摘要：Ten years ago the Summer 1999 issue of the Eudora Welty Newsletter opened on a section on “Welty and France”. The main article, “A Translator’s Perspective” was by Welty’s chief translator in France, Michel Gresset. Gresset lamented that Welty “had not fared as well” in France as other Southern writers like Faulkner or O’Connor, and he wondered if it was because she had not been translated by Maurice Edgar Coindreau. Michel Gresset’s article traced the history of the late and haphazard story of Welty’s translations in France and of the circulation of her books, since the publication of the first translation, that of Delta Wedding by Lola Tranec in 1957 for Gallimard, the only Welty book translated into French until The Optimist’s Daughter (translated by Louise Servicen) in 1974. Gresset had a hand in all the subsequent translations of Welty into French. The only new edition that came out since 1999 has been a one-thousand page compendium of Welty’s Fictions , published by Flammarion with a preface by Gresset, in 2000 — except for Delta Wedding, Losing Battles and The Optimist’s Daughter. Losing Battles remains unpublished to this day.
