Open All Night - Paul Morand (Signed by Vyvyan Holland)
MORAND, Paul. Open All Night. London: Chapman and Dodd, 1923.
Second English edition (first published in French in 1922; first English translation issued in 1923). Translated from the original French by H.B.V. (Vyvyan Holland)
Inscribed and signed by the translator: ‘To J.G. Millward. With best wishes from the translator, Vyvyan Holland. May 1924.’ Vyvyan Holland (Vyvyan Oscar Beresford Wilde)(1886-1967) was an accomplished translator, writer, and son of Oscar Wilde.
Holland's translation of Open All Night has been praised as ‘one of those rare translations which make it unnecessary to read the original' (Desmond MacCarthy). Holland's talent reflected his ancestry - both Oscar Wilde and Wilde's parents having been accomplished translators. Like them, he sought to enrich English literature by making little-known foreign works of artistic merit accessible. (ODNB)
Paul Morand (1888-1976) was a French diplomat and writer, whose stylish prose was admired by Proust and Pound. Morand married Romanian Princess Hélène Soutzo, one of Proust’s friends and muses. The Princess was renowned for hosting glamorous dinners at the Ritz. The famous diarist Henry 'Chips' Channon attended one of Princess's dinners in 1918, where he found himself seated between Proust and Cocteau, and confessed to having 'felt stupid between the two wittiest men in Europe'.
Open All Night is a collection of six stories told in the first person by the male narrator, as he travels through Europe in the aftermath of the First World War and encounters his beautiful but doomed heroines.
220 pp. 8vo, original cloth, spine faded, lettering rubbed. Endpapers browned. Very good.