Just as his working technique, Kristian Wachinger’s Vienna project is divided into three parts. His integral work on the text requires three perspectives: The central focus of his editorial work is on the new translation of Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris, which Simon Werle includes after his famous translation of the Fleurs du Mal. Wachinger himself translated Georges Simenon’s Le Coup de vague, as well as poetry by Victor Hugo. As for editorial research, he looks into locations important for Elias Canetti, where Vienna played an essential role.

Kristian Wachinger, born in 1956, had just learned to read with the look-and-say method, when a book fell into his hands. The title of which confronted him with a whole new challenge: Maigret et l’inspecteur malgracieux. A friend of the family helped him to decipher and pronounce the words, further encouraging him to learn French, after training for the book trade, and to travel in France. Wachinger studied German and French Literature in Munich, Nantes and Hamburg from 1977 to 1984, first translations of Casanova, Mérimée and a Paris anthology soon followed. From 1984 to 2015, he was the editor for literary classics at the Hanser publishing house, alongside a teaching assignment at the University of Regensburg. Since 2016, he is an independent translator from the French, a publisher (specialised on posthumous editions) and an editor (with a focus on translations of literary classics and non-fiction). Since 2017, he is on the board of trustees for the Canetti Foundation in Zurich. Most recently, he translated Laurent Binet’s semiotician crime story, the essays on E. A. Poe by Charles Baudelaire and three novels by Georges Simenon.