The Little Prince at Babel : translations in rare languages

Child watering a red flower — *The Little Prince* by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

This symposium will be held on October 12 and 13, 2023 at the Institut des Civilisations of the Collège de France. Admission is by pre-registration, subject to a limit of 50 places.

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Institut des Civilisations du Collège de France
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Presentation

The year 2023 marks eighty years since the simultaneous publication of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince in French and in English translation in New York in April 1943. This little book appears to be one of the most translated works in the world. It has been translated into 552 languages and dialects (cf. the " Le Petit Prince - Collection" page on the Jean-Marc Probst Foundation website), which puts it in a completely different league from conventional bestsellers such as Agatha Christie, whose entire vast output of novels comprising several dozen titles has been translated into 103 languages " " only. This figure can be compared with the number of Bible versions : 733 for the complete text, over 1 600 for the New Testament. This places The Little Prince in a special category of universal literature, between religious texts and mass-market literature.

If we look at the list of languages and dialects in which The Little Prince has been translated, we discover even more astonishing facts, which only serve to highlight the singularity of this work, or rather of its reception, which sets it apart from works of mass literature. One of the most obvious is the large number of retranslations into the major languages of distribution. From this point of view, the example of East Asian languages is very striking : more than sixty translations into Chinese " mandarin ", more than forty into Korean, more than twenty into Japanese, not to mention the local varieties ; only religious texts can boast such a number of retranslations. The other singular fact is the choice of target languages for the translations. These are not the languages usually targeted by publishers, into which an indefinite number of retranslations are possible, and we could divide them into several groups :

languages, varieties and idioms with very few speakers, let alone potential readers, such as Ouïlta (a Tungus language spoken by fewer than 50 people) or Aïnou (whose native speakers have probably all now disappeared) ;
minority languages with a variable number of speakers ranging from several million to a few hundred, but which are rarely written down : from Aymara to Rapanui, the languages of the Maya group, the Lappish languages (Sami), a unique palette of African or American, Asian or Siberian, Polynesian or Himalayan languages. This section also includes countless Italic, Gallo-Romance and Alemannic varieties that are rarely printed.

In addition, there is a quite singular group of languages : these are the versions of The Little Prince in ancient languages, between which more subtle distinctions could be made :

ancient languages that have disappeared, but are sufficiently attested to encourage their reconstitution by enthusiastic philologists : Gotic, Old Prussian, Cornish ;
translations into ancient states of modern languages that we don't usually cultivate : ^{twelfth-century} French , Anglo-Saxon, Old High German ;
finally, there are ancient and classical languages : Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Syriac, Latin, even hieroglyphic Egyptian.

This brief overview shows that an important part of the history of translations of The Little Prince, quite distinct from other major literary works with international success, could be grouped under the general term " translation into rare languages ", and that it overlaps remarkably with ILARA's sphere of interest and activity.

While the Little Prince has been the subject of various studies in translatology and language didactics for several years, it does not appear that a comprehensive study has yet been undertaken on this phenomenon of translation in the languages and dialects mentioned above, all of which are marked by a form of rarity in relation to the major languages of translation.

It will therefore be of great symbolic significance to mark ILARA's first years of activity by associating it with the commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of the publication of The Little Prince in New York, and by placing this event under the sign of translation into rare languages. As the numerous translations of The Little Prince cover most of what can be understood by " rare languages ", this will be an opportunity to show that the creation of ILARA responds to a profound need in terms of the linguistic situation in today's world : the need to affirm and illustrate the existence of languages which risk being ignored or sidelined by the major cultural and social currents. Whether enriching endangered languages or reviving vanished idioms, the linguistic and philological adventure represented by the translations of The Little Prince has its rightful place at the Institut des Civilisations du Collège de France.