Each successive version of this translation has been painstakingly reviewed by Mme Yourcenar herself, who understood from the outset the special challenges that confront any attempt to render into another idiom the luminous purity of language and the haunting tone of voice which so distinguish her earliest novel. Throughout, she has offered subtle suggestions and poetic solutions. I am deeply grateful to her for her generous collaboration and her unfailing encouragement, but even more for the affectionate friendship she has shared with me for more than a decade now.

Three other close friends, George P. Savidis, Walter C. Hughes, and Jess N. Taylor, were kind enough to read and comment on an early draft, each bringing to it his own astute stylistic sensibility; I am obliged to them for saving me from a number of careless infelicities.

This English version of Alexis is dedicated by the translator, with boundless and abiding love, to its only begetter and to Sheila La Farge.

W.K.

La Perla

Poros (Troezeneas)

July 1983

It was with Alexis that, in 1929, Marguerite Yourcenar began her career as a novelist. Few literary debuts in the 20th century are quite as astonishing; for this profound analysis of a man’s homosexuality was written by a young woman of twenty-four. The novel takes the form of a letter from the protagonist, Alexis, to his wife, Monique. His letter declares that he can no longer continue in the marriage, that he must obey the demands of his own sexuality, against which he has struggled in vain, to achieve a freedom without which he cannot live.

“Alexis was remarkable in its time and place, yet its immediacy has not been diminished in the fifty years since it first appeared … Even at the age of twenty-four, Yourcenar was a master of her art.”

—Sara Carlo Rosenbaum
San Francisco Chronicle

“Its graceful style and subtle insights into character resonate long after its last page is turned.” —Publishers Weekly

Translated by Walter Kaiser 

in collaboration with the author

FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX

19 Union Square West / New York 10003

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