SEGALEN, Victor.

£15,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Stèles. First edition, number 70 of 81 copies on Korean imperial paper, of this influential modernist work, signed by the author's wife on the first blank, "Yvonne Victor Segalen, 21 Mars 1920". Loosely inserted is a proof sheet of one of the poems - "Terre Jaune" - with the author's manuscript ink and pencil changes corresponding to the final printed version. This copy is from the library of Henry Bouillier, the author's biographer and the editor of critical editions of Steles.Victor Segalen (1878-1919) was a doctor, archaeologist, novelist, and modernist poet who was "one of the first occidental authors to incorporate artistically and knowingly the language and culture of China into a European literary work of art" (Shapiro, p. 24). In the opinion of Borges, he "was one of the most intelligent writers of our age, perhaps the only one to have made a fresh synthesis of Western and Eastern aesthetics and philosophy" (quoted in Taylor, p. 156). While T. S. Eliot once proclaimed Ezra Pound the "the inventor of Chinese poetry in our time", Steles shows that "the matter is more complicated than Eliot thought" (ibid., p. 161).The poems in the present work were inspired by the stone tablets used throughout Chinese history to memorialize, commemorate, and celebrate famous persons, events, and ideas. The collection offers insights into understanding of the self and other, exoticism, time, Chinese schools of thought - Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism - and Segalen's idea of the "aesth

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