History of Maupassant's Short Stories

In response to a question on the Modern Library mailing list on February 27 2007, Barry Neavill offers the following comments on this title.

ML editions of Maupassant are a bit complicated.

We start with two Boni and Liveright collections: Mademoiselle Fifi and Twelve Other Stories (1917) and Love and Other Stories (1919). The 1917 volume doesn't identify the translator (or translators). Love and Other Stories identifies the translator as Michael Monahan. "A Piece of String" was added to Love and Other Stories (pp. 213-222) in spring 1930 (the earliest printing I've seen with the story) or possibly late 1920s. I assume this was translated by Monahan but who knows.

In 1932 the two Maupassant volumes were combined as a single volume titled The Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant. The first half of the volume, paginated i-xi, 1-222, is Love and Other Stories; the second half, paginated 7-251, is Mademoiselle Fifi and Twelve Other Stories. The ML combined several volumes in this fashion in the early 1930s to give better value during the Depression. The title page identifies the translator as Michael Monahan, but that applies only to the first half of the volume. "A Piece of String" (or "The Piece of String" as it was titled in Mademoiselle Fifi and Other Stories) is included twice in two different translations. As you note, the jacket title is The Best Stories of de Maupassant.

In 1940, when The Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant appeared in the larger format designed by Joseph Blumenthal, the title was changed to The Best Stories of Guy de Maupassant. The jacket continued to give the title in the shorter form as The Best Stories of de Maupassant. Monahan is still credited as the translator on the title page.

This volume was superseded in 1945 by a new selection edited by Saxe Commins. The title on both title page and jacket is The Best Stories of Guy de Maupassant. A number of stories in earlier collections are retained but in different translations. "The Piece of String" appears in a different translation from either translation used previously.

Commins doesn't identify the source of the translations, but he took them from The Life and Work of Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant, published by M. W. Dunne in 17 volumes (1903). The attraction of these translations was not that they were better or worse than other translations. Commins used them because they were in the public domain. The alternative, as he told Alfred Knopf, was to use translations by several hands with many copyright complications.