Translations from Tartarus

The Gypsy Spiders by Nicola Lombardi, 2021

We’ve recently published a superb collection of intelligent contemporary weird stories, The Gypsy Spiders and Other Tales of Italian Horror, by Nicola Lombardi. The title story, which is set in Italy in the dying days of World War Two, won the Premio Polidori, one of Italy’s most prestigious horror awards. It’s a great privilege to be able to make available the marvellous English translation of the collection by J. Weintraub. The book recently  received a very wonderful review at Oddly Weird Fiction: 'Absolutely brilliant and very, very highly recommended.', and the blog pointed out that there is a whole world of unstranslated weird fiction out there.

Clarimonde, Monsieur de Phocas and Darkscapes

Tartarus is obviously a publisher of literature in English, but we have always made a point of publishing books by authors from the US, Canada, Australia, Ireland and the rest of the world, as well as the UK. Alongside The Gypsy Spiders, in print with us at the moment are Clarimonde and OtherStories by Theophile Gautier, translated from the French by Lafcadio Hearn; Monsieur de Phocas by Jean Lorrain, translated by Francis Amery (Brian Stableford); and in paperback Le Grand Meaulnes and Miracles by Henri Alain-Fournier, translated by R.B. Russell and Adrian Eckersley; and Darkscapes, by Anne-Sylvie Salzman, translated by William Charlton. In the past we have published such classics as The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, The Sand Man and Other Night Pieces by E.T.A. Hoffman and The House of Oracles by Thomas Owen, amongst others. All have sold well, in large part because of the wonderful translations that were available to us.

And there lies the difficulty. We would very much like to become even more inclusive and wide-ranging in our publishing, making available classic and contemporary weird fiction from many other countries – India, Africa and the Far East spring to mind. But there is always the problem that we need a good English translation, and it is problematic for a small press to take the financial risk of commissioning a translation of a work that we can only read and assess for publication once it’s been translated!

So, for now, we are largely reliant on international authors and translators coming forward and submitting finished translations to us. This has resulted in several wonderful books, including The Gypsy Spiders, but we agree that there are many more out there, just waiting to be discovered by an English-speaking audience . . .