If you wrote a late Modernist classic and wanted someone to translate it into French, you could have done worse than getting Georges Belmont on the case.
Belmont knew everyone. In the period before the war, he associated with expatriate Modernists like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett, as well as local giants such as Andre Gide. During that time of his life, he became especially close to Henry Miller, whose erotic classic Tropic of Capricorn he was later to translate.
The war broke his career in half, though he worked hard to glue the pieces back together. During wartime, he chose to work for the collaborationist Vichy regime, and was forced later to deny and obfuscate about this period of his life.
