Alexander Louis Teixeira de Mattos (9 April 1865 – 5 December 1921), known as Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, was a Dutch-English journalist, literary critic and publisher, who gained his greatest fame as a translator.
Early life
The Teixeira de Mattos Sampaio e Mendes family was of Portuguese Jewish origin, having been driven out of Portugal to the Netherlands by Holy Office persecution. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos was born as a Dutch Protestant to an English mother and a Dutch father. In 1874, when he was nine years old, he and his family moved from Amsterdam to England. There, he studied under Monsignor Thomas John Capel and converted to Roman Catholicism. He then studied at the Kensington Catholic Public School and at the Jesuit school Beaumont College. In addition to the later works of Maeterlinck, his translations include works by Émile Zola, Alexis de Tocqueville, Maurice Leblanc, Gaston Leroux, François-René de Chateaubriand, Paul Kruger, Carl Ewald, Georgette Leblanc, Stijn Streuvels, and Louis Couperus. He considered his greatest achievement to be his complete translation of Jean-Henri Fabre's natural history.
In the 1890s, Teixeira was the leading translator for the Lutetian Society, a group whose mission was "to issue, to its members, translations of such representative master-pieces of fiction by Continental authors as are unprocurable in English in an unmutilated rendering". He oversaw the Society's publication of unexpurgated translations of six banned novels by Émile Zola in 1894–5, contributing his own translation of the third volume in the series, La curée.
During World War I, Teixeira was head of the Intelligence Section, as well as a member of the Advisory Board, of the War Trade Intelligence Department. Midway through the war, Teixeira became a British subject.
Personal life
On 20 October 1900, he married Lily Wilde (née Sophie Lily Lees, 1859–1922), the widow of Oscar Wilde's older brother Willie Wilde, and thus became the stepfather of Dolly Wilde, then age 5.
Teixeira was known to his acquaintances as a dandy and a fastidious worker, keeping strictly to set hours, and was linked to the Symbolist movement thanks to his friendship and travels with Arthur Symons. He was politically liberal and a devout Catholic.
Due to ill health, Teixeira traveled on a rest cure in 1920 at Crowborough and the Isle of Wight, returning to his home in Chelsea, London in spring 1921. He worked as usual through the autumn and traveled to Cornwall for the winter. On 5 December 1921, in St Ives, Cornwall The high quality and readability of Teixera's work was such that many of his translations are still in print today. For example, though his translation of La curée is over a century old, its accuracy and style have given it a status still unrivaled by more modern versions.
| 1910
|-
| Maurice Maeterlinck
| Death
| 1911
|-
| Maurice Maeterlinck
| Hours of Gladness
| 1912
|-
| Maurice Maeterlinck
| Our Eternity
| 1913
|-
| Maurice Maeterlinck
| Our Friend the Dog
| 1913
|-
| Maurice Maeterlinck
| The Unknown Guest
| 1914
|-
| Maurice Maeterlinck
| Life and letters
| 1914
|-
| Maurice Maeterlinck
| The Wrack of the Storm
| 1916
|-
| Maurice Maeterlinck
| The Light Beyond
| 1917
|-
| Maurice Maeterlinck
| The Burgomaster of Stilemonde
| 1918
|-
| Maurice Maeterlinck
| The Betrothal or the Blue Bird Chooses
| 1918
|-
| Maurice Maeterlinck
| The Miracle of Saint Anthony
| 1918
|-
| Maurice Maeterlinck
| Mountain Paths
| 1919
|-
| G. Hermine Marius
| Dutch painting in the nineteenth century
| 1908
|-
| Eugénie de Coucy Oudinot
| Memoirs of Marshal Oudinot, duc de Reggio
| 1896
|-
| Xavier Paoli
| My royal clients
| 1911
|-
| Peter Rosegger
| The forest farm: tales of the Austrian Tyrol
| 1912
|-
| Stijn Streuvels
| The Path of Life
| 1915
|-
| Alexis de Tocqueville
| The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville
| 1896
|-
| August Weissl
| The Mystery of the Green Car
| 1913
|-
| Émile Zola
| The heirs of Rabourdin
| 1894
|-
| Émile Zola
| La curée
| 1895
|}
References
Further reading
- , Louis Couperus in den vreemde (Leiden, 2008). Includes ten letters by Teixeira to the Dutch writer Louis Couperus.