A career recorded through translations
The available sources do not securely establish Sallagar’s birth and death dates, family or education. His published translations provide the clearest record of his work. Vampire appeared from the John Day Company in New York in 1934; Bobbs-Merrill published The Voyage of Forgotten Men in 1937.
The second book, a translation of Thiess’s Tsushima, recounts the Russian fleet’s voyage toward defeat by Japan in 1905. A contemporary New Yorker notice explicitly credits Sallagar as translator. Alongside Vampire, it shows him working with both fantastic fiction and a substantial historical narrative of naval war.
The English version of Vampire
The held title page names Hanns Heinz Ewers as author and Sallagar as translator. Ewers’s German novel Vampir had appeared in 1921. It is the third of his novels about Frank Braun, whose travels during the First World War become entangled with an increasing dependence on blood.
The opening places Braun at Antofagasta as news arrives of the assassination at Sarajevo. He regards travel as a cure for an illness he associates with Europe, yet his apparent recovery leaves something unresolved. Later, the narrative follows his horror at discovering blood on his own face and clothes. In Sallagar’s English, expansive descriptions of sea and landscape give way to broken sentences and urgent questions as Braun’s confidence collapses.
These changes of pace are a feature of the English text readers encounter here. The surviving publication credits identify Sallagar’s role, but do not establish how closely his version follows every part of the German original.
