NIGHTWOOD
Inscribed later edition of Barnes's great Modernist classic, an association copy with Barnes's handwritten postcard to literary critic Hans Mayer, with several letters and translations sent from Mayer to Barnes.
Near fine in good only jacket.
Price: $1,500.00
NIGHTWOOD
"You are Djuna Barnes, and you have opened your door to me and given me the happiness of seeing your eyes and hearing your voice, and you have given me your work. I thank you." — Mayer
In the early 1970s, Mayer wrote extensively to Barnes, assisted in negotiations with Suhrkamp Verlag, her German publisher, and visited her in person at least once. This copy was inscribed to Jack Oldfield, with whom Mayer co-translated for Barnes a review of the German translation of ANTIPHON, as well as Wolfgang Hildesheimer's note on his German translation of NIGHTWOOD (both laid in). Barnes's Christmas-card ("And to your friend") is also presumably intended for Oldfield via Mayer.
The included letters contain a detailed critique of the German ANTIPHON translation's failings "to carry across the glowing passion inside your text" but Mayer confesses that his "deep love for your work is much too private an affair of my heart for me to come to any conclusions of objectivity and validity. [...] I send you all my love and my best wishes, and so does my friend Jack." In 1975 Mayer published OUTSIDERS, on women, gay men, and Jews in Western literature, his most influential work and the only one to reach an Anglophone readership; an English translation was published in 1982, the year of Djuna Barnes's death. It remains a landmark study of alienation and transgression. Signed copies of Barnes' best-known work are decidedly uncommon. A remarkable association and a revealing collection of materials.
Read more: Ng, "Of Beasts Blond and Damned: Fascist and Hysterical Bodies and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood; Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960.
The Object
New York: New Directions, (1961). 8'' x 5.25''. Original grey-green cloth with gilt-lettered spine. Blue marbled endpapers. Blue topstain. In original unclipped ($5.00) blue dust jacket. 170 pages. Inscribed by Barnes on half-title page: "For Jack with the best wishes of the author - Djuna Barnes / 1972. / Hans gives you the book proper." Additionally present are: 1) Postcard from Barnes to Hans Mayer laid in: "Christmas Greetings - Djuna Barnes / And to your friend." 2) [6]-page photocopied letter from Mayer to Barnes, dated February 1 '72. 3) [4]-page typescript letter (legal size) from Mayer to Barnes, dated September 6, 1972. 4) 2 typescript letters in German from Reinhilde Binz of Suhrkamp Verlag to Mayer, in original envelopes, along with xerox copies of Mayer's responses. 5) typescript letter to Mayer from Wolfgang Hildesheimer, German translator of NIGHTWOOD. 6) Four xerox copies of various translations by Mayer et al. 7) photograph and obituary of Jack Oldfield. Minor toning and offsetting to preliminary leaves of book. Jacket laminated. Spine and edges sunned. Letters, etc. generally very good or better.
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