The Little Prince - Softcover

De Saint-Exupery, Antoine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330268325 ISBN 13: 9780330268325

Publisher: Piccolo, 1982

Synopsis

This wonderful book includes not only the beloved and deep story of The Little Prince, but Antoine de Saint-Exupery's best quotes and the prayer. Enjoy reading! In one of his letters Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote once: “In eternity I will be asked how I’ve used my talent, what I’ve done for human beings...” If you have read this book, perhaps that means the Little Prince has tamed you, too, that he’s become the child living in your heart, too, who helps you to repent, to purify yourself again and again. Perhaps you have revealed, too, that the spiritual ties are the strongest, that sometimes it is simply enough to take care of a flower to be happy... In the novel of “The Little Prince”, in this cozy treasury of universal and spiritual values, we find the real beauty and truth, so simple and concealed at the same time. And we realize deep in our soul what this child’s mission was... We see a child who could make water flow in the desert, who loved and devoted himself to all with his entire soul, who understood the language of heart and who knew the spiritual things. Saint-Exupery carried his Little Prince with him through all his life, never let him alone at any crossroads of life and lived as the Little Prince did, being ready to give his life for a friend, never placing body higher than soul, loving his homeland, remaining child in soul and dreaming, falling and flying... “The Captain of Birds” was free-minded, indeed. And he flew for the last time, made a slit into the white clouds by his airplane and hovered to the sparkling stars, to the promising unknown... I don’t think Saint-Ex will be asked many questions in eternity: it is sufficient to see all the hearts he poured with warmness and reminded the art of loving...

About this title

Review

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

Book Description

First published in 1943
Previous hardcover edition 2000
0-15-202398-4

About this edition

• Publisher: Piccolo
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0330268325
• ISBN 13: 9780330268325
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 89