8vo. 111 pp., French text, translated from Arabic by Charles Pellat revised by Salim Mujais & Abdelaziz Ghozzi, original drawings by Mahmoud Al Obeidi, Note and Introduction by Charles Pellat, Preface by the editors Salim Mujais, Aziz Ghozzi and Badr El-Hage, publisher’s original wrappers, NEW, copy in mint condition, published and printed by Kutub Ltd and Abencerage Editions, in Beirut and Tunis, 2022.

Synopsis

From the introduction: “… The long story – or the short novel – of which we are offered a translation, summarises Gibran’s thought and art; it is the work of a thinker, a philosopher, a poet and an artist who handles with ease a language deliberately simplified, but colourful as desired. The Lebanese clergy is not moved by the attacks of which it is the object, and the readers whose taste is not distorted by snobbery which requires above all a rare and difficult vocabulary, find Gibran’s prose enjoyable. They understand it easily, and the lasting success of this work can be judged by its numerous reissues. Transposed into French, it loses much of its flavour; the title itself needed to be modified because it is now quite antiquated: The broken wings, and above all, while striving to respect the original style, we have been forced to lighten a good number of passages where a cascade of comparisons risked offending western taste… “ [Charles Pellat].
Charles Pellat (1914 – 1992) was an Algerian-born French academic, historian, translator, and scholar of Oriental studies, specialised in Arab studies and Islamic studies. He was professor of Arabic at the Collège Louis le Grand from 1947 to 1951, at the École des langues orientales from 1951 to 1956, and at the Sorbonne from 1956 to 1978. In 1984 he became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
He was a contributing editor to several articles of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, published by Brill Academic Publishers; throughout his career, he had translated several works written in Arabic by the classical Muslim scholar al-Jāḥiẓ (781-869 CE) into French, he wrote Introduction à l’arabe moderne, Langue et littérature arabes, L’ arabe vivant, Recueil de textes tirés de la presse arabe, La Vie d’un Arabisant…