Two of the Imaginary Lives
of Marcel Schwob (1867-1905)
by Michael Wooff
“Two Pirates” appears in this issue.
Marcel Schwob was an Anglophile who read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in the original English when it first came out in 1883 and later translated Oscar Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant” as “Le Géant égoïste” with the permission of the author, whom he counted as a friend.
It is possible that he was also familiar with The Buccaneers and Marooners of America first translated into English in 1684 by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) from a work by Alexandre-Olivier Exquemelin (1645-1707), a French Huguenot and ship’s surgeon and buccaneer with Henry Morgan, who settled in Holland and published De Americaensche Zeeroover in Dutch in 1678.
Part 2 of this work gives an account of four notorious pirates: Captain Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard, with a section referring to Stede Bonnet, Captain William Kid, Bartholomew Roberts and Captain Avery. The English version was edited and illustrated by Howard Pyle in 1891 and was a book that Marcel Schwob may well have had access to in 1894 plus, perhaps, A General History of the Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson (Defoe again?), first published in London in 1724.
Schwob may have had access to all those works of the 17th and 18th centuries when he started to write the 22 lives of “poètes, dieux, assassins et pirates, ainsi que de plusieurs princesses et dames galantes...” (poets, gods, murderers and pirates, as well as of several princesses and gallant ladies...) which would eventually become, in 1896, his Vies imaginaires.
Would Pyle’s and Johnson’s works have been fresh in his mind when he published on 29 July 1894 the first of these imaginary lives, that of Stede Bonnet? At any rate, this life and that of Captain Kid(d) seemed to me too good to leave in literary limbo, so I’ve taken them out, dusted them off and called them “Two Famous Pirates: Captain Kidd and Major Stede Bonnet” in the hope that they’ll be read in our 21st century, too.
Copyright © 2025 by Michael Wooff
