The Little Prince
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Book Summary Information
Illustrator: Antoine de Saint-Exup?ryTranslator: Richard Howard
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2000-05-15
ISBN: 0156012197
Number of pages: 96
Reading Level: Ages 9-12
Publisher: Mariner Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780156012195
- Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
- Notes:
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Book Reviews of The Little Prince
Book Review: don't let the language bother you.
Summary: 5 Stars
This book was one of the first books I've read by my own will, and the language i read it in was neither French nor English.
I wanted to read it again as an adult, and thought an English translation would do better justice.
So I picked up Richard Howard's translation and honestly, I liked it.
Woods and Wakeman's translations have merits of their own and I can see why people are not satisfied with Howard's translation. However, I think a translation is meant to be read as a translation.
It's difficult to tell a story written by another person and perfectly carry the same spirit even in the same language as the author.
Translating it into another language, culture and a whole new century must be even more difficult.
Considering the fact that this is only a translation of an original work, I think Howard did pretty good.
the content is beautiful regardless of the shortcomings of the process of the language you read in.
I hope those little linguistic flaws won't distract you from seeing the charm of this story.
Summary of The Little Prince
Few stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as The Little Prince. Richard Howard's new translation of the beloved classic-published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Antoine de Saint-Exup??ry's birth-beautifully reflects Saint-Exup??ry's unique and gifted style. Howard, an acclaimed poet and one of the preeminent translators of our time, has excelled in bringing the English text as close as possible to the French, in language, style, and most important, spirit. The artwork in this new edition has been restored to match in detail and in color Saint-Exup??ry's original artwork. By combining the new translation with restored original art, Harcourt is proud to introduce the definitive English-language edition ofAntoine de Saint-Exup?ry 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-Exup?ry 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-Exup?ry's drawings offer a handy rebuttal: they're fresh, funny, and like the book itself, rigorously truthful. --James Marcus
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