World Literature
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world literature Peter Harrington london This catalogue celebrates the international conversation that is literature, and the creativity that can spark when writers and texts cross national, linguistic, and cultural borders. For his lifelong commitment to literary internationalism, Jorge Luis Borges is a key figure here. One of the star items is Borges’s own annotated copy of Dante (20). Another is a man- uscript of the only poem he composed in the English language (17). We also have a scarce signed set of his Biblioteca de Babel series (21), which brought the great short stories of world literature to a South American audience. Many other items connect notable authors across place and time: Dylan Thomas’s school- boy copy of Omar Khayyám (item 179), T. S. Eliot’s Rimbaud (61), and E. M. Forster’s Chek- hov (41), for example. Among international presentations, Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose to García Márquez is a show-stopper (58), as is García Márquez inscribing One Hundred Years of Solitude to his English publisher (67). A compelling example of international readership is found in a first American edition of Moby Dick being read by a poet in Hawaii who correspond- We are exhibiting at these fairs: ed with Melville (127). Classical literature is fundamental to our global network of inspiration, and where else to begin but with the editio princeps of Homer, printed in Florence in 1488 (83)? We also have, list- 7–9 June 2019 ed under its translator’s name, a scarce inscribed copy of T. E. Lawrence’s beautifully-printed firsts london English version (109). Battersea Evolution National epics are here seen influencing foreign readers. We have Persian, English, and Battersea Park, London French versions of the Arabian Nights (5, 4, and 6), and the earliest practicably obtainable www.firstslondon.com edition of Malory’s Arthurian epic (121), itself a reweaving of French romance. A rare Danish translation of Beowulf (13) nods across the room to an English edition of the Icelandic sagas in 27 June – 3 July a translation that inspired Tolkien (139). masterpiece The great Russians of the 19th century are here in English: Pushkin (136, 150), Lermontov The Royal Hospital, Chelsea (110), Turgenev (183), Tolstoy (181), Gogol (72), and Dostoevsky (53, 54). From the Soviet era, www.masterpiecefair.com Anna Akhmatova’s banned poem Requiem was printed in Munich and is here owned by an émigré in New York (1), as well as the rare first edition of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in Russian, 12 –14 July secretly printed in The Hague by the CIA (143). melbourne Paris is the home-from-home of the expatriate writer. We have Hemingway’s rare first book, Melbourne Rare Book Fair In Our Time (80), Joyce’s Ulysses (93), Nabokov’s Lolita (135), Beckett’s Godot (12), and Henry Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy (128). More than a century earlier, the rare first French Frankenstein www.rarebookfair.com features the first printed acknowledgement of Mary Shelley as author (171). Certain cross-cultural translations are striking: the Japanese Ulysses (94) was its first 7–8 September non-Western translation and inspired a modernist movement there; Pasternak’s Russian brooklyn translation of Goethe’s Faust, here a rare inscribed copy (142), was published while he was Brooklyn Expo Center working on Zhivago; and the first publication of Shakespeare in Turkish was, fittingly, Othello, www.brooklynbookfair.com in a late-Ottoman play edition (169). Nobel laureates Coetzee, Heaney, and Yeats make their acceptance speeches (44, 77, 195), 3–6 October in company with titles by laureates Albert Camus (33), André Gide (71), Herman Hesse (82), frieze masters Selma Lagerlöf, the first female laureate (104), Thomas Mann (123), Czeslaw Milosz (130), Regent’s Park, London Frédéric Mistral (132), Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-westerner (177), Derek Walcott (187, www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-masters 188), and Patrick White (190). Sammy Jay [email protected] VAT no. gb 701 5578 50 Peter Harrington Limited. Registered office: WSM Services Limited, Connect House, 133–137 Alexandra Road, Wimbledon, London sw19 7jy. Registered in England and Wales No: 3609982 Cover illustration from Nikos Kazantzakis’s Odysseas, item 98. Design: Nigel Bents. Photography: Ruth Segarra. 7—9 JUNE 2019 BATTERSEA PARK Peter Harrington 1969 london 2019 catalogue 153 WORLD LITERATURE “I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men . I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and ad- vise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” (Goethe) mayfair chelsea Peter Harrington Peter Harrington 43 dover street 100 FulHam road london w1s 4FF london sw3 6Hs uk 020 3763 3220 uk 020 7591 0220 eu 00 44 20 3763 3220 eu 00 44 20 7591 0220 usa 011 44 20 3763 3220 www.peterharrington.co.uk usa 011 44 20 7591 0220 1 2 1 tury literature: he had a particular genius for bringing world-class AKHMATOVA, Anna. [Cyrillic:] Requiem. Munich: T-vo writers from abroad (such as Neruda, Garcia Marquez, and Derek Walcott) to publish in the UK, and 15 of his authors were award- Zaburezhnikh izdaniy, 1963 ed the Nobel Prize in Literature. He additionally has the honour of Small octavo. Original textured white card wrappers, titles in black to front. conceiving the Booker Prize, and of having introduced his friend Portrait of the author to p. [5]. Ownership stamp of S. J. Chernavsky, with Quentin Blake to Roald Dahl. an address in Rochester, NY. Slight toning around the edges of wrappers, otherwise a fine copy. £1,250 [131409] first edition in book form, one of 500 copies only, of Akhma- tova’s masterpiece. Requiem is a cycle of poems written from 1935 cap- First edition in the original Greek, presentation copy from turing the horrors and anguish of the Great Terror under Stalin, during Tudor Greek scholar Robert Pember to his friend and which Akhmatova’s husband and son were sent to the gulag. The po- ems in Requiem, unpublishable in Russia, were absent from Akhma- student Roger Ascham, tutor to Queen Elizabeth tova’s collected works, and she kept the manuscript closely guarded 3 through the decades, still redrafting into the early 1960s. This small edition, produced in West Germany, was its first APOLLONIUS RHODIUS. Argonautica [in Greek, with printing in book form, with the publisher stipulating that the poem the scholia of Lucillus, Sophocles, and Theon. Edited by was “received from Russia and published without the consent of Joannes Laskaris.] Florence: [Laurentius (Francisci) de Alopa, the author”. The only distribution prior to this had been oral, com- Venetus,] 1496 mitted to memory by Akhmatova and a few close friends and secre- tively passed by word of mouth for fear of persecution, and in a few Median quarto (232 × 164 mm). Bound in the third quarter of the 19th centu- ry by Francis Bedford (his name in gilt at the foot of the front turn-in) in red- samizdat productions. dish-brown crushed goatskin, spine divided in six compartments by raised £2,250 [131464] bands, gilt-lettered in two compartments, the others with gilt devices, sides with frames formed of gilt and thick-and-thin blind rules, gilt centrepieces, turn-ins ruled in gilt and in blind, gilt edges (spine a little faded; extremi- 2 ties rubbed). Housed in a burgundy flat-back cloth box. 172 leaves, including the final blank. Greek types 114 (two sets of capitals designed by Laskaris, AMICHAI, Yehuda. Selected Poems. Translated by Assia one large for headings and initials letters, one small for the text). Commen- Gutmann. London: Cape Goliard Press, 1968 tary (10–33 lines) in miniscule surrounding text (3–31 lines) in majuscule. Octavo. Original blue boards, title to spine in silver, yellow endpapers. With Greek marginalia in an early hand in six places; the publication date added the dust jacket. A fine copy in the dust jacket with faded spine. in Arabic numerals in ink at the foot of the final text leaf; an excellent copy, well-margined, clean and fresh. first edition, signed limited issue, number 7 of 50 copies signed and numbered by the author. “Yehuda Amichai [was] for editio princeps. A remarkable presentation copy, inscribed on generations the most prominent poet in Israel, and one of the lead- the verso of the final blank from the Greek scholar Robert Pember ing figures in world poetry since the mid-1960s” (The Times, Lon- to his friend and student Roger Ascham: “R. Pemberi hunc librum don, October 2000). This is the publisher Tom Maschler’s copy, dono dedit Rogero Aschamo testi magistro Fitzerbert et multis al- with his bookplate to the front pastedown. Maschler (b. 1933) was iis.” The presentation inscription brings together three of the out- head of Jonathan Cape, and a highly influential figure in 20th-cen- standing figures in the early years of Greek scholarship in Tudor 2 WORLD LITERATURE 3 England: Robert Pember, Hugh Fitzherbert, and Roger Ascham by Giovanni Aurispa during his book-buying trip in the Orient in (1514/15–1568), author of Toxophilus and The Scholemaster. 1421–3 (now Codex Laurentius XXXXII 9, also containing plays by In 1530, at fifteen, Ascham matriculated at the University of Sophocles and Aeschylus). Cambridge and became a student at St John’s College. In autumn provenance: 1) Robert Pember (d. 1560), presentation copy 1533 he became a questionist and on 18 February 1534 he was ad- to; 2) Roger Ascham (1514/15–1568); 3) the great book collector mitted BA and nominated for a fellowship.