SAINT-EXUPÉRY Antoine de (1900-1944).

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SAINT-EXUPÉRY Antoine de (1900-1944).
AUTOGRAPHIC MANUSCRIT, [Preface to Le Vent se lève, 1939); 5 leaves in-4 (27 x 21 cm), mounted on tabs on sheets of Japanese paper, followed by a typed transcription, in an in-4 volume, caramel morocco parlour binding, with boards and spine decorated with celestial decoration, clouds with brown oeser and sun rays gilt, smooth spine decorated with gilt title in Chinese style. First draft and working manuscript of the preface to the book The Wind is Rising by American aviatrix Anne Morrow LINDBERGH. Anne Morrow LINDBERGH (1906-2001), wife of Charles Lindbergh, herself an aviator, had participated with him in a series of raids from which she drew a breathtaking account, Listen! The Wind, published in 1938. The following year, Saint Exupéry agreed to preface the French translation of this book given by Henri Delgove under the title Le Vent se lève (The Wind is Rising), although he knew neither the work nor the young woman. This beautiful preface was inserted in the posthumous collection Un sens à la vie (1956). The manuscript, in blue-black ink, on the front of the pages, in a cursive handwriting, is overloaded with erasures and corrections (some small traces of rust). Saint-Exupéry takes advantage of this preface to express his conception of a literary work, wondering about the relationship between reality and the writing of reality, making the writer a passer between words and things... "I remembered, on the occasion of this book, the reflections of a friend: "I have just read, he had told me, the admirable report of an American journalist. This journalist had the good taste to write down, without commenting on them or romanticizing them, war anecdotes collected from submarine commanders. Often he even took refuge behind the nakedness of the texts and limited himself to reproducing the dry notes of the logbooks. How right he was to hide behind this material and to let the writer sleep, because from these dry testimonies, from these raw documents, emerges an extraordinary poetry and pathos... Why are men so stupid that they always want to embellish reality, when it is so beautiful by itself? If one day these sailors themselves write, perhaps they will labour over bad novels or bad poems, neglecting the simple treasures they had in their possession..." [...] The real book is like a net whose words compose the meshes. It does not matter what the meshes of the net are. What matters is the living prey that the fisherman has brought up from the bottom of the sea, these flashes of quicksilver that we see gleaming between the meshes. What has Anne Lindbergh brought back from her inner world? What does this book taste like? [...] Anne Lindbergh has rendered, with a striking truth, this little professional tear. And she has certainly not been mistaken about the pathos of the plane. It does not lie in the golden clouds of the evening. The golden clouds are junk. But it can reside in the use of the screwdriver [...] But the help of the gods is also necessary: Anne Lindbergh finds Fatality. [...] She writes at a sufficiently high level so that her struggle against time takes on the meaning of a struggle against death"... Bound after the manuscript: - a modern typing of the final text of the preface. - a telegram from Saint-Exupéry to the translator Henri Delgove: "Enthused by reading Lindberg's placards. Willing to give importance to the place of short preface, if handing over text fifteen July return airplane New York you not delay too much" (Saint-Pierre-des-Corps July 10, 1939). - an article of Delgove, "Saint-Ex intimate: the history of a preface" (extract of La Vie mancelle, December 1971).
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