The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Mailer in Translation: The Naked and the Dead

Written by
Jeanne Fuchs

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Abstract: By divine intervention, pure chance, or karma, Norman Mailer and Jean Malaquais met in Paris in 1948 for the first time. It was the beginning of a fruitful friendship, one that would benefit and enrich both writers in many ways and on many different levels. At that time, Mailer was on the threshold of fame, and Malaquais was an established “French” intellectual. Malaquais is a wizard—a Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov rolled into one. Not a native speaker of either English or French, he achieves a tour de force in his translation of Mailer’s immense novel.

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URL: http://prmlr.us/mr13fuc

By divine intervention, pure chance or karma, Norman Mailer and Jean Malaquais met in Paris in 1948 for the first time. It was the beginning of a fruitful friendship, one that would benefit and enrich both writers in many ways and on many different levels.

At that time, Mailer was on the threshold of fame, and Malaquais was an established “French” intellectual. The expatriate, Polish born Malaquais (né Wladimir Jan Pavel Malacki), had settled in France after a long period of wandering in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. A flâneur before the fact, he presented himself as a kind of intellectual vagabond: “Morally and intellectually I was a tramp, a companion of the dispossessed.” Such a self-assessment certainly would have appealed to the anti-establishment Mailer, as it had to the French intellectual community. Fifteen years Mailer’s senior, Malaquais had learned much the hard way. Mailer, uncharacteristically self-effacing, remarked that “Malaquais had more influence on my mind than anyone I ever knew from the time we had gotten well acquainted while he was translating The Naked and the Dead.”

By any reckoning, Malaquais had to be one of the most intelligent and fascinating people the young Norman had ever met. Primarily an autodidact, Malaquais came from a learned family: his father was a Classicist and his mother was a musician, but having left home at the age of seventeen, Malaquais had to earn his living doing manual labor and read and study on his own. Without knowing it, he had followed the educational precepts of Michel de Montaigne (1539–1592) in that he traveled before settling down to reading, books and all that is meant by “education.”

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Works Cited

• Lennon, J. Michael (2013). Norman Mailer: A Double Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.