Patricia Worth
Bewildering Stories biography
Patricia Worth is an Australian literary translator. She has translated George Sand’s 1842 novel, Spiridion (2015), two bilingual books of New Caledonian stories by Claudine Jacques (2017, 2018), Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé’s small 1884 collection, Winter Tales (2018), and Jean Lorrain’s fin-de-siècle collection, Stories to Read by Candlelight (2019). Apart from the collections, twenty-five other translated stories have appeared in journals in Australia, New Caledonia and the U.S.
Having always looked back to the 1800s for good English fiction, Patricia eagerly responded to online recommendations that forgotten works by George Sand and Jean Lorrain be translated. The appeal of Sand’s Spiridion was in the haunted monastery and the dangers of segregating men from society. With Lorrain, it was the adult fairy tales written in reaction to realism and technological advances that amused and intrigued her.
Through Lorrain she discovered and translated other late 19th-century authors of fairy fantasy, Catulle Mendès and Théodore de Banville. Many of these writers produced works which lent themselves to illustration and were published in the illustrated journals popular at the turn of the century; viewing the images added a particular pleasure to the translation process.
By contrast, the New Caledonian stories translated by Patricia were originally written in the last twenty years. The author, Claudine Jacques, writes fiction that draws attention to her territory’s social problems.
As a translator, Patricia suspects there might be a certain interest for fellow Australians in the darkness sometimes found in the tropical paradise of a Pacific island.
For more about Patricia’s translations, see patriciaworthtranslator.com.
Copyright © 2019, 2020 by Patricia Worth
