Stèles from Segalen
Nov 14th, 2013 by houghtonmodern
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.
Among the occupations on Victor Segalen’s multifarious résumé are French naval doctor, anthropologist, ethnographer, literary critic, linguist, and poet. The latter most concerns us here: pictured is Segalen’s Stèles, a collection of prose poems presented as translations of imaginary Chinese stone monuments. To write it, Segalen drew from his residency in China from 1909 to 1914, a period during which he served as personal doctor to the son of the first president of the Republic of China. Each of the “stèles” is headed with a literary phrase in Chinese; these are either taken from classical literature or the monuments that inspired the poems, or composed by Segalen. The poems deal with a range of emotional and spiritual subjects, while hewing to a formal style imitative of Chinese inscriptions.
The Santo Domingo Collection includes two editions of Stèles, with largely identical text blocks: one published in Peking by Pei-Tang in 1912, and the second in Paris by Georges Crès in 1914. Both are limited editions, and are printed on one side of a continuous sheet of accordion-folded leaves, in the style traditional to China and Japan. The 1912 edition is sewn with ribbon into separate decorated paper-covered board covers, while the 1914 edition, shown here, is similarly bound into covers of carved wood.
Stèles: Pei-king: Des presses du Pei-T’ang, 1912. FC9.Se375.912s.
Paris: Georges Crès, 1914. FC9.Se375.914s.
Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.