The well-knownCanadian pioneer novelist Frederick Philip Grove had a prolific careeras the translator Felix Paul Greve before he disappeared from theGerman scene with a staged suicide and started a new life in Kentuckyand Canada where he remained until his death in 1948.[1]Greve'sfinal major translation project in 1909 was a four volume editionof Swift's prose works, his earliest attempt had been directed atDante's Vita Nuova in 1898 when he was nineteen years old.

Grovealways claimed to be of Anglo-Swedish descent, partly due to anti-Germansentiments during World War I, partly because he had reason to conceala fairly shady past. He explained his proficiency in several languageswith a cosmopolitan upbringing, and excused the strange fact thathe was not fluent in his alleged mother-tongue with the same argument.He consistently added twenty years to his actual arrival in Canada,and somewhat more haphazardly between six and eight years to hisage, but adhered to his birthday on February, 14th throughout.[2]

The spectaculardiscovery who Grove had been was not made until 1971 when D. O. Spettiguelinked him Gide's major German translator who often signed his prefaceswith the initials FPG -- a habit Grove also practiced. Gide, thoughunnamed, looms large in Grove's second and less fictionalized autobiographicalaccount In Search of Myself (1947). By an extraordinary coincidenceit was confirmed from an unexpected direction in the mid-eightiesthat Greve had not perished in 1909, but started a new life in NorthAmerica instead: his wife of ten years had followed him there fromberlin within a year.[3]Afterhe abandoned her in Kentucky, she went to New York, married a blacksheep of the illustrious Freytag-Loringhoven family, and became quitefamous there in her own right for her extravagant art and life-styleas the titled, but penniless Baroness Elsa. Her papers in the Universityof Maryland throw a revealing light on Greve's life up to their separationand beyond.[4]Bothhave squared retrospective accounts of their troubled liaison: sheartfully combined some of Greve's neo-romantic poetry in settinghim a negative monument in her powerful, expressionist poems,[5]Grovepainted a very unflattering picture of her as Clara Vogel in hisfirst Canadian novel Settlers of the Marsh (1925). Apart fromallusions like this, the best literary proof that Grove was Greveremains the conspicuous fact that one of six German poems Grove jotteddown possibly in the late twenties had been published by Greve twentyyears earlier.[6]

Grove'spapers came into the possession of the University of Manitoba Archivesin the early sixties. Spettigue's research files documenting hisdiscovery were acquired in 1986, and in 1992, the remnants of hislibrary were donated by Grove's son Leonard. These roughly 500 titleswere made accessible within the following year, and many of the textsGrove had translated in his early years are represented, includingsome Dante and a complete twelve volume edition of Swift's proseworks. Only a few of the texts pointing back to Greve's translationendeavours were annotated by their owner, and those betraying Grove'sre-readings and reactions in his Canadian years are indicative ofa revealing, longstanding attachment.

DesmondPacey, in the introduction to his masterly edition of Grove's letterscomments on the author's impressive literary horizon as follows (Letters,p.xxi):

"As a correspondent, Grove was at his most attractive in his letters to ... literary friends...and at his most unattractive in his letters to publishers. He writes to them of books and writers knowledgeably, modestly, wittily, and pungently. Any lingering notion of Grove as an untutored peasant will quickly be dispelled by the se ... letters, which prove beyond any doubt that Grove was a highly educated man, steeped in the traditions of classical and European literature. He can write knowledgeably on Sappho, Sophocles, Simonides, Homer and Horace, Dante, Milton and Shakespeare, Swift, Goethe, and the English Romantics, and of most of the leading nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers of Germany, France, Italy, England, and America."

     And in relation to Grove's widespread interest in the arts and sciences, he states: "Grove was by far the most erudite Canadian novelist yet to appear."

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Notes 1-6