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Michel Cresset will remain among us as one of the best Faulknerians of his generation. Of the small group of scholars Joseph Blotner once called "the French school of Faulkner," he was the youngest, the first to defend his dissertation, the first to translate or retranslate the novels for the Pléiade series at Gallimard (completing the first volume in 1977, all by himself-a model for the series). He was also the first to die, bearing his illness with admirable courage, even serenity.
The spiritual son of the great translator and ambassador of American fiction in France, Maurice Edgar Coindreau, Michel became in his own right an elegant translator of other American fiction writers, as curious and enthusiastic in his discoveries as his mentor (Shelby Foote, Fred Chappell, Heather Ross Miller, Reynolds Price, and mostly Eudora Welty: we owe him the volume of two novellas and the short stories, and the translation of...