Volume 14, Number 6 · March 26, 1970
On "All Men Are Mad"
By Edmund Wilson
Sometime in 1944, when I was regularly reviewing books for the New Yorker, there fell into my hands a translation of a novel called Canapé Vert, by two brothers, Philippe Tho-by-Marcelin and Pierre Marcelin, which had just won a prize, as the candidate from Haiti, in a Latin American fiction contest. This book seemed to me very strange, quite unlike any other piece of fiction that I had ever seen, and it piqued my curiosity. It was so evident that the translation was unreliable that I applied to the publisher for the original French, and this partly cleared up the mystery, for the translator had actually tampered with the text, and his French was so inadequate that he had sometimes mistaken the meanings of common enough words and phrases.
Feature, 1496 words
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