Jean Pavans

His father and mother were Bernard Pavans de Ceccatty (1925–1984) and Ginette Fréah (1924–2015).

The writer René de Ceccatty is his younger brother.

Jean Pavans is a French writer and translator, born in Tunis on September 20, 1949.

His first books were published in the early 1980s by Les Éditions de la Différence.

His first play adapted from Henry James, Retour à Florence, was performed in 1985 at the Théâtre du Rond-Point, in Paris.

He then began his translations of Henry James, the main part of which being The Complete Tales, in four volumes, the first appearing in 1990, and the last one in 2009.

For various publishers, he translated other Anglo-Saxon classics, such as Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Harold Pinter, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.

Distinctions : Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres, 1999.

His French adaptation of The Aspern Papers was staged in 2002 by Jacques Lassalle and produced by the Comédie-Française.

Published in 2003, his translation of Harold Pinter's The Proust Screenplay was broadcast in 2012 by France Culture with the actors of the Comédie-Française.

His translation of Harold Pinter's Celebration was staged in 2005 by Roger Planchon at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris.

He wrote the libretto of La Bête dans la jungle, an opera by French composer Arnaud Petit, premiered in 2011 at the Forum du Blanc-Mesnil, with the orchestra Les Siècles conducted by François-Xavier Roth.

In 2015, he worked with film director Julien Landais on a script in English based on his scenic adaptation of Les Papiers d'Aspern.

The film, The Aspern Papers, was shot in Venice in July 2017, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.

An expanded version of La Bête dans la jungle premiered in April 2023 at the Oper Köln in a staging by Frederic Wake-Walker, with Emily Hindrichs and Miljenko Turk as May Bartram and John Marcher, and the Gürzenich-Orchester conducted by François-Xavier Roth.