J. C. Mardrus

Joseph Charles Mardrus, otherwise known as "Jean-Charles Mardrus" (1868–1949), born in Cairo, was a French physician and a noted translator. Today he is best known for his translation of the Thousand and One Nights from Arabic into French, which was published from 1898 to 1904, and was in turn rendered into English by Powys Mathers. A newer edition, Le livre des mille nuits et une nuit, was published in 1926–1932.

Mardrus's version of the Arabian Nights is racy, elegant, and highly readable. It is mentioned explicitly in the pages of The Remembrance of Things Past. Unfortunately, Mardrus inserted a lot of material of his own (he was as imaginative as Sheherezade herself), and his translation is therefore not wholly authentic, even though it is very well written and developed. Much of the homosexual material for example, though quite romantic, is an absolute invention of Mardrus himself, and so confuses the issue of actual homosexuality in the Nights, of which there is a substantial amount. Mardrus claimed that his translation was based on a previously unknown "Tunisian text". But this definitely fictional manuscript was never seen by anyone else.

As a doctor for the French government, he worked throughout to Morocco and the Far East. He produced other translations, some illustrated by the Swiss engraver François-Louis Schmied (1873–1941).

He married the novelist and poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus in 1900.

Elvira Buder was born in 1918 in Port Said, Egypt. At the age of 18 when the nuns at the convent boarding school she attended from the age of five, wanted her to become a teacher she promptly left for the Sorbonne University in Paris with Mardrus with neither the nuns' nor her mother's permission. Her father had died from an accident when she was three years old. According to Buder, Mardrus convinced her it was a good idea. It must have been 1936. Also according to Buder they travelled via Greece and Mardrus was a difficult although highly entertaining companion. He had a hunchback which she felt brought out the genius in him. She was clearly smitten. Soon after arriving in Paris war broke out and she found herself pregnant and in France on an Italian passport. Buder left France for Italy when the Germans occupied Paris. It is not clear whose child she was carrying. Buder claims Mardrus was not the father of her child. Much later they met for the last time when Buder had just married E.W.N. Mallows, son of C.E. Mallows Charles Edward Mallows. Again according to Buder, Mardrus said he thought she had married well if boring. He died shortly thereafter in a car accident. He was driving which apparently he was not licensed to do. It would seem they both enjoyed telling tales. It was through Mardrus that Buder met the poet and writer Louis Aragon as Mardrus was a friend of his Louis Aragon.

Works

• Les Mille et Une Nuits (The 1001 Nights, edited by Robert Laffont; in the Bouquins collection)
• L’Apocalypse qui est la révélation
• Le Livre des Morts de l’Ancienne Égypte
• Le Cantique des Cantiques
• Le Livre des Rois
• Sucre d’amour (1926), illustrated by François-Louis Schmied
• La Reine de Saba (1918)
• La Reine de Saba et divers autres contes (1921)
• Le Koran, commissioned by the French government in 1925
• Le Paradis musulman (1930), illustrated by François-Louis Schmied
• Toute-Puissance de l'Adepte (Le Livre de la Vérité de Parole) 1932