SAPPHO; Rolande CANUDO (translator). [Fragments des poëmes éoliens.] Sappho. Quatorze burins par Espérance.

’The Most Openly Lesbian Edition’ of Sappho since Renée Vivien’s

SAPPHO; Rolande CANUDO (translator). [Fragments des poëmes éoliens.] Sappho. Quatorze burins par Espérance. Éditions Paris: [Imprimerie nationale for] Éditions du Raisin. [22 December 1944].

4to. Publisher’s printed wrappers on handmade paper, loose as issued, in the original matching chemise (lined with paper patterned with violets) and glassine jacket, printed spine label in Greek and French; ff. [35], of which 14 blue-green line engravings by Espérance; text printed in blue; without publisher’s card slipcase; slight creasing and chipping to tissue guards and very faint central crease to upper wrapper; a near-fine copy.

First edition of fourteen of Sappho’s fragments to be illustrated by Espérance (i.e. Suzanne Theureau, 1910–2004), printed four months after the liberation of Paris in August 1944.

This edition was translated by the portrait artist Rolande Canudo, here aged twenty-two, the daughter of Jeanne Canudo and the early film theorist Ricciotto Canudo (also the former partner of the futurist Valentine de Saint-Point and a friend of Picasso and Marinetti); her 1957 letter to Picasso, presenting him with a portfolio of her work, is held at the Musée Picasso in Paris. This is ‘the most openly lesbian edition [of Sappho] since [Renée] Vivien’s. The less erotic poems are made to appear so by the overtly homoerotic etchings that accompany each of them. Even the fragment known as “Alceus to Sappho” and used by German chastity theorists as a proof of Sappho’s heterosexuality, since it indicates that a man was interested in her, appears homoerotic because of the accompanying iconography […] this elaborate collector’s edition of an openly lesbian Sappho corpus, as a French national gesture and as an act of defiance against German ideals, as the ultimate fulfillment of the political agenda shared by the Reinachs, the Barney sisters, and Vivien’ (De Jean, pp. 157-58). Vivien, lover of Natalie Barney from 1899 to 1901, had produced the first ‘explicitly lesbian translation of Sappho’s poetry’ (Mendès-Leite, Gay Studies from the French Cultures 25 (1993), p. 102).

The fourteen striking engravings by Suzanne Theureau, best remembered as an illustrator of children’s books, are frequently misattributed to Sylvain Sauvage, i.e. Jules Louis Félix Roy.

OCLC finds a single copy outside continental Europe, at Columbia. Not on Library Hub.

Bonnet, p. 367. See De Jean, ‘The Time of Commitment: Reading “Sapho 1900”’, in Modern Language Quarterly 65.1 (2004), pp. 149-159.

SKU: 2125435