Essentially Pelletier set out to translate the book because he liked it, and because he enjoyed the work, although it also occurred to him that he could submit the translation, prefaced with a study of the Archimboldian oeuvre, as his thesis, and - why not? - as the foundation of his future dissertation. At the time, there was no French publishing house interested in publishing the German author with the funny name. In 1983, at the age of twenty-two, he undertook the task of translating D’Arsonval. Reading these two novels only reinforced the opinion he’d already formed of Archimboldi. In 1981, he made a trip to Bavaria with three friends from the German department, and there, in a little bookstore in Munich, on Voralmstrasse, he found two other books: the slim volume titled Mitzi’s Treasure, less than one hundred pages long, and the aforementioned English novel, The Garden. The name Archimboldi appeared in a dictionary of German literature and in a Belgian magazine devoted - whether as a joke or seriously, he never knew - to the literature of Prussia.

He also scoured the few German bookstores he could find in Paris. Pelletier wrote to the Hamburg publishing house that had published D’Arsonval and received no response. Ten minutes later, to Pelletier’s outrage (and horror), he realized that the person his professor had in mind was the Italian painter, regarding whom he soon revealed himself to be equally ignorant. One said he thought he recognized the name. Pelletier’s professors had never heard of him. Almost no reference to Archimboldi could be found in the university’s German department. Getting hold of books by Benno von Archimboldi in the 1980s, even in Paris, was an effort not lacking in all kinds of difficulties. The young Pelletier didn’t realize at the time that the novel was part of a trilogy (made up of the English-themed The Garden and the Polish-themed The Leather Mask, together with the clearly French-themed D’Arsonval), but this ignorance or lapse or bibliographical lacuna, attributable only to his extreme youth, did nothing to diminish the wonder and admiration that the novel stirred in him.įrom that day on (or from the early morning hours when he concluded his maiden reading) he became an enthusiastic Archimboldian and set out on a quest to find more works by the author. The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature.

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