The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince)

French children’s classic about life and love

Although a classic, this book has recently been generating a lot of discussion after being adapted into a film. It is a book have never read, and I came across this beautiful edition with gold tinted edges. Shockingly, despite the name of this blog, it has been over a year since I’ve reviewed a book with tinted edges – something that I shall have to remedy, because I certainly haven’t stopped reading them.

“The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and adapted from the French by Rosemary Gray (more on that later) is a children’s book about a pilot stranded in a desert. He wakes up to find a little prince requesting him to do a drawing. The pilot, although an adult, appears to have retained a child’s way of thinking and is able to connect with the little prince while he awaits rescue in the desert. Although not very forthcoming in answering questions, as the unlikely pair run out of water, the pilot slowly learns about where the little prince has come from and what he is really looking for. The little prince recounts his adventures leaving behind his beloved flower on his own planet, and meeting strange adults on various tiny planets and learning from their exaggerated behaviours, before he finally arrives on Earth.

This is a whimsical and bittersweet story that uses innocence and childlike logic to tackle personal and social issues. On his adventures, the little prince learns about vanity, greed, pointlessness, the value of experience and, finally, love. The reader is left wondering whether the little prince was in fact real, or whether he was something that the imaginative pilot conjured up to help get himself through a time of great hardship. This book lingers particularly on the importance of intangible things, like human connection, and the impermanence of physical things.

Sometimes, when you read a book, you can easily see the value in it it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you like it. This is one of those books. I cannot with complete certainty say whether it was the story itself that grated on me, or whether it was the translation. I have bakery-level French, so reading the original is beyond me at this stage, but I understand that this book has been subject to many translations and some preferred over others. I decided to have a bit of a look at the original English translation by Katherine Woods and immediately I liked it better. It is far more lyrical and much more in keeping with the style of the time. I think sometimes people are tempted to try to oversimplify language for children’s books, but there has been criticism of publishers “dumbing down” children’s books recently. If kids aren’t exposed to new words, how will they learn them?

Anyway, translation issues aside, I think that this story is definitely a bit of a “where we went and what we did there“, though I did feel that there was quite a lot of gentle exploring of social and personal issues like I said before. It is a short book, and though some of the life lessons seem a bit disjointed from one another, it’s an easy enough story to read.

While perhaps not my favourite of children’s books, certainly worth a read and definitely worth doing your research when it comes to translations (unless, of course, you can read French).