What Howard’s 1922 translation leaves out.

Howard’s translation appeared as Against the Grain, published by Lieber & Lewis in New York. The comparison below concerns that translation, including the Howard text available through Project Gutenberg. It should not be applied to every edition using the title Against the Grain, or to every inexpensive reprint.

Chapter VI of Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884) includes Des Esseintes’s recollection of Auguste Langlois, a young person whose desires he sets out to manipulate. Des Esseintes imagines that cultivating expensive habits and then withdrawing his support will turn Auguste towards crime.

Des Esseintes is no longer arranging rooms or collecting objects: he is trying to determine the course of another person’s life, with consequences he seems willing to enjoy from a distance. Huysmans gives us Des Esseintes’s scheme and his recollections; that is not proof that the crimes he hopes for ever occur.

Howard omits the original chapter. Including it lets readers encounter this part of Des Esseintes’s character within the novel, rather than learning about it only through an editor’s description.

The opening of Chapter VII in Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884) refers back to Auguste Langlois. Comparing the two English versions makes the difference easy to see.

The French opening names Auguste too: “le mélancolique souvenir d’Auguste Langlois.” This is one specific textual difference. It is not a general verdict on the quality of every sentence in either translation.

Chapter IX of Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884) includes a recollection of an encounter with a young man near the Invalides and the attachment that follows. Howard leaves out this passage, moving between the surrounding recollections without it.

Its inclusion gives readers more of Des Esseintes’s remembered emotional and sexual life. The difference is a passage within Chapter IX, not a second missing chapter. Our comparison therefore separates it from the wholesale omission of VI.

Huysmans wrote the retrospective preface to Against Nature in 1903, after his conversion to Catholicism. It lets readers compare the novel published in 1884 with the account its author later gave of it.

The Time Warp Edition includes this preface separately. Its presence is a useful difference from Howard’s 1922 volume, but it should not be described as a chapter missing from the original novel.

For our Time Warp Edition of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884), we returned to the first French edition published by Charpentier. In Aurélie Chambord’s new translation, we have worked to retain Huysmans’s extended sentences and specialised vocabulary, explaining selected French terms in the endnotes. We chose the passages from Chapters VIII and IX at the front of the book to introduce readers to the translation. Our Chapter IV sample pairs a printed passage with its notes, showing the context we provide alongside the text.

We have brought together Lee Raymond’s introduction, chapter endnotes and Field Notes of the Decadence to explore the novel’s art, literature, religion and experiments with the senses. Huysmans’s own 1903 preface offers his later view of the novel; contemporary responses show how others received it. A biography and chronology trace the life and career behind the writing.

Readers choose this edition for its unique combination of a new modern translation, complete treatment of previously omitted passages, and supporting material that helps readers understand the text.

The comparison draws on the original French chapter text held in our editorial files; John Howard’s translation in Project Gutenberg no. 12341; the Huysmans bibliography’s illustrated account of Lieber & Lewis and subsequent editions; and the Time Warp Edition interior. It identifies the passages discussed above, rather than claiming to be an exhaustive collation of every textual change. The comparison is published by the publisher of the Time Warp Edition.