About this project

Gabriel Charmes (1850–1886) was a French journalist and writer on foreign affairs who travelled through Egypt, Syria, and Palestine beginning in 1880. His Voyage en Palestine: impressions et souvenirs first appeared in the Revue des deux Mondes and was published as a book in 1884. Charmes died of tuberculosis at thirty-five.

This site is my personal English translation of a copy of the book bought at a market in the south of France. The translation is my own. Claude offers editing advice, puts together the site, and researches the historical context behind the people, places, and events Charmes describes. Each page is photographed, the original French transcribed, and the English reviewed against it — the French sits beside the English so the translation can always be checked against the source.

The translation is a work in progress and the rendering of a 35-year-old journalist's 1880s prose is inevitably interpretive. Corrections and second readings are welcome.

How it's built

A small Node pipeline turns page photos into structured entries; the reading interface is a static Astro site. See the project README for the full workflow.