ABSTRACT
The author of Souvenirs d’outre-monde (2001), a lively autobiography, is well-known in France as the translator of Evelyn Waugh, Henry James, Henry Miller, Graham Greene, and Anthony Burgess. Besides translating, Georges Belmont—who was born Georges Pelorson in 1909 and died in 2008—has written novels and poetry collections, worked as a journalist, and, more surprisingly, founded Jours de France, a glossy publication devoted to the lives of European royalty and the international jet-set. In brief, the man’s intellectual ambitions, pecuniary needs, and whimsies have led him into a variety of literary (and notso-literary) pursuits. In this first volume of Souvenirs d’outre-monde, Belmont commemorates the notable incidents and especially the decisive encounters of his life, starting with his childhood in a rather remote part of the Jura mountains, and concluding with a final bottle of dry white wine shared with James Joyce, in the Allier, in late February 1940.
