Georges Eekhoud, Escal-Vigor (1899): A New Translation

Abstract

Georges Eekhoud’s Escal-Vigor, first serialised in 1898 in the Mercure de France as ‘Le Comte de la Digue’ and published in full the following year, is a homoerotic and decadent novel that has only been translated into English once in the century since its publication.[i] The fairy-tale-like story follows Henry de Kehlmark, a young aristocrat who returns to his ancestral home of Escal-Vigor on the mythical island of Smaragdis, somewhere off the coast of the Low Countries. There he falls in love with the shepherd Guidon Govaertz, provoking the wrath of the villagers: in the novel’s dénouement, Guidon is murdered by a mob of local women, and Kehlmark dies of a broken heart alongside his beloved.

My thanks to friends and colleagues Ms Marie Hervieu (professeur agrégé) and Ms Veronica Szafranski, as well as the anonymous reviewer and the editors for their comments and feedback on this translation.

[i] Michael Rosenfeld, ‘Escal Vigor – A Novel from the French of George Eekhoud. Comment traduire l’innomable’, in Traduire la littérature belge francophone. Itinéraires des œuvres et des personnes, ed. by Béatrice Costa and Catherine Grevet (Éditions UMONS, 2016), pp. 25–40. Rosenfeld notes that two English editions of Escal-Vigor have been published, although both are essentially identical. The first appeared in 1909, published by Charles Carrington as Escal Vigor – A Novel from the French of George Eekhoud (Brussels: The Gutemberg Press); the full text is available online here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Escal_Vigor [last accessed 17/08/2025]. The second edition, published in the United States in the 1930s as A Strange Love. A Novel of Abnormal Passion (New York: Panurge Press, 1930), does not differ significantly in translation.