LETTERS FROM MY MILL
by Alphonse Daudet, translated from French by Daffni Percival
When I came home from being evacuated during the war I found myself in the grammar school needing to learn French for School Certificate. I had picked up a bit while spending five months in a church hall complex in Southport courtesy of part of Bootle Boys Grammar which had been evacuated because their school was bombed, but my French was way below that of my contemporaries in my old school. Lettres de Mon Moulin was our prescribed reading and I fell in love with it while struggling through about three pages with a dictionary.
"One day I am going to know enough French to translate this", I promised myself. And many years later I did and this was the result.
You can buy the book from me either, if you are in North Wales on a Thursday, in the Country market in Dolgellau, or from me by post. You can see it on the right here. The price is £10 including postage.
Contact me by email merilang@google.com or by post or phone
at Bodyfuddau, Trawsfynydd, Gwynedd, LL41 4UW Phone 01766 540
Alphonse Daudet was a journalist in Paris in the 19th century. He got fed up with the city rat race and departed for Provence, where he lived in an old windmill. His fellow journalists all told him he'd be back but he wasn't. He wrote to them a description of his arrival at the mill and the paper published it. It was so popular that he needed to write more stories so went around his neighbours collecting material for stories. Hence a whole series of tales collected in Lettres de Mon Moulin, my translation of which are available here. The picture on the cover is my watercolour of the actual mill with the addition of the rabbits.
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