoted to exorcising the demons of his imagination. Hence the fantastic work we all know. His correspondence is an ironic and passionate contribution to this painful but fascinating struggle: for the first time, French readers are able to penetrate the most intimate labyrinth of the magical creator of Démons et merveilles and La coouleur tombée du ciel. These Letters from Arkham invite them to do so…

Back cover copy

English translation

French audiences may have been aware of H. P. Lovecraft as early as the 1930s, when English-language books and periodicals made it to European shores; Jacques Bergier even claimed to have carried on a brief correspondence with Lovecraft, and he certainly had two letters published in the pages of Weird Tales despite living in France at the time.

Lovecraft’s major introduction to French audiences came in the 1950s with collections like La couleur tombée du ciel (“The Color from the sky”/”The Colour Out of Space”) [1954, Denoël], and Démons et merveilles (“Demons and Marvels”) [1955, Deux Rives] that translated Lovecraft’s prose into French. Both of included introductions from Bergier, who provided many readers with their first insight into Lovecraft himself—who he was, and where he came from. Both books went through many reprints and editions.

In 1964, Arkham House published the first volume of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters. This project had begun shortly after Lovecraft’s death in 1937, as August Derleth and Donald Wandrei had begun contacting Lovecraft’s correspondents and requesting letters to transcribe for future publication. The scope and cost of the project soon made actual publication of the Arkham House Transcripts—at least in their entirety—impractical; war time paper rationing and rising post-war costs delayed the project further. The first three volumes, released under the editorship of Derleth and Wandrei, represent a compromise to their original vision—but also a tremendous effort, and one nearly unique.

Lovecraft had died broke and was far from a popular or mainstream author; the publication of his letters not only kick-started real Lovecraft biographical scholarship and literary criticism, but it helped center Lovecraft himself as an individual worth reading. More of Lovecraft’s letters would be published than those of Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, or dozens of other much more popular authors.

Of course the French had to get in on the action.

Early translations of Lovecraft’s letters into French began piecemeal, in literary and fan periodicals; the biography is a bit opaque to English-language readers living in the United States, but a special issue of L’Herne dedicated to Lovecraft in 1969 stands out for translating a few letters, amid a mass of literary and biographical material that marks the first major critical publication on Lovecraft in any language. The 1970s in France would see growing interest in Lovecraft, especially in the field of Franco-Belgian comics; the contributors of Metal Hurlant (“Howling Metal,” translated into English markets as Heavy Metal magazine), which began in 1974, was founded by Jean Giraud (Mœbius) and Philippe Druillet, both of whom would go on to fame…and through Metal Hurlant, many graphic adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories, and stories inspired by Lovecraft and his creations, would be published in the pages of Metal Hurlant and Heavy Metal, to audiences around the world.

Lettres d’Arkham (1975, Jacques Glénat), translated by François Rivière, is a slim booklet of 80 pages, counting all the introductory material. The cover is by Mœbius, and plays to Lovecraft’s legend: seated at a table, writing with a quill pen, a row of antique volumes behind him, against a starry landscape, a tail or tentacle discreetly emerging from beneath the table cloth.

Jacques Glénat had founded Glénat Éditions in 1972; it is now a major publisher of bandes dessinées, and also publishes French translations of manga and nonfiction periodicals. But this was early days, and Lettres d’Arkham was the second entry in a series titled Marginalia; the first was a reprint of Les clefs mystérieuses (“The Mysterious Keys”) by Maurice Leblanc, the creator of Arsène Lupin. This was apparently an experiment in shorter-form material, mostly fiction reprints, with Rivière as overall editor of the series. Lettres d’Arkham appears to be the sole non-fiction entry.

Given the short format, Yves Rivière apparently opted against trying to translate entire letters. Instead, after a brief initial essay (“Lovecraft, un cauchemar Américan”/”Lovecraft, an American nightmare”) and chronology of his life, Rivière presents a series of excerpts from the first two volumes of the Selected Letters, divided into individual topics.

The initial letters, reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts, were created by the artist Floc’h (Jean-Claude Floch), who would become known for his many collaborations with François Rivière.

Most of the translations don’t specify date or even the recipient of the letter, so from a scholastic viewpoint Lettres d’Arkham wasn’t ideal—but translating one of Lovecraft’s letters is more difficult than translating one of his stories or poems. There is no guiding narrative, the letters are full of quirky language, obscure topical and geographic references, callbacks to previous correspondence. Even though Derleth and Wandrei had already edited and censored Lovecraft’s letters to give the excerpts in the Selected Letters volumes better readability (and to remove or downplay some of Lovecraft’s more racist sentiments), Rivière was trying to translate some pretty tricky material for an entirely new audience.

Generally speaking, Rivière seems to have done a pretty decent job of the translations. The most egregious errors are (and this might be expected), geographical. For example, the entry for Salem places it in New York instead of Massachusetts. Still, for a Lovecraft fan in 1970s France, how else were you going to read any of Lovecraft’s letters at all?

For francophone readers, that is still an issue. The vast majority of Lovecraft’s letters have never been translated into French, and might never be (one can only imagine the difficulty of trying to translate some of Lovecraft’s slang-filled letters or stream-of-consciousness sections into French). Some further attempts have been made to present a part of Lovecraft’s correspondence to a French audiences: in 1978 there was Lettres Tome 1 (1914-1936), translated by Jacques Parson, for example, but there was no Lettres 2 forthcoming. Several other collections of part of Lovecraft’s letters have been published, especially in recent years, much of the correspondence from Lovecraft’s later years, and with friends like Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, E. Hoffmann Price, and Robert E. Howard, remains untranslated.

There are people working on that last one, however. A translation of the correspondence of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft into French by David Camus and Patrice Louinet was successfully crowdfunded, and although health issues have delayed the project, it still looks fantastic.

It has to be emphasized what a labor of love translation is; it is never simply a matter of translating word-for-word, but always trying to capture the essence of what is being communicated. English-language readers have an advantage over the French in that we have practically every word that Lovecraft has written published, but as he wrote them; French readers and scholars face not only a limited amount of such material, but have to deal with multiple translations of those same stories and letters in various formats.

Considering that the whole of Arkham House’s Selected Letters has never been translated, much less any of the later, more complete volumes of letters by Necronomicon Press or Hippocampus Press, Lettres d’Arkham remained relevant in France long past the point where most Lovecraft scholarship had superseded the Arkham House Selected Letters.

---

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).