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Henry Murger is best known for writing the book and play that Giacomo Puccini used as the basis of his delicious opera La Bohème, later the source of Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent. Murger actually wrote twenty books, many of them also engaging fiction about bohemian characters in mid-nineteenth century Paris. Until now, almost none of Murger’s other work has been translated into English.

“Long known to opera buffs as the author who inspired Puccini’s La Bohème, Henry Murger was actually a more complex, acerbic, and entertaining writer than we might realize. Now, with Zack Rogow’s carefully chosen selection of Murger’s sketches of bohemian life, translated here for the first time, English readers can enjoy the qualities that made Murger both one of the most renowned writers of his day and a master chronicler of the heartbreaks and follies of nineteenth-century Paris.”
Mark Polizzotti, translator of Flaubert, Modiano, and Duras, and author of Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto

“A lively and engaging rendering and adaptation of Murger’s beguiling text. It deserves a broad readership.”
Jerrold Seigel, NYU Professor Emeritus and author of Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930.

In this collection, the full tile of which is THE WATER DRINKERS AND OTHER SKETCHES OF PARIS IN THE ROMANTIC ERA, Zack Rogow has translated and adapted Murger’s best fiction in one volume. The title piece is The Water Drinkers, Murger’s satirical look at a real-life group of artists and writers who strongly rejected commercialism. They were “Water Drinkers” because they shunned the luxury of wine. Set in the colorful, unheated garrets so familiar to fans of La Bohème; in the galleries of the Louvre where young artists copied from the old masters; and in Paris’ fashionable quartiers, The Water Drinkers introduces us to a fascinating array of characters whose dilemmas resonate deeply with contemporary issues. Written with Murger’s sharp irony, The Water Drinkers is a little-known classic that has remained in print in France since its publication in 1854.

This collection also includes another great example of Murger’s sharp wit, The Funeral Supper, a send-up of the Romantic movement’s obsession with melancholy, suicide, and spleen. That nineteenth-century mania for the dark side foreshadowed the punk and goth movements, and Murger’s take on it still feels current today.

The third piece in this book is Murger’s account of an extreme cold spell in Paris that jarred the lives both of married couples and extramarital lovers, another terrific example of Murger’s wry humor.

Henry Murger (1822–1861) was one of the leading writers of the Romantic movement. His most famous book is Scenes of Bohemian Life, the source of Puccini’s La Bohème and Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent. A man-about-town in Paris, Murger died a tragic death at age thirty-eight, hastened by a disease called purpura, which turns the skin a purplish hue. A statue of Murger stands to this day in the Jardin du Luxembourg. His reputation in English has been delayed by the lack of translations, and this volume aims to fill that gap.

Zack Rogow (translation and adaptation) was the co-winner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award for Earthlight by André Breton (Black Widow Press), and he also translated Breton’s Arcanum 17 (Green Integer). Rogow won the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for his translation of George Sand’s novel, Horace (Mercury House). His English version of Colette’s novel Green Wheat (Sarabande Books) was shortlisted for the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award and for the Northern California Book Award in Translation. Rogow’s cotranslation of Shipwrecked on a Traffic Island and Other Previously Untranslated Gems by Colette was published by State University of New York Press. He edited two volumes of Two Lines: World Writing in Translation. www.zackrogow.com

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