Victor Llona - Important Translator

Important Translator

Returning to France and having gained the confidence of Parisian publishers (Payot, Stock, Plon, Fayard, Albin Michel, La Renaissance du Livre, Gallimard), he was going to translate some forty books into French, between 1920 and 1939, amongst them Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Ambrose Bierce, Ezra Pound, Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy), Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Edna Ferber, Willa Cather and also several works by the Argentinian- English writer William Henry Hudson (1841–1922). With the help of a native Russian he was also able to translate several Russian works, from Alexis Tolstoï, Nikolai Gogol and Elie Ilf.

Llona also wrote in magazines, especially about James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. He also wrote two novels in French, one about the Ku Klux Klan, one about prohibition in the States. He also co-authored a biography of Peter the Great, with the Russian émigré Dimitri Novik.