Dedalus Books, publishers of such dandy classics as “The She-Devils” by Barbey d’Aurevilly and “Monsieur de Phocas” by Jean Lorrain, has put out a new edition of J.-K. Huysmans’ seminal work of French Decadence, “Against Nature.”

Released last week in the UK and this week in the US, the book features a new translation, introduction, bibliography in English, the celebrated preface by Huysmans written 20 years later, and extensive notes on the author’s obscure historical and cultural references.

It also features as a cover image a self-portrait by Egon Schiele looking like a LiveJournal blogger.

“‘Against Nature’ will be Dedalus’s seventh Huysmans title and the fourth book to be translated by Brendan King,” Dedalus founder Eric Lane told Dandyism.net. “Our edition will be the definitive edition of ‘Against Nature’ for the next 30 years. A classic text benefits from having new translations to keep it alive. It also reinforces its importance and reminds people that it is a book for today as yet another new translation has appeared.”

Below is an interview with Brendan King, a Paris-based writer and translator who recently completed his Ph.D. on Huysmans, and who runs the site Huysmans.org. Following that is a sample of King’s translation, including the “sermon on dandyism” passage in which Des Esseintes, the book’s hero, looks back on the sartorial follies of his youth.

DNET: Leon Bloy described Huysmans’ prose style as “constantly dragging Mother Image up and down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified syntax.” Given his flamboyant style, ever-present black humor and abstruse cultural references, what was your approach in translating him for the 21st-century English reader?

BK: Trying to convey something of Huysmans’ vivid, often convoluted style and still communicate the text’s meaning and make it comprehensible presents a particular challenge to his translators. Perhaps even more so now, in that a younger generation of readers may be less familiar with the culture and politics of 19th-century France and more used to cultural experiences that are easily accessible and instantly assimilable.

As a translator, however, one has to balance accessibility with fidelity to the text and to the aesthetic ideas of the author. Although it might be possible to produce a translation of “Against Nature” that was very much easier to read, it simply wouldn’t be Huysmans — a certain amount of complexity is intrinsic to his style. Indeed, part of the pleasure of his literary style lies in the abstruse, unusual and at times shocking nature of his images and his vocabulary. But if it’s true to say that Huysmans is an author who will never be to everyone’s tastes, it’s also the case that those who like his work tend to be passionate about it. In a sense it was this latter audience I was thinking about when I was working on this new edition. I wanted to produce a translation that would satisfy both the intellectual and the artistic demands of readers who were enthusiastic about Huysmans’ work, a translation which would propel them even deeper into his world.

DNET: Given that Robert Baldick’s 1959 translation for Penguin is held in such high esteem, what did you feel you could improve on? And what did you do to cater to the contemporary reader?

BK: Like many English speakers, I first came to “Against Nature” through Baldick’s classic translation, which I admire enormously — not least for the fact that it did a huge amount to popularize Huysmans’ name. But Baldick was writing in the late 1950s and even great translations age. Certain words and turns of phrase become outdated over time, and it is probably also true to say that Baldick toned down some of Huysmans more graphic imagery. It should be added, too, that there have been a lot of developments in Huysmansian studies over the last 50 years that have influenced our understanding of the novel, including new editions of his letters, important critical editions of his texts, and discoveries of manuscripts and other archive material that Baldick, great scholar though he was, wouldn’t have had access to.

One of my main complaints about Baldick’s translation is that while it respects the meaning of Huysmans’ text pretty well, it doesn’t always do a very good job of capturing Huysmans’ style. As you’ve already noted in the quotation from Léon Bloy, Huysmans’ style was famously difficult and convoluted. He often uses unfamiliar or archaic words, and is not above inventing words when he needs to. He is also fond of elaborate similes and extended metaphors. The most common response I get from French people when I say I’m working on Huysmans is “Even the French find Huysmans difficult to read.”

Obviously there would be no point in producing a translation that was impossible to read, but what I wanted to do was to try and ensure that as well as conveying Huysmans’ meaning, the translation reflected some of the formal and stylistic complexity of his prose. To give just one brief example. Huysmans tends to use a lot of semi-colons, constructing his paragraphs out of a series of phrases that refine and add to what has gone before, so that meaning is built up and emerges gradually, a bit like the method used by the Impressionists, of whom he was an early champion. I tried to echo this sentence structure whenever I could, whereas Baldick tends to either chop Huysmans’ long sentences up into smaller units, making his prose seem more clipped than it actually was, or reorder his phrases, making his sentences seem more prosaic than they actually were.

Readers of Huysmans tend to seek him out. I don’t think one should try and distort his work in order to cater to a wider audience. What I tried to do with this edition is to provide contemporary readers with material that would facilitate a deeper understanding of his work. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to include, for the first time in an English translation, a large series of extracts from the original manuscript of A Rebours. English-speaking students studying “Against Nature” now have a chance to read Huysmans’ early drafts of the novel, and to see how his ideas changed and developed in the course of writing.

DNET: What’s the appeal of the book for you personally? And what’s your take on des Esseintes, since you spent so much time with him in preparing this book?

BK: One of the appeals of the book for me is that it perfectly captures a cultural period, the fin-de-siècle, in which I’m very interested. Indeed, it is the book which almost single-handedly redefined the period. “Against Nature” also marks Huysmans’ maturity as a writer. It is the first in a series of novels that deal with issues that have an incredible contemporary resonance: The polarisation of science and religion, for example, or notions about what kind of art can exist in a capitalist or a democratic society. Plus it has running through it a kind of existential quest, in which des Esseintes seeks to find a satisfactory resolution of the conflict between the subjective world of ideas and the objective world of contemporary reality. I think a lot of people mistakenly see “Against Nature” as a kind of aesthetic fantasy that is somehow detached from real life. One of the things I wanted to try and do in this edition was to put the novel back in its social and political context, not just through my introduction, in which I try to highlight the political dimension of aesthetic movements such as Naturalism and Decadence, but also by clarifying references in the text to the political and economic state of France at the time, and to the ongoing conflict between various social classes and political factions.

For me, one of the great things about des Esseintes is that he is both an abstraction and yet also fundamentally human, he is someone who struggles to deal with ideas and ideals in a world that is contemptuous of idealism, a world in which money is the sole arbiter of value. It is this poignant frustration des Esseintes has with the world, even though he sometimes borders on parody, that elevates him into the ranks the great characters of European fiction. By definition des Esseintes could never be Everyman, but in a sense he is the outsider’s Everyman: someone who represents every person who has ever felt dissatisfied by the world and the shabbiness of its values.

Sample passage:

And during the period when he had deemed it necessary to be different, des Esseintes had devised marvellously strange furnishings, dividing his drawing room into a series of alcoves, each decorated with different wall-hangings which, by a subtle analogy, a vague harmony of colours that were pleasant or sombre, delicate or crude, were related to the character of the Latin or French books he most loved. He would then seclude himself in that recess the décor of which seemed to him to best correspond to the very essence of the work which the caprice of the moment had led him to read.

And lastly, he had had constructed a high-ceilinged room, intended for the reception of his tradesmen: they would enter, sit themselves side by side on church pews, and then he would climb up into a magisterial pulpit from which he would preach sermons on dandyism, entreating his bootmakers and tailors to conform in every particular to his directives in matters of style, threatening them with pecuniary excommunication if they failed to follow to the letter the instructions contained in his monitories and bulls.

He acquired a reputation as an eccentric, to which he put the finishing touch by wearing suits of white velvet and waistcoats embroidered with gold thread, by inserting, in lieu of a cravat, a bouquet of Parma violets in the open neck of his shirt, and by giving notorious dinners to men of letters, at one of which, inspired by the eighteenth century, he organised a funeral repast to celebrate that most futile of mishaps.

In a dining room draped in black, opening out onto the garden of the house, now transformed with its paths powdered with charcoal, its little pond filled with ink and bordered with basalt and its shrubberies laid out with cypresses and pines, dinner had been served on a black tablecloth adorned with baskets of violets and black scabias, lit by candelabra from which green flames blazed, and by chandeliers in which wax tapers flared.

While a hidden orchestra played funeral marches, the guests had been waited on by naked black women wearing slippers and stockings of a silvery material sprinkled with tears.

From black-bordered plates they had eaten turtle soup, Russian rye bread, ripe olives from Turkey, caviar, salted mullet roes, smoked black pudding from Frankfurt, game birds covered in sauces the colour of liquorice and boot polish, truffle gravy, chocolate flavoured cream, plum-puddings, brugnon musqué peaches, fruit preserves in grape juice, mulberries and black-heart cherries; from dark glasses they had drunk wines from Limagne and Roussillon, from Tenedos, Valdepeñas and Oporto; and after coffee and walnut brandy, they had savoured kvass, porter and stout.

‘A farewell dinner for a temporarily dead virility’ was what he had written on the invitation card, which looked just like an announcement for a burial service.

But these extravagances in which he once so gloried had burned themselves out in due course; now he was filled with contempt for such puerile and outmoded displays, for his abnormal clothes and his bizarrely embellished apartment. He dreamed simply of composing, for his own pleasure and no longer for the astonishment of others, an interior that would be comfortable, albeit decorated in a rare style, and of fashioning for himself a curious and calm environment adapted to the needs of his future solitude.