QUENEAU Raymond. - Lot 175

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Lot n° 175
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10000 - 12000 EUR
QUENEAU Raymond. - Lot 175
QUENEAU Raymond. AUTOGRAPHIC MANUSCRIPT and CORRECTED TAPScript, The Drunkard in the Bush, 1952-1953; 188 pages small in-4 on 7 school notebooks, and 119 pages in-4 typescript. Working manuscript of the translation of one of the very first great African novels. Under the title L'Ivrogne dans la brousse (The Drunkard in the Bush), Raymond Queneau translated from English the novel by Nigerian Amos TUTUOLA (1920-1997), The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town; the translation was published by Gallimard, in the collection "Du Monde Entier", in 1953. The novel had been published in London in 1952; Queneau, who discovered it through his friend Jean Rosenthal, immediately decided to translate it. Amos Tutuola was completely unknown at the time, so some thought it was a hoax by Queneau. It was not until 1988 that other Tutuola titles were translated into French. Queneau wrote an introductory note which we quote from the manuscript: "The author of this story, Amos Tutuola, is currently a planter in Lagos (British Nigeria). He is a Yoruba. I have tried my best to convey the author's candid and clever tone. I don't know if I succeeded. I have also tried to resist the temptation to rationalize the story, whose "inconsistencies" and "contradictions" sometimes creep into the very structure of the sentences... The manuscript is written on the front of seven school notebooks, the first one with a blue cover (27 x 21.7 cm) and small squares with 20 pages, the six others with large squares (22 x 17 cm) with 24 pages each except the last one (18 pages), with a blue cover (except notebook n° 4 with a yellow cover). Queneau has numbered the quires from 1 to 7 and noted in the upper right-hand corner the name of the author "Amos Tutuola"; all the pages are numbered from 1 to 188; the last page bears the word "End" as well as this annotation: "1st version - 24.10.52 / 2nd version - 8.11.52". At the end of the first booklet, one page bears the literal translation of the original title: "The Drunkard as Palm Wine Drinker and his Dead Palm Wine Tapper in the City of the Dead". The manuscript is extensively crossed out and corrected: there are more than a thousand corrections, including crossed-out sentences and numerous modifications, repetitions and additions. The signed autograph manuscript of the introductory note (1 p. in-4) presents variants with the text printed at the head of the volume. The typescript has 119 pages in-4 (27 x 21 cm), numbered from 2 to 120, on fine machine paper. It contains almost a thousand autograph corrections by Queneau, mainly in black ink (some in pencil). It was used for printing and bears a few typographical annotations. As can be seen from this manuscript and typescript set, all abundantly corrected and revised, this novel caused Que - neau a great deal of trouble, and the author's unprecedented use of the English language (especially the conjunctions but and or) gave him a hard time. "I had been drinking palm wine since I was ten years old. I had nothing else to do in life but drink palm wine. This is how the narrator, who calls himself "Father-of-the-Gods-Who-Can-Do-All-Things-In-The-World", introduces himself. The 560,000 palm trees on his plantation provided him with enough palm wine to drink more than two hundred calabashes a day. But one day his "malafoutier", the man who prepared his palm wine, fell from the top of a tree and killed himself. It is impossible to find a malafoutier as expert as the deceased, and the narrator sets out to find him, even in the City of the Dead. This fascinating quest takes him from the bush to the World of Foreign and Terrible Beings, on the path of Yoruba myths and legends.
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