{"id":15767,"date":"2014-09-24T03:21:41","date_gmt":"2014-09-24T02:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=15767"},"modified":"2014-09-30T13:35:00","modified_gmt":"2014-09-30T12:35:00","slug":"moravagine-book-covers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2014\/09\/24\/moravagine-book-covers\/","title":{"rendered":"Moravagine book covers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"moravagine01.jpg\"<\/p>\n

First publication, Grasset, 1926.<\/em><\/p>\n

I should have liked to open all cages, all zoos, all prisons, all lunatic asylums, see the great wild ones liberated and study the development of an unheard-of kind of human life…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Recent reading was Moravagine<\/em> (1926) by Blaise Cendrars, a novel that resists easy summary. It’s a Modernist work to some extent although the prose (a good translation from the French by Alan Brown) is never unorthodox in style; it’s also scabrous, amoral, misogynist and deeply misanthropic. The narrative is a picaresque affair narrated by a young doctor who frees the mysterious Moravagine from an asylum where he’s been imprisoned for many years. “Moravagine” is an adopted name whose origin and meaning is never addressed, although a French reader would find a rather unavoidable pun on “death by vagina”. Moravagine himself is an otherwise unnamed member of the Hungarian royal family, a dwarfish intellectual psychopath with a bad leg who goes on the run with the doctor, first to pre-revolutionary Russia, then to the United States and South America.<\/p>\n

Reviewers have compared the book to Beckett, C\u00e9line and Burroughs although it’s much lighter reading than the first two, and the prose is more coherent than Burroughs in cut-up mode. Since we’ve been hearing a lot about the First World War this year it’s tempting to read the book as a kind of Dadaist reaction to Cendrars’ own experiences in the war, even though the entirety of the conflict is dispensed with in two pages. Cendrars appears as a character in the later chapters; he lost an arm in the war so he has his narrator lose a leg while Moravagine loses his reason altogether. At the end of the book he’s found imprisoned in another asylum where he believes he’s an inhabitant of the planet Mars, and where he spends his last months writing a huge, apocalyptic account of how the world will be in the year 2013.<\/p>\n

All this, of course, presents a challenge for a cover designer. I have two Penguin editions, both with very different covers, neither of them unsuitable. Curiosity impelled me to see how the book has been treated since 1926. There aren’t many editions but their difference shows the difficulty of trying to encapsulate the contents of this strange novel in a graphic form. The selection here has avoided text-only treatments in favours of those using some form of illustration.<\/p>\n

\"moravagine05.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Le Livre de Poche, 1957.<\/em><\/p>\n

In an early chapter Moravagine describes fleeing the imperial household by strapping himself to a horse. Without knowing this narrative detail the painting here seems bizarrely arbitrary.<\/p>\n

\"moravagine02.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Editora Ulisseia, Portugal, 1966.<\/em><\/p>\n

The horses again, with Moravagine strapped underneath one of them. I’d guess the illustrators of these two books didn’t read very far.<\/p>\n

\"moravagine03.jpg\"<\/p>\n

First UK edition, Peter Owen, 1968.<\/em><\/p>\n

Peter Owen commissioned the first English translation which is still in use today.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"moravagine09.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Doubleday, 1970.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

I’m not sure where the capitalised V comes from but this is a good design by Seymour Chwast. 50 Watts<\/a> shows more of the cover and also boldly attempts a pr\u00e9cis of the contents.<\/p>\n

\"moravagine07.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Penguin, 1979.<\/em><\/p>\n

A favourite Penguin edition of mine for its use of Lucifer<\/em> by Thomas H\u00e4fner. The painting was one of the highlights in David Larkin’s Fantastic Art<\/em><\/a> (1973) which might explain its appearance here. Monster Brains<\/a> has a larger copy together with more of H\u00e4fner’s detailed canvases.<\/p>\n

\"moravagine04.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Blast Books, 1990.<\/em><\/p>\n

The only example here that actually attempts to summarise the book via illustration, and a good attempt at that. If anyone has a credit please leave a comment.<\/p>\n

\"moravagine06.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Penguin, 1994.<\/em><\/p>\n

The photograph is Figure Descending Stairs<\/em> by Anton Giulio Bragaglia. Not a bad choice but it’s pretty vague, and could easily by used on many other novels.<\/p>\n

\"moravagine08.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

NYRB Classics<\/a>, 2004.<\/em><\/p>\n

A detail from\u00a0Death: I am the one who will make a serious woman of you; come, let us embrace<\/a><\/em> (1896) by Odilon Redon. Difficult to go wrong with Redon although this was originally an illustration for Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"moravagine10.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Die Andere Bibliothek<\/a>, 2014.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

A new German edition in a slipcase. Looks like a quality production but that illustration is more like something for a Genet novel.<\/p>\n

There’s more Cendrars at the Paris Review<\/a> where the author was profiled in their long-running Art of Fiction series.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The book covers archive<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First publication, Grasset, 1926. I should have liked to open all cages, all zoos, all prisons, all lunatic asylums, see the great wild ones liberated and study the development of an unheard-of kind of human life… Recent reading was Moravagine (1926) by Blaise Cendrars, a novel that resists easy summary. It’s a Modernist work to … Continue reading “Moravagine book covers”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,42,4,44,12],"tags":[2329,6476,6478,6224,3358,193,1265,461,3529,126,1396,2696,6477,3797,302,6479],"class_list":["post-15767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-books","category-design","category-painting","category-photography","tag-50-watts","tag-alan-brown","tag-anton-giulio-bragaglia","tag-blaise-cendrars","tag-david-larkin","tag-doctor-who","tag-gustave-flaubert","tag-lucifer","tag-monster-brains","tag-odilon-redon","tag-paris-review","tag-peter-owen","tag-seymour-chwast","tag-the-paris-review","tag-thomas-hafner","tag-torsten-kochlin"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-46j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15767\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}