The Newberry Library has received a major grant from The National Endowment for the Humanities for a Collaborative Research project titled “Translating a ‘French Robinson Crusoe’ of the Americas: The Memoir of Dumont de Montigny.” The grant will support preparation of a an English translation of the Newberry’s Dumont manuscript (Ayer ms 257). This has been designated an NEH “We the People” project.
Ayer ms 257 is an illustrated manuscript containing the mid-eighteenth century memoir of a colonial adventurer, Jean François Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, a French soldier who settled in Louisiana during the first half of the eighteenth century. In a first-person narrative, Dumont recounts his travels over a 32-year period, in Quebec, Louisiana, and Brittany. With its first-hand reports of colonial events, ethnographic observations, and remarkable hand-drawn maps, Dumont’s memoir stands out as a seminal work of French colonial Louisiana. The English translation, to be published by Louisiana State University Press, will make it available to anglophone readers for the first time, complete and in its original form, in an annotated volume. The translation will be based on a French edition of the memoir that is also currently in preparation, with support from an NEH Scholarly Editions grant.
The translator is Gordon M. Sayre (English, University of Oregon), and the editors are Carla Zecher (Center for Renaissance Studies, The Newberry Library), and Shannon S. Dawdy (Anthropology, The University of Chicago).