Robert boudry editor (1 Ergebnisse)
Weitere Bilder[MALAGASY LITERATURE - SIGNED COPY BY AFRICA'S FIRST MODERN POET] Presque-songes: poëmes hova traduits par l'auteur Présentation de Robert Boudry [Almost Dreams: Hova poems translated by the author. Introduction by Robert Boudry].?
Rabearivelo, Jean-Joseph; Robert Boudry, editor; and Urbain Faurec, illustrator
- Softcover
- Erstausgabe
- Signiert
Anbieter: Penka Rare Books and Archives, ILAB, Berlin, DeutschlandPenka Rare Books and Archives, ILAB
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In den WarenkorbTananarive (Antanarivo), Madagascar: Henri Vidalie, 1934. Large quarto (33 × 25.5 cm). Original blind paper-covered wrappers with printed title label affixed to upper left corner; [39] leaves, mostly printed to recto and verso on thick Helios paper; two leaves of full-page etchings under protective calque by Faurec. Numbered and… signed in ink by the author below colophon. Minor wear and foxing to wrappers; overall very good. First edition, published in an extremely small print run, of one of the best-known works by Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (1901-1937), widely considered to be the first modern poet in Africa and named the national poet of independent Madagascar in 1960. Born Joseph-Casimir, Rabearivelo descended from impoverished Imerina nobility and grew up among the first Malagasy generation under French colonial rule. Although sent to prestigious schools, he was soon expelled and took up unskilled labor in various trades, while developing a strong interest in both traditional Malagasy oral poetry (known as "hainteny") and classical French literature. Although prevented by the colonial authorities from traveling to France throughout his lifetime, Rabearivelo corresponded with major writers of his time, including André Gide, Paul Valéry, and Paul Claudel. The travel ban also made it impossible for him to establish himself as a professional writer with a larger readership than the largely illiterate local populace and a small circle of French colonial bureaucrats on the island. Rabearivelo was also prevented from publishing much of his work in his native Madagascar: "Barriers to publication functioned as a covert form of censorship for certain kinds of text in colonial Madagascar. For example, none of Rabearivelo's Malagasy-language works or his more critical French-language works were published in his lifetime" (Moradewun A. Adejunmobi, "Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo" in Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, Routledge, 1998, p. 404) In 1924, Rabearivelo took a job as proofreader at the Imprimerie d'Imerina, which he would hold until his death. He nevertheless devoted large sums of money to importing books and created the largest personal library on the island. In the early 1920s, Rabearivelo befriended Camo, the editor of journal "Latitude Sud" and postal magistrate on the island, who was himself a minor poet and who exposed Rabearivelo to symbolist and post-symbolist poetry. His writing would eventually evolve toward a surrealist-inflected vers libre, as Rabearivelo continued to grapple with the uneasy dual influence of French literature and the Malagasy oral tradition. In the end, "he synthesized Europe's prevailing urban surrealism with his own comparatively bucolic surroundings. In Rabearivelo, we are offered the best aspects of two poetic traditions: the wildly innovative imagery of modern surrealism, permeated with the essence of traditional oral poetry: clear communication" (Robert Ziller, introduction to "Translated from the Night", Pittsburgh 2007). In addition to his extensive literary output, Rabearivelo also translated the works of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, and Whitman into Malagasy. Much of his own poetics, too, revolved around translation and what he called "transcription", which often involved writing two versions of each text, in Malagasy and French. One scholar has asserted that he used the term "translated" to describe the complicated relationship between Hova and French, with neither language being used exclusively: "as if Rabearivelo was no longer writing directly in French or Malagasy, but in the perpetual passageway from one language to another" (Joubert, cited in Alain Ricard, The Languages and Literatures of Africa, p. 125). After a series of personal setbacks, including the death of his daughter and of his lover, fellow Malagasy poet Esther Razanadrasoa (1892-1931), Rabearivelo committed suicide on June 22, 1937. Ziller notes that he "died just prior to the flowering of the Négritude movement in Paris, having never met Césaire, Senghor, and other African luminaries. Nevertheless, at the time of his death, Rabearivelo was recognized as Africa's first modern poet" (Ziller, p. x). Regarding the present work, Adejunmobi notes"Rabearivelo's best-known works of poetry, Presque-songues and Traduit de la nuit, articulate his resolution to the problem of alienation faced by the colonized writer. [They] were real translations, for they existed in both French and Malagasy versions in a manner making it almost impossible to determine the original version conclusively. In so doing, Rabearivelo makes the French version, the only version published in his lifetime, tributary to the Malagasy version, thus subverting the intentions of a system that obliged him to write in a foreign language in order to be published. " (p. 404). The work was published in a small private edition limited to 65 copies, of which five copies on Japon imperial, fifteen on Madagascar, and forty-five on Helios (the present being one of the forty-five). Illustrated with two etchings by Urbain-Faurec and with a four-page preface by the Belgian painter Robert Boudry. An exceedingly rare signed copy by this central figure in modern African letters. As of May 2026, KVK, OCLC locate one copy in the UK and an extremely poor copy (inscribed to Claude McKay) is held by Yale.
