Over the last few years, we’ve been publishing a series of letters from one of our Classical Studies PhD graduates, Paul Jackson, who now lives in Provence. In this latest instalment, Paul shares some exciting news about his new translation of Alexandre Dumas’ epic novel Isaac Laquedem – congratulations on the publication of Volume I, Paul! We love keeping in touch with our graduates, and would welcome other letters like this from our OU Classical Studies alumni. You can email us on FASS-ClassicalStudies-Enquiries@open.ac.uk
“Of the hundreds of writers and artists who have adapted the legend of the Wandering Jew, Alexandre Dumas is among the most well-known and beloved. And yet, his Isaac Laquedem is not well known among Anglophone readers or much included in voluminous scholarship on the Wandering Jew legend. Paul Jackson’s wonderful new translation is sure to change this” (Professor Lisa R. Lampert-Weissig).
In 1852, Alexandre Dumas claimed that he had been working on his epic novel Isaac Laquedem for some twenty-five years. However, as it was being published en feuilleton, it soon fell subject to a great deal of controversy, and Dumas, stubbornly refusing to make any changes to his material, was then forced to abandon the work, and upon his death some years later, it remained unfinished—though what remains is of considerable length in itself. The novel subsequently fell into relative obscurity, and for over one hundred and sixty-three years, unlike many of Dumas’s works, it never enjoyed translation into English for an audience that continues to love the French author so very much. This is all the more remarkable because Dumas himself refers to Isaac Laquedem—and not The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers, both of which he had published a number of years earlier—as the “capital work of [his] life”, and unlike The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers, it was written all in his own hand, and so represents pure Dumas.
This peculiarity has now been rectified, however, as Isaac Laquedem: A Tale of the Wandering Jew is the first edition in my new Classical Dumas Series, a project that endeavours to produce English translations of some of Dumas’s more obscure works set in or about the ancient world—of which there are many—in the hope of revealing a perhaps rather underappreciated aspect of the writer, the passionate lover of the classical world, a passion that has been the focus of several papers and articles I have produced in recent years, and indeed a post or two here as well.
However, my own project has itself experienced something of an epic too, and one not so dissimilar to Dumas’s decades of writing Isaac Laquedem, the adventures across the world therein that the eponymous Wandering Jew experiences, and the journey through time that the book has taken from then until now. For, coming out of my PhD with the Open University, which was supervised by professors Sophie Grace Chappell and Naoko Yamagata, with my topic bridging both philosophy and classics respectively, I almost immediately emigrated to France and took up this project, something that I had of course had to set to one side until my thesis had been completed. The project was then taken up relatively quickly by a literary agent in London and a publishing house in the United States, and things progressed rather nicely for a number of years, until, that is, challenges began to present themselves, challenges that ultimately could not be overcome. The arrival of COVID was a big hit, but if that were not enough, the closure of Small Press Distribution (SPD), which had operated for over fifty years until then, was just too much for my publishing house to take, and the project was set aside indefinitely. It would then be taken up by another publishing house in London, who were initially extremely excited about things too, but again, things began to unravel, with life getting ever tougher for the literary world, and so it was that I decided to take the plunge, to do what I had resisted doing for so long, and ‘go it alone’!
So much work had gone into the project, you see, and I had also faced a number of personal challenges too, challenges that I will not go into detail about here but challenges that the project had managed to survive, and I was just so eager to share what had by then remained dormant for one hundred and seventy-three years. And so it was with great pleasure—if not considerable relief—when the first volume of my translation of Isaac Laquedem was published. The other three volumes are being released successively, initially in softback and then also in hardover and ebook versions, before bundles or boxsets arrive towards the end of this year in time for Christmas.
I have many people to thank for helping me get to this point: my agent, literary houses, and editors, who had all put so much time and effort into this project over the years; the avid Dumasian Rick Volpe, who continues to push me to not give up on things; my friend Holly Hill Mangin, who helped me to ‘go it alone’; my friend Kate Collord, who meticulously proofread Isaac Laquedem; Professor Lisa R. Lampert-Weissig, who penned an introduction for it; and many others besides.
But more than anything else, the decision to ‘go it alone’ has allowed me to work more closely with my wife, Cécile Césarini-Jackson. We had originally started out on this epic adventure together all those years back, and it must be said, what with the diligence, organisation, and sacrifice required in such things, how she puts up with me, I will just never know. But now, together, we have accomplished something, something that we had perhaps suspected might never have been, and this has brought us even closer together.
Dumas’s magum opus has become ours!
Acte: A Tale of Greece of Rome will be coming out before the end of the year, and I am presently well on my way with the extremely exciting third edition in the series, which is something that has never seen the light of day even in book format, but before then, enjoy Isaac Laquedem: A Tale of the Wandering Jew, for it has been far too long in coming!
Paul T. M. Jackson