Travels with my Aunt.

London: The Bodley Head,, 1969. Inscribed to Greene's primary French translator First edition, first impression, inscribed by the author on the title page "For Marcelle with love from Graham". This is the first of Greene's novels for which the recipient, Marcelle Sibon, was not the French translator: she had decided to stop after struggling with May We Borrow Your Husband (1967), having translated all of Greene's previous novels from Brighton Rock (1947) onwards. Sibon is best-known for her translations of Greene's works, including The Power and the Glory, for which she won the Grand Prix Halperine-Kaminsky in 1948. She "decided to call it a day after translating May We Borrow Your Husband, in which the strange, contemporary language of the title story - the sort used in homosexual milieux - was totally alien to her" (Clottea, p. 88). At the request of Marie Biche, Greene's French literary agent, author Yvonne Cloetta (Greene's long-time lover) continued work on the translation. Green presented a copy of the book to her, inscribed "For Yvonne, who worked so hard getting the translation right and whose name should be on the front page" (ibid, p. 87). Georges Belmont, who translated Travels with my Aunt, remarked to Cloetta that Greene's books were "full of traps" (quoted ibid.), and particularly difficult to translate into French. Sibon also translated works by Stephen Spender, Vladimir Nabokov, and Kinglsey Amis, and was regularly recommended by Sylvia Beach, who introduced her to Katherine Anne Porter. Sibon became Porter's sole French translator and close friend. Porter praised her work, "I don't know a young American serious writer who doesn't hope to secure your interest as a translator" (5 July 1950), and wrote admiringly of her to others "it is amazing how clear and straight her work is, it reads back into English with not a shade of meaning lost" (Letter to Seymour Lawrence, 24 December 1962). Octavo. Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, top edge blue. With dust jacket. Slight lean to spine, a near-fine copy, square and bright, in the lightly soiled jacket, spine panel a little toned, unclipped, a few short closed tears and two tiny chips to head of spine, one spot of foxing, else bright and fresh. Miller 51a. Isabel Bayley (ed.), Letters of Katherine Anne Porter, 1990; Yvonne Cloetta, In Search of a Beginning, 2004.