Victor Llona

Victor Llona was a novelist and translator, Péruvien of birth, having alternatively lived in France and with the the United States, born with Lima in 1886 and deceased with San Francisco in 1953.

Youth

The Peruvian Victor Marie Llona learned French as of the nine years age, his father having brought his family to Paris, where it continued marketing activities. Llona studied with the college Janson de Sailly and in a college of Jesuits. At the sixteen years age it haunted the literary coffees and bound with a group from young abroad, among whom the young Irishman James Joyce was (1882-1941).

In the United States

In 1906, following his/her parents, Llona left for the United States and is established with Chicago. It maintained the bonds with French literary men and arrived, via André Gide to publish two accounts in NRF, in 1911 and 1913.

During the Great War, Llona lived with New York, where it became acquainted with some American novelists of the new generation, that it was promised to make known in France.

Large translator

In 1920 it is established in France with an aim of becoming translator of literary works. Having gained the confidence of Parisian editors little by little (Payot, Stock, Plon, Dupont, Beech, Albin Michel, Rebirth of the Book, Gallimard), it translated into 20 years forty books, among which Gatsby splendid the of Scott Fitzgerald, of the books of Ambrose Bierce, Ezra Pound, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Edna Ferber, Willa Cather, like several books of the anglo-Argentinian author William Henry Hudson (1841-1922). It also translated works of Nicolas Gogol, Elie Ilf and Alexis Tolstoï, in collaboration with a Russian translator.

While playing a part in several literary reviews, with article devoteds to inter alia with his/her friend of youth James Joyce and with Samuel Beckett, Llona also published two French novels, devoted to the Prohibition of alcohol in the United States and excesses of the Ku Klux Klan. In duet with emigrated Russian Dimitri Novik it wrote also a biography of Pierre Large the.

In the small portion of its literary memories who was published, Llona remembers the French writers with whom it tied friendly relations, among which Pierre Benoît (it translated of him “the salted lake” into English under the title “Salt Lake”), Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, Francis Carco, Henri Poulaille, Henri Michaux, Jean Galtier-Boissière, Paul Morand, Maurice Martin of Gard and Roger Martin of Gard, without forgetting the important figures of NRF, André Gide, Jean Schlumberger, Valéry Larbaud, Andre Ruyters and Jacques River. Jules Supervielle dedicated in Llona its poem “Mornings of the world”. Llona also tied a relation between great friendship and the poet and Belgian draftsman Jean de Bosschère (1878-1953). It also published a cordial test devoted to the writer Louis Thomas.

In addition, it remained in liaison with the American writers of the “lost generation”, of which some lived in Paris, E. a. Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Natalie Clifford Barney, Paul Bowles, Thornton Wilder and Scott Fitzgerald. It met them in the apartment of Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), with the art gallery of Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) or with the English bookseller of Sylvia Beach (1887-1962), the first editor of Ulysses of James Joyce.

When in 1929 Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore of Sylvia Beach, published a book with twelve articles, gathered by Eugene Jolas (1894-1952), the editor of the review Transition , under the title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination off Work in Progress, in which the authors took the defense of Work in progress of Joyce (which will be published completely only ten years later under the title Finnigan' S wake ), Llona was one of the authors with an article with the title well “joycian”: “ I Whose Know What to Call It drank Its Mighty Unlike Prose ”.

Llona was also put to receive friends in the house which he lived with his first wife, Florence Nelson, in skirt of forest of Fontainebleau and later he quoted among his French hosts, Pierre Mac Orlan (to which he dedicated its first novel), André Gide, Jacques de Lacretelle, Julien Green, Jacques Rivière and Roger Martin of Gard.

In 1939, the war becoming threatening, Llona, being remarié, was turned over in addition to the Atlantic and settled from there in Lima. After the war it set out again for New York where it worked as translator for the United Nations for the food and agriculture (FAO), in English: Food and Organization Agriculture off the United Nations. Later it is established with San Francisco and died there in 1953 following cardiac problems.

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