STEINBECK, John. Les Pâturages du ciel (Pastures of Heaven). Traduit de l’americain … Roman.

STEINBECK, John. Les Pâturages du ciel (Pastures of Heaven). Traduit de l’americain … Roman. Paris: nrf / Gallimard. [1948.]

8vo. Publisher’s black boards decorated in white, red-orange, and gilt after a design by Mario Prassinos, spine lettered in gilt and decorated in white and orange, patterned endpapers with repeated pegasus design; pp. 246, [2]; title printed in red and black; joints, corners, and spine ends somewhat worn, a few small marks to boards; sporadic light toning; a very good copy.

First appearance in French of Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven, translated by the Breton writer Louis Guilloux, friend and correspondent of Camus and Secretary of the First World Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers (1935), no. 864 of 1040 copies on Alfa Navarre paper and bound after designs by Mario Prassinos.

Guilloux (1899–1980), the author of Le Sang noir as well as French translations of Margaret Kennedy, C.S. Forester, Robert Didier, and the Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay, had worked as an interpreter for the American army following the liberation of France. Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven is a cycle of short stories set in California’s Salinas Valley, near Monterey. It is seemingly the preparation of this translation to which Guilloux refers in a 16 September 1946 letter to Camus: ‘Everything that you write to me makes me want to see you all the more, but before I leave a few questions must be settled, the first of which is the completion of my Steinbeck translation. I do not want to see Gaston [Gallimard] without bringing him a manuscript …’ (Correspondance 10, trans.). Guilloux submitted his corrected proofs to Gallimard immediately before travelling to Algeria with Camus in February 1948.

Siefker 132; see Camus and Guilloux, Correspondance 1945–1959 (2013).

SKU: 2124930