The Small Prince

For the moon astéroïdale, to see (45) Eugenie I Small-Prince .

See also: Prince

Presentation

the Small Prince is the most known work of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Published in 1943 with New York, it is a philosophical and poetic tale which, under the appearance of a tale for children, sets up an authentic art of living. It is an account which does not have a label in the history littéraire.

Each chapter reports an astonishing meeting of the small prince and leaves this one perplexed as for the absurd behavior of the " large personnes". Each one of these meetings can be read like a Allégorie.

The language, simple and stripped - parce that intended to be included/understood children, is actually for the narrator the privileged vehicle of a design Symbolique of the life.

The watercolours belong to the text and take part of this purity of the language: examination and depth are main qualities of work.

One can read an invitation of the author there to find in oneself the child prodigy, because " All the large people initially were of the children. (But little of them remembers it). "

Summary

The narrator and the Small Prince

The narrator is an aviator who, following a breakdown of engine, had to be posed in catastrophe in the desert of the the Sahara and must try to only repair his plane.

The shortly after its emergency landing, it is awaked by a small voice which requires of him Please “… draws to me a sheep! ”.
Very surprised by this " appearance miraculeuse" , the aviator obeys, but none of its sheep is appropriate to the Small Prince. Exceeded, the narrator draws the case of the sheep: " That it is the case. The sheep that you want is dedans".

Day after day, the small prince tells his history with the narrator. He lives on another planet, the asteroid B612, " hardly larger than a maison". Having attended the birth of a superb pink - but very vain and demanding, the Small Prince discovers that the love… can have spines. He then decides to leave his planet and to go to explore stars, in search of friends.

The voyage of the Small Prince

The Small Prince visits seven planets:

  1. the planet of the king whose logic is that of " to reign sur".

  2. That of the conceited which does not cease greeting so that it is acclaimed.
  3. the planet of the drinker , which drinks " to forget that it with shame of boire".
  4. the star of the businessman which counts stars and which does not cease repeating " I am a serious man, moi."
  5. the planet of the lamplighter , the only one which does not appear ridiculous to the Small Prince " because it deals with another thing that of oneself-même".
  6. the planet of the geographer .
  7. "The seventh planet was thus Terre".

The Small Prince on Earth

Always in search of friends, the Small Prince arrives on Earth, and it is still the loneliness and the nonsense of the existence which it will discover: its meeting with the snake which speaks only by enigmas, that of a flower " to three pétales" , the echo of the montagnes.

Lastly, it arrives in a garden of pinks. Then it realizes that its flower was not single and becomes well malheureux.

At this point in time it meets the fox which explains to the Small Prince what " means; apprivoiser". It is thanks to the teaching of the fox that the Small Prince discovers the depth of the friendship:

  • “One does not see well that with the heart; essence is invisible for the eyes”.
  • " You are responsible for always for what you have apprivoisé"
  • "It is the time which you wasted for your pink, which makes your pink if importante"

Later, the small prince meets successively a pointsman and a merchant before meeting the aviator - with whom there will remain 7 days. Guided by the brittleness and the frankness of the small prince, it ends up discovering a well in the desert: " What embellishes the desert, known as the small prince, it is that it hides a well some part." A little later the small prince explains to the narrator why it arrived on ground since nearly one year: it must return on its planet to deal with its flower of which it feels from now on " responsable". In company of the aviator, the small prince reconsiders the exact place where it had arrived: " He fell gently as fall a tree. That did not even make noise because of sand”.

Birth of the character

" I would have liked to begin this history the made-to-order of the Fairy tales ". The regret of the narrator is clear. However, at the time of its publication, the Small Prince did not receive the Fighter pilot reception of Ground of the men nor of , considered by the Americans as " The greatest answer which the democracies found with Mein Kampf ". However, in spite of his gilded hair and his air scarf, the Small Prince never smiles. He was born in time of war.

the Small Prince makes his appearance in the bookstores with the the United States, in 1942. But Saint-Exupéry has thought of it for more than seven years already. Unless one cannot read the work like a " Autobiography discrète"

In 1935, appears Ground of the men . In the train which leads it to Moscow, Saint-Exupéry meets a couple of workmen: Between the man and the woman, the child, after a fashion, had made its hollow and he slept. But it was turned over in the sleep, and its face appeared to me under the night light. Ah! what a adorable face! It had been born from this couple there a kind of gilded fruit. It had been born from these heavy herds this success of charm and grace. I considered this smooth face, on this soft pout of the lips, and I say myself: here a face of musician, here Mozart child, here a fair promises of the life. The small princes of the legends were not different from him. the character was already named.
December 29th of the same year, Saint-Exupéry tries to ensure the connection of Paris-Saigon but its plane is crushed on December 31st in the desert of Libya. It is a caravan of nomads which will save it: the meeting " miraculeuse" and like " fallen from the ciel" comes from naître.
Michel Quesnel specifies that " when he attends the small restaurants, Saint-Exupéry feeds his patience while griffonnant, on the corrugated paper which holds place of tablecloth to him, the draft of a young character to which it will be enough that one cuts down it by useless wings and that one lets radiate his hair so that it becomes Small Prince.".

Gradually the personal mails of the author reveal the very clear silhouette which we know of the character. In May 1940, in a letter which it sends to Leon Werth, appears on its cloud a small character with the courroucé glance, opposite a planet inhabited by an old horned sheep, planted trees and decorated in foreground by a pink.

A phenomenon of the edition

The work was translated in addition to one hundred sixty languages: the most known languages of the four continents, but also in less widespread languages like the Tagalog with Philippines, the papiamento in Curaçao, the faerosk in the Faroe Islands, the Scipétaire in ex-Yugoslavia, Frioulan in Italy, the Aragonese in Spain, the sursilvan in Switzerland, the Quichua in Ecuador and in the many languages of India: the Telugu, the Marathi, the Pendjabi, the Tamoul, the Malayalam In 2005, the Small Prince was translated into toba, an Amerindian language of the north of the Argentine, under the title So Shiyaxauolec Nta' has . It is the first book to be translated in this language after New Testament.

Phenomenon of edition, international phenomenon, cultural phenomenon, the Small Prince is universal. 160 translations indexed to date, more than 80 book million, K7, audio CD sold in the world, museum with the Japan, opera with the the United States and in Germany, musical comedy in Korea, integration in the school programs with the Morocco, the Canada, the Japan, in Korea…

The book was initially published in New York, and the French edition was then drawn by retramage from engravings from this edition, whose originals were not available any more. A new pulling in collection Folio at the beginning of XXIe century tardily restored in a French edition the illustrations starting from the originals. Independently of best technical quality, one realized that several drawings of the former French editions had been altered of authority by the editor for reasons of page layout (star aimed by the Astronomer, for example) (source: indications of accompaniment of the specimen Folio)

Adaptations

  • 1966 : Soviet film ( Malenkiy prints ) of the Lithuanian realizer Arünas Zebriünas

  • 1973 : phonographic adaptation, with Marcel Mouloudji in the role of reciting and Eric Rémy in the role of the Small Prince

  • 1978 : Japanese animated series ( Hoshi No ōjisama: Puchi Puransu ) of 39 episodes

  • 1990 : German telefilm ( DER kleine Prinz ) of Theo Kerp

  • 1990 : French filmic adaptation of Jean-Louis Guillermou with Guy Climbed, Daniel Royan and Alexandre Warner

  • 1996 : Moving “integral” numerical Québécois (Radio-Canada, 101 min.) on a musical screen by Robert Normandeau. The actor Michel Dumont (narrator/aviator) is surrounded by a panoply of characters, of which the young person Martin Pensa who incarnates the title role

Dedication

Saint-Exupéry dedicated the Small Prince with the one of his best friends, Leon Werth, writer and critical of Article Or rather with the child who was Leon Werth. But he regretted thereafter not to have dedicated it with his wife Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, who is the heart of the book.

See too

Close works

The style of the modern tale which approaches philosophical topics in a simple and stripped language inspired some authors of XXe and XXIe centuries:

Internal bonds

  • a Asteroid: 46610 Bésixdouze was named according to planet of origin of the small prince.

External bonds

  • '' the Small Prince '' in 100 languages, with sound examples
  • '' the Small Prince '' in 160 languages
  • '' size of the Small Prince '': approaches generic - Memory of DEA per Laurent de Galembert
  • '' the Small Prince '': Complete French text (in the public domain in Canada, without pub)
  • '' the Small Prince '', work supplements text and illustrations

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