Translation of and introduction to "Féerie pour une autre fois" by Louis-Ferdinand Céline : "Fable for another time" / by Mary Regina Hudson.

This doctoral thesis in French for the CUNY Graduate Center consists of the translation of and commentary upon "Feerie pour une autre fois I", the first in the two-book series (the second being "Feerie pour une autre fois II: Normance") written by Louis-Ferdinand Celine when he was a prisoner in Copenhagen in 1946-47 due to his pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic writings before World War II. Until this doctoral thesis it had remained untranslated in English. It was undertaken with the cooperation of Professor Henri Godard of the Sorbonne, editor of the Pleiade edition of Celine's works. Inasmuch as it can be said that the novel has a story line, this book essentially expresses the author's rage at being imprisoned and his nostalgia for his former freedom and his beloved home in Montmartre, Paris. However, the importance of the book lies not in its narrative content but in the fact that it explores and stretches to the limit certain meta-verbal aspects of the French language like its musicality and capacity for phonetic word play. The author chose this tactic in pursuance of his stated aim to reproduce the poetry of the spoken language into written form, a phenomenon which presents major difficulties for the translator. Although much of the word play is necessarily lost in translation, the aim was to convey in English the mood, tone and humor of the original French and to bring out as much a possible the story line buried in the text. The commentary addressed the question of the author's place in the canon of French and European literature, the book's place in the author's oeuvre, and the specific choices made by the translator in dealing with the peculiar semantic, syntactic, topical and punctuation problems presented by the text.