Author: Antoine De Saint-Exupery
Translator: Seong-chang Pak
Publisher: Biryongso
Hardcover | 150 pages | 215*155mm
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean. |
About This Book
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only
a year before his Lockheed P-38 vanished over the Mediterranean during a
reconnaissance mission. More than a half century later, this fable of
love and loneliness has lost none of its power. The narrator is a downed
pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked
plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a
little, well, prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an
overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls.
"Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in
danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket."
And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination
in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.
The Little Prince describes his journey from planet to planet, each tiny
world populated by a single adult. It's a wonderfully inventive
sequence, which evokes not only the great fairy tales but also such
monuments of postmodern whimsy as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. And
despite his tone of gentle bemusement, Saint-Exupéry pulls off some fine
satiric touches, too. There's the king, for example, who commands the
Little Prince to function as a one-man (or one-boy) judiciary:
I have good reason to believe that there is an old rat living somewhere
on my planet. I hear him at night. You could judge that old rat. From
time to time you will condemn him to death. That way his life will
depend on your justice. But you'll pardon him each time for economy's
sake. There's only one rat.
The author pokes similar fun at a businessman, a geographer, and a
lamplighter, all of whom signify some futile aspect of adult existence.
Yet his tale is ultimately a tender one--a heartfelt exposition of
sadness and solitude, which never turns into Peter Pan-style treacle.
Such delicacy of tone can present real headaches for a translator, and
in her 1943 translation, Katherine Woods sometimes wandered off the
mark, giving the text a slightly wooden or didactic accent. Happily,
Richard Howard (who did a fine nip-and-tuck job on Stendhal's The
Charterhouse of Parma in 1999) has streamlined and simplified to
wonderful effect. The result is a new and improved version of an
indestructible classic, which also restores the original artwork to full
color. "Trying to be witty," we're told at one point, "leads to lying,
more or less." But Saint-Exupéry's drawings offer a handy rebuttal:
they're fresh, funny, and like the book itself, rigorously truthful.
--James Marcus
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