![]() The Little Prince is a book which I read a long time ago in French at the bequest of my mother, my French teacher throughout high school. His goal was then to create a translation which would appeal to the English as much as Saint-Exupéry’s prose does to the French, to open it up to a wider number of English readers. This new translation of the novella starts out with an explanation of the book in relation to French culture according to Morpurgo there is not a book out there in the universe which has been read, studied, and loved so much as Le Petit Prince has been by the French. Without worrying if it’s ‘correct’ or not. And now I’ve sat down to write about what I thought. I reread the good bits (which is the whole thing). It was then that it occurred to me that this book was making me act exactly like one of Saint-Exupéry’s grown ups. And it’s very important when writing an opinion piece that your opinion is correct and is held by a very many number of people. Because I think I knew what it meant, but I didn’t know if that was actually what it meant, or if other people felt the same way too. But in order to do that, I needed to make sure that I actually knew what it meant, and to have my opinions backed up by grown ups who are much cleverer than I am. ![]() I didn’t want to just write a review, I wanted to write an opinion piece, an essay, a tour-de-force about what it really meant. But what? After having put it down (and having had a cry and eaten a rather large number of chocolate biscuits), I sat down to my laptop and googled ‘Le Petit Prince’. ![]() I was going to write about this book, then. And try as I might to concentrate, these thoughts were turning and tumbling and nibbling at each other like a pair of rats in a cage. I was reading to create content, because content needed to be made, because I’ve got a blog to run and a job to do and grown up things to accomplish. Underneath this however, as I read on and tried very hard to concentrate on Saint-Exupéry’s drawings (reprinted to lovely and vibrant affect in this new edition), I was keenly aware of the waste-land of content the recent move into my flat had left my blog. I was having a lazy Sunday, I was reading what I thought would be a short and cute read to pass the time before my partner stopped having a nap and made me dinner. Initially, this wasn’t something that I had read for my blog. After having spent a Sunday afternoon curled up on my sofa reading a beautiful new hardback translation of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince by Michael Morpurgo, and having finished having a little cry and eating a lot of biscuits, I was torn about what to do next.
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