Dear readers of my blog,

while the new school year is relentlessly heading for the autumn recess of two weeks, well-deserved by any of the concerned, allow me to recount just one or two anecdotes that made my life as a translator, biographer, and editor turn around four stars of the literary universe mentioned in chronological order of their birth only in the title of this post:

First it was Victor Hugo (1802-1885), discovered for myself in 1983 when I took a single book written in French on my way out from Unna, Westphalia, to Dundee, Scotland, Notre-Dame de Paris – 1482, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, that is.

Second there was Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) whose Complete Works I acquired in Dundee in December 1983, postponing rather than waiting to start my reading until the back cover had already faded in spring 1989. On the surface, the anecdotal part of that acquisition lies in the fact that I only started perusing Wilde after I had decided to devote the next three or four years of my life to a doctoral dissertation on James Joyce entitled “James Joyce's Own Image”.

Before I forget about it altogether, let me pay tribute to a student of mine whose incisive definition of the literary genre of the mostly orally told anecdote motivated me to go back in time and unearth as well as unravel some of those stories that allow me to spice a sometimes very stressful existence as a commuting teacher-cum-parent-cum-writer.