“Your traduction winks at me with a yellow back as I sit writing”

[For correct and critical edition of this letter, see Mehew 7, 2329.]

To Berthe M. Low

[W.H. Low, A Chronicle of Friendships, 1908, pp.433-4]

June 19, 1891, Vailima.

My dear Traducer,

In all things it seems you have done very well:

Will Hicok Low, ‘Souvenir of Nantucket’. The American painter had married in 1878 Berthe Julienne, who had translated Treasure Island into French in 1885 [www.askart.com]

the keys have come, but not yet the boxes,

St. Stephen Hotel, 46-52 East 11th Street, NY, c. 1880. At Mrs Low’s prompting, some trunks left by RLS at the hotel had been shipped to Apia [http://thehotelalbert.com]

nor any word from the perfidious Burlingame.

Edward Livermore Burlingame (1848-1922), editor-in-chief of Scribner’s Magazine. In a later letter he made it clear that the material left at Scribner’s was also being sent by the safest means [https://en.wikipedia.org/]

But what am I to say? His letter has probably miscarried, as some of mine have done. For it seems that you have never heard of the arrival of the traduction, which, however, I read with much pleasure and which winks at me with a yellow back as I sit writing.

Berthe Low’s French translation of Jekyll & Hyde had been published in August 1890 [https://picclick.fr/]

And it seems yet another has gone wrong – my last to your degenerate husband,

William Hicok Low c. 1880 in his Bronxville studio [www.albanyinstitute.org]

in which I offered him (in my name and Lloyd’s) the dedication of “The Wrecker”, and gave him an order on Burlingame for the sheets so far as they went. This, I believe even a New Yorker would have answered. The point is this: Loudon Dodd, the narrator of the tale, is drawn a good deal from the degenerate W.H.L.: some of his adventures and some of mine are agreeably mingled in the early parts, and the thing might seem too near the truth for him to care about the connection.

Illustration from The Wrecker, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1892. Artist: Willard Leroy Metcalf [https://illustratingstevenson.wordpress.com]

See that he bears this sheet to the truculent Bulingame, by which he (the T. Blgme.) is authorized to communicate “The Wrecker”, and do you see that he (the degenerate W.H.L.) answers it. He will start to find himself quite a taffrail!

We guess we shan’t want the skates much before winter: though I daresay I might use them for razors – they would be as good as what we have.

RLS in a diorama on Baker’s veranda with his skates at Saranak Lake in 1888 [www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com]

But the lakes in this part of the States don’t bear much before Christmas. I am fatuous: enough. I can inflict no more of this rubbish, even on a traducer. And with a thousand thanks for all the horrid bother we have put you to, I say farewell,

Yours ever,

R.L.S.