ELIOT, T.S. (trans.); St-J. PERSE.
Anabasis: A Poem by St.-J. Perse, with a Translation by T.S. Eliot.
New York, Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1938.
8vo, pp. 75, [5 (blank)]; printed in parallel French and English on facing pages; small printer’s error to lower margin of p. 61, otherwise an excellent copy; in publisher’s black cloth, spine gilt, with the red-printed dustwrapper; lightly worn at spine.
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Anabasis: A Poem by St.-J. Perse, with a Translation by T.S. Eliot.
First American edition of Eliot’s translated Anabase. One of the earliest works of the French poet and diplomat Alexis Leger (1887–1975), written under the nom de plume St-John Perse, Anabase was published in 1924 and translated by Eliot in 1930. It ‘is a series of images of migration, of conquest of vast spaces in Asiatic wastes, of destruction and foundation of cities and civilizations of any races or epochs of the ancient East’ (preface).
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