The Little Prince 小王子 ISBN 9780156012195

　　Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in1943, only a year before his Lockheed P-38 vanished over theMediterranean during a reconnaissance mission. More than a halfcentury later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none ofits power. The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert,frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts areinterrupted one day by the apparition of a little, well, prince,who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overpoweringmystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls. "Absurd asit seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and indanger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of mypocket." And so begins their dialogue, which stretches thenarrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlikedirections.　　The Little Prince describes his journey from planet to planet,each tiny world populated by a single adult. It's a wonderfullyinventive sequence, which evokes not only the great fairy tales butalso such monuments of postmodern whimsy as Italo Calvino'sInvisible Cities. And despite his tone of gentle bemusement,Saint-Exupéry pulls off some fine satiric touches, too. There's theking, for example, who commands the Little Prince to function as aone-man (or one-boy) judiciary:　　I have good reason to believe that there is an old rat livingsomewhere on my planet. I hear him at night. You could judge thatold rat. From time to time you will condemn him to death. That wayhis life will depend on your justice. But you'll pardon him eachtime for economy's sake. There's only one rat.　　The author pokes similar fun at a businessman, a geographer, anda lamplighter, all of whom signify some futile aspect of adultexistence. Yet his tale is ultimately a tender one--a heartfeltexposition of sadness and solitude, which never turns into PeterPan-style treacle. Such delicacy of tone can present real headachesfor a translator, and in her 1943 translation, Katherine Woodssometimes wandered off the mark, giving the text a slightly woodenor didactic accent. Happily, Richard Howard (who did a finenip-and-tuck job on Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma in 1999)has streamlined and simplified to wonderful effect. The result is anew and improved version of an indestructible classic, which alsorestores the original artwork to full color. "Trying to be witty,"we're told at one point, "leads to lying, more or less." ButSaint-Exupéry's drawings offer a handy rebuttal: they're fresh,funny, and like the book itself, rigorously truthful. --JamesMarcus