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Archipelago Books in Brooklyn has announced, in its latest catalog, the forthcoming publication of a new translation by Bill Johnston of a short novel from 1933 by the French writer Roger Martin du Gard. The Mail Carrier is the gender-neutral replacement for the title employed in the previous translation (by the art critic John Russell), which was The Postman. While the new title strikes me as a bit anachronistic in tone for a book set in rural France between the wars, the original French title is actually Vieille France, which literally means "Old France" but carries cultural baggage that doesn't come across in English (compare to our loaded term "Middle America").

As it happens, Vieille France was the first book I ever read from cover to cover in French. I didn't actually know all that much French at the time, but I couldn't find a copy of The Postman, which was out of print, and which seemed the logical next step after reading The Thibaults and Jean Barois in English. I don't have my copy of the French edition anymore, but I remember slowly making my way through with the aid of a dictionary and a pencil to write in the English equivalents of the (many) words I didn't know. As I recall, the novel was pretty slight, but I did make it through to the end (and eventually my French got better). Years later I stumbled across this mass-market edition of The Postman, which attempted to capitalize on the popularity of a certain notorious American novel.


The far classier cover art that Archipelago has come up with includes a hedgehog by Albrecht Dürer. The book has been announced for April 2027. Perhaps there's hope now that someone will undertake a new translation of Les Thibaults, since the existing one, by Stuart Gilbert, is dated and unsatisfactory.