Genealogical Artifact - The Little Prince

The Little Prince is one of those rare books that grows with you. I read it when I was 12, waiting for my mum who had gone to the temple. Not wanting to leave me at home, she brought me with her and told me to bring something to occupy myself with - I took a small stack of books and some paper and pens. The Little Prince was one of those books - a crappy Chinese bootleg copy that had a stilted English translation and a glossary of English terms in the back. I read it voraciously, and finished it a few hours later, somehow in my bedroom at home, without noticing. It was so different - it felt as if Exupéry was speaking to me as a peer, and as a child. There was a mutual understanding between myself and the author, and I remembered that.

The second time I read it, I was a teenager. The image of the prince leaving his planet by way of migratory birds was one that held special significance for me - the need for an escape, discounting intoxication, was of great relevance to me at the time. I tried to follow his lead and let myself recede into my own thoughts, creating worlds and people and stories. This helped me through many problems that appeared, at the time, to be insurmountable.

The third time I read it, I was a freshman. I missed my home. I was tired. I felt an urge to go through it once again, but the copy I had grown fond of was in my parent's study in Melbourne. I spent hours researching the translation I remembered - the new mass-market paperback released a few years ago was abhorrent, the interpretation gauche, the words cold and soulless. There was a website documenting all the different Chinese bootlegs of the book, well over 100 of them - I gave up finding an exact copy. I turned to Katherine Woods' classic version, capturing enough of the original's poetry while still keeping a literary English tone. It was not what I was used to, but it had to do. I found an old copy of it on eBay, with colour illustrations and the original 1943 translation. I bought it for five dollars. When it arrived, I left it on my desk for quite some time and read it intermittently, focusing moreso on my schoolwork. It had the same beauty and the same emotion, but I was too tired, too busy to devote any attention to it. The characters were still just as relevant, the illustrations still just as sincere. I suppose I had just grown old.

Artist's Statement

The Little Prince is still my favourite book, and will likely remain so. I wanted to contact my parents about the book whilst writing this, but forgot to and ran out of time - I had to stew over these things myself, and I feel like it helped me achieve the tone I wanted. With this essay, I wanted to create an atmosphere of nostalgia and also discuss the concepts of growth and deterioration - the structure is quite obvious in this regard and the object itself is an excellent embodiment of these ideas. That's what The Little Prince is to me, essentially: a yardstick of my own growth and development as an individual, guarding against my own Baobabs and learning the value of my own planets and volcanoes.

There is one thing to note, though - when I finally read it the third time, it was just as potent. I was busy, sure, but I still felt the same things and understood the plights of the characters in a new, more mature sense.  I wrote that last line in order to discuss the feeling of deterioration and loss, but in reality, I feel like I have not grown old, nor do I expect to within this lifetime. The Little Prince is an excellent book that grows with you in the most remarkable ways, but keeps you rooted to your childhood, and that is why it is significant to me.