Littérature Étrangère

En 1857, un poète français de trente-six ans donne à lire en France un conteur américain mort à Baltimore en 1849, presque inconnu de ce côté de l'Atlantique.

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Le poète est Baudelaire, le conteur Edgar Poe, et la traduction qu'il signe pour les Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires fera date. Une œuvre étrangère n'entre pas dans une langue toute seule : il lui faut une traduction puis une édition. Russes, américains, hispanophones, tous, une fois traduits, enrichissent notre vision de la littérature. C'est cette date-là, celle de l'édition originale française, que recense cette collection. On y cherche le moment où un texte venu d'ailleurs devient disponible en français pour la première fois, en grand papier comme sur papier courant, broché ou dans de grandes reliures signées. Estimation gratuite sur demande.

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The original French edition of a foreign work is dated by its publication by the French publisher, not by that of the original in the source language. The distinction is not a nicety: they are two different pieces. A different title, a different language, a different publisher, but the same criteria of value.

The case of Poe immediately demonstrates this. Our Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires (Extraordinary New Stories) bears the imprint of Michel Lévy Frères, Paris, 1857, in Baudelaire's translation, whose preface opens the volume. A volume that has no equivalent in English since Baudelaire gathers here stories composed by Poe over the years. To the general interest of the book is added the extreme literary quality of the translation by the author of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), making Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires a book sought after by bibliophiles. Baudelaire did not have large paper copies printed: the deluxe copy, here, does not exist, which shifts the rarity towards the quality of the copy itself.

Because not everyone has the opportunity to discover works in their original language, translation allows the public access to previously unknown worlds. A Frenchman then travels from the cataracts of the Amazon to the confines of Russia, as is the case in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, which appeared in French from Plon-Nourrit in 1887, in two octavo volumes. The translation is by Victor Derély, who had already provided Crime and Punishment in 1884 and The Possessed in 1886, and the preface is by Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, at a time when his essay on Le Roman russe (The Russian Novel) had just appeared. This shows that the edition arrived within a specific trend: that by which France discovered these new Russian authors, after pioneers like Gogol. The copy is bound in anthracite half-morocco signed P.-L. Martin, with covers and spine preserved, and a gilt top edge.

The large paper copy, when it exists, separates the regular copy from the deluxe copy. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World illustrates this. The English original, Brave New World, was published in London by Chatto & Windus in 1932; the original French edition of Jules Castier's translation followed from Plon in 1933, an octavo of 331 pages. Our copy is one of 59 deluxe copies numbered on pure rag paper, in contemporary black morocco, with a ribbed spine, untrimmed. Fifty-nine deluxe copies out of the entire print run: it is this figure, and not merely the novel's notoriety, that determines the piece's value.
Kerouac's On the Road takes the same logic to its extreme. The original French edition was published by Gallimard in 1960, in the "Du monde entier" collection, an octavo of 380 pages, in the translation by Jacques Houbard. Our copy is one of 42 on Lafuma-Navarre pure rag vellum, the only large paper of the print run. The binding is signed by Hugo Liesen and dated 2020: full black sharkskin mosaiced with white leather strips, under a slipcase and bordered chemise.
Four editions, four translators, one rule: the value lies in the author's notoriety, the original edition and, where applicable, the large paper and signed binding. Free estimate upon request.