You know modern English only has one set of second-person pronouns and basically no formal address that uses pronouns? And how French has “tu/vous”, informal/formal forms of address?

Well, I have the whole weekend to work out how characters in Obsidian and Blood should address one another in the French translation, whether by tutoiement or vouvoiement–in order to help out the translator.

Arg.
(don’t get me wrong, I’m overjoyed I get that kind of control over the translation, but it’s just that I now have to mentally translate my characters interactions into French, and it’s a teensy little bit painful)

A new French webzine has launched here: its inaugural issue has stories by Laurent Kloetzer and me (“Coeur Flétri”, the English-language translation of “Blighted Heart”). With extra texts by Xavier Mauméjean and Daryl Gregory, which you can get when you buy the whole issue (2.99 euros), or you can wait a bit for them to be posted.

Thanks to Seb Cevey, Florence Dolisi, and the whole Angle Mort team for the honour of opening up the shop 🙂

(and wow, it sure feels weird to be published in my native language…)

Also, for an encore, my second French translation will soon be published in Galaxies, courtesy of Pierre Gévart and Camille Thérion. It’s “Chute d’un Papillon au Point du Jour”, in which the astute will recognise the French version of the Xuya story “Butterfly Falling at Dawn”.

And for the encore of the encore, here’s the webpage of my French publisher, Eclipse.

I’ve just been given official permission to post about this: my story “The Lost Xuyan Bride”, originally published in Interzone, will form part of the upcoming release of Polish online library Skryptorium at the Katedra site, edited by Jan Zeranski.

The site itself is not live yet, but we’ve been given permission to spread the word 🙂

You can see a preview of the working design here. The Skryptorium project aims to showcase SF/Fantasy short fiction in translation for the benefit of Polish readers.

Here are the current stories:

Aliette de Bodard – “The Lost Xuyan Bride”
Cory Doctorow – “I, Robot”
Jeffrey Ford – “Exo-Skeleton Town”
Daryl Gregory – “In the Wheels”
Ted Kosmatka – “Divining Light”
Jay Lake – “Tom Edison and his telegraphic harpoon”
Nedimma Nkemdili Okorafor-Mbachu – “Amphibious Green”
Jeff VanderMeer – “A Heart for Lucretia”
Zoran Zivkovic – “First photograph”

This is my first ever translation–thanks to Jan for the offer, and to everyone involved in the Skryptorium project.

And, er, wow. That’s some TOC.