Gilbert, Stuart

Stuart Gilbert was born October 25, 1883, at Chipping Ongar, Essex, to Arthur Stronge Gilbert, a retired army officer, and his wife Melvina Kundiher Singh. After graduation from Cheltenham and Hertford College, Oxford, Gilbert joined the Indian Civil Service in 1907. Following military service in the First World War he served as a judge on the Court of Assizes in Burma, retiring in 1924.

With a lifelong interest in literature and in French culture, Gilbert moved to Paris in 1925 and remained there with his French-born wife Moune (born Marie Agnès Mathilde Douin) the remainder of his life, save for an exile in Wales during the Second World War.

Soon after his arrival in Paris Gilbert met James Joyce and advised him on the translation of Ulysses into French. From the 1920s until Joyce's death in 1941 Stuart Gilbert worked closely with the Irish novelist, and in his James Joyce's Ulysses helped explicate and popularize that landmark work. In 1957 the first volume of Joyce's letters, edited by Stuart Gilbert, was published.

In addition to his activities as a literary scholar and student of James Joyce, Gilbert Stuart had a major career as a literary translator, rendering into English the works of Saint-Exupéry, Malraux, Camus, Sartre, Simenon, Cocteau, and other contemporary French authors.

In the last decade of his long life Stuart Gilbert translated numerous texts for the art book publisher Albert Skira of Geneva. Gilbert died in his apartment at 7 rue Jean du Bellay on January 5, 1969.