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Inscribed by the french translator to Giuseppe Ungaretti First edition in French, service de presse issue, presentation copy, inscribed by the translator on the front free endpaper “à Giuseppe Ungaretti, ce livre dont il a été l’un des premiers confidents. Avec toute mon amitié, Paul Henri Michel”. The recipient Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970) was an Italian poet who, like his close friend Paul-Henri Michel (1894– 1964) had an interest in hermeticism. Michel was the author of La cosmologie de Giordano Bruno (1962), an important study of the famous Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, cosmological theorist, and hermetic occultist. This key modernist novel was originally published in Italian in 1923, under the title La coscienza di Zeno , at the author’s expense. It received little attention until James Joyce, who had taught the author English in Trieste, championed the work in Paris. Before his death following a car accident in September 1928, Svevo lived to see himself hailed as the Proust of Italy and was received into the Parisian literary scene. “Svevo, lacking the confidence in his genius that carried Joyce through so much frustration, was amazed. Calling himself, in the face of his belated fame, a ‘bambino di 64 anni’, he charmed his hosts at a 1928 Paris literary dinner in his honour by filtering his ingenuous joy through a screen of cigarette smoke. He was even more amazed to discover, as the young poet Eugenio Montale championed his cause in Italy, that he was being hailed as the revolutionary father of a new generation of Italian writers” (Lebowitz). Octavo. Original red and black printed wrappers, unopened and uncut. Faint dampstain to spine, a few small nicks and closed tears to extremities, mostly to foot of spine, some browning, mostly to verso of wrappers; an excellent copy. ¶ Naomi Lebowitz, The Philosophy of Literary Amateurism, 1994, p. 98. £1,750 [132462]
poetry. A loosely inserted label from the National Portrait Gallery shows that that this copy was shown in their “The Sitwells” Exhibition, October 1994 – January 1995, and that the copy was lent by Francis Sitwell. Edith Sitwell first started to publish the poems that would become Façade in a literary periodical, Wheels , in 1918. A version in which verses were spoken over an instrumental accompaniment by William Walton was first privately performed at the Sitwells’ home on 24 January 1922. For that performance, the texts were printed in a programme with a note that “all these poems, and some additional ones, will appear in a book called Façade which Miss Sitwell is publishing privately in a limited edition with a special frontispiece in colour by Gino Severini”. This book comprises five poems under the sectional title of “Winter” and nine poems under the title of “Façade”. Of those 14 poems, two are printed for the first time, four are collected from previous appearances in periodicals and nine first appeared in the January 1922 programme. The first public performance of Walton and Sitwell’s Entertainment was in the Aeolian Hall, New Bond Street, London, on 12 June 1923. The audience included Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh and Noël Coward. This pointedly avant- garde premiere, in which Sitwell declaimed the poems through a megaphone, was widely condemned by the press. Octavo. Original boards with brick wall pattern, printed title label to front. Colour frontispiece by Gino Severini. Extremities worn, minor loss to spine and title label, minor browning to free endpapers; a good and internally clean copy. ¶ Fifoot EA6(b). £4,750 [153849] 89 SVEVO, Italo. Zéno. Traduit de l’italien par Paul-Henri Michel. Paris: Gallimard, 1927
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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