Madrid (EFE).- It is one of the emblematic works of French literature, but “The Little Prince”, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, first appeared in the United States in 1943, now 80 years ago. The admiration for this apparently simple story has not been diluted and five million copies are still sold a year today.
These are the data offered by the Gallimard publishing house, which managed to launch the book in France in 1946 and which has continued to publish this short novel of barely 120 pages that is admired by readers of all ages and places in the world, maintains its editorial success and inspires to creators who highlight their introspective character.
“If it has a universal scope, it is because it deals with universal themes very simply and at the same time with great depth. Among them, perhaps the one that unites us all, which is childhood, the nostalgia of being children”, Pedro Mañas, author of Children’s and Youth Literature, comments to EFE for whom the work returns the reader to “that life so simple in which Deep down, everything made more sense and that we have been hiding under all those years”.
The novel, whose number of copies sold today is incalculable, is the second most translated book in the world after the Bible, with the last one in 2022 into the Sephardic dialect of Haketí, which brings the number of official translations to 500, according to Gallimard.
The first edition in Spanish was in Argentina, in 1951. And “The Prince” can be read in Friulan, Romance, Ladino, Palatine, Quechua, Konkani, Esperanto, Venetian, Languedocian Occitan, Aragonese, Basque, Galician, Catalan and Asturian.
In the text, delicately illustrated by Saint-Exupéry, childhood is vindicated as a territory in which to recover the essentials and the young Prince talks about it while traveling across planets making new friends.
“You’re all the time saying ‘but how right was the Little Prince’. It is very beautiful because it puts you in a mirror as an adult”, highlights the writer Begoña Oro, who finds in the book “a narration made from the strangeness, by someone who is neither a child nor a Martian, but alien to the prosaic world of ‘adulting ‘ that puts us in that mirror of but why do we do those things?
Originally published by the New York publisher Reynal & Hitchcock on April 6, 1943 in English (on the 20th of the same month in French), the work deals with love represented in the fragility of a rose or friendship embodied in a fox that wishes to be tamed. while instructing a humanity in a crisis of values during the Second World War.
The adventurer and aviator Saint-Exupery wrote the novel while serving as a military pilot from New York, and it would not be until 1946, after his death in a plane crash in 1944, when the book was published in a Europe already liberated from Nazism.
Only then could Leon Werth, an anarchist and Jewish journalist and writer, to whom the author dedicated the work as his best friend, read it.
“I think that the Little Prince himself is considered children’s literature because he asks for it from the dedication, in which he apologizes for dedicating it to an older person and apologizes saying ‘he is an older person capable of understanding everything, even children’s books'”, recalls Oro, while encouraging sharing the versatility of storytelling with the little ones.
“It is a work that is precious to read aloud, between different generations, surely there are grandparents who are looking forward to reading it with their grandchildren. Or make a teen book club about ‘The Little Prince’. It seems like an idea to me, ”says the author.
A fundamental part of the narration are also its illustrations, original watercolors by the author that today decorate all kinds of promotional objects related to the character.
For María Hesse (illustrator of Elena Medel’s book “The Little Princess”, influenced by the work of Saint-Exupery) the illustrated part of the novel is “a very naive drawing that gives that aspect of a return to childhood”.
“If the drawing were drawn by another person with a more perfect drawing, it would lose its essence because part of what he narrates has to do with what he draws and how he draws it,” says the illustrator, recalling how the character has also accompanied him in the elaboration of books like “Marilyn”, in which she takes a phrase from the work that the actress, an admirer of the novel, dedicated to her second husband, Joe DiMaggio.
The anniversary is remembered by publishers such as Gallimard, which has launched a special collector’s edition with a limited print run of 3,000 copies.
Or Salamandra, responsible for its distribution in Spanish since its birth, which in March published the interactive children’s book “The Little Prince: Where are you fox?” and the English-Spanish version of the work, followed in July by the “Official Agenda of The Little Prince” and an edition with a die-cut cover.
“This type of crossover book has very different reading levels, much closer to one’s own deeper, more vital and emotional story”, highlights Laia Zamarrón, Salamandra’s literary director. EFE