Le Petit Prince

Is this really a children's book?

Damn, I have so many complicated feelings right now just after rereading this tiny book after two years.

Well, it dissected my thoughts and beliefs.

And yes, like swallowing a bitter tonic, it's making me think about what I am and what I believe. All. Over. Again.

The first time I read this book I didn't make much out of it. I remember feeling it was rather too serious and dull.

But when life gets really serious and dull like now, the funky 2020, this book is like taking its revenge on me like "See, you gotta understand me." And yes, understand it better, I did!

Reading this book made me sad because it speaks the truth. And we are always (well, most of the time ☺️) uncomfortable with the truth. It's making me see how pretentious we grownups tend to get when in real we get happy with M&Ms and singing rhymes (without our unrealistic fears and hopeless comparisons of course!).

I need to reread this book again. It's something I need to do to understand myself better and the people around me.

This book makes sense in a way no human interaction will make me understand our human nature. All the damn useless things and the pretense we put on all our lives. All the mere unpretentious delights we tend to overlook because the rest of us do not seem to approve of.

Why am I so damn emotional now?

(The reason why I don't want to write reviews just after reading a book. But yes, I need to write reviews just after reading a book because the feelings and emotions right there is like the little prince: confused but being his true self.)

Relectura de sábado con mis hijos. Tenía muchas ganas de leerlo con ellos, a mi me ha encantado como la primera vez que lo leí siendo un niño y sigue pareciéndome un relato precioso y una lectura muy emotiva.

Es un libro para hacernos reflexionar, a grandes y pequeños, y para hablar largo y tendido de cada una de sus lineas con ellos.

Al final hemos sacado nuestras propias conclusiones:

n  - Las personas grandes son decididamente muy, pero muy extrañas.n

n  - Los ojos están ciegos, es necesario buscar con el corazón.n

Me alegro mucho de, siendo una persona grande, seguir recordando que antes fui un niño.

I can easily see why this is one of my moms favorite books. I loved the nonsensical nature of an alien little prince traveling to our planet mixed with his insightful view of the human condition. I will say, there were a couple points in the story that reminded me this was written a while ago and is a product of its time, but overall still an incredible read.

I have read only three books which I felt were magical: One Hundred Years of Solitude, To Kill a Mockingbird and this one. However, what separates this from the other two is that this is a book for all ages.

There was a magazine called "Imprint" (now defunct) during my childhood, in India. It used to publish literary articles and stories. My father got official copies and he brought them home regularly. One issue contained this story, and he gave it to me for reading. I was maybe 10-12 at that time.

It left an indelible impression on my mind: I was sad for the little prince and his proud rose, and constantly worried whether the goat would eat it. I chuckled at the silly grownups on the various planets, following their inane pursuits. I was sad when the fox and the prince had to separate, after he had tamed it. And I broke down and cried at the end.

I read this book again after a long time... and suddenly realised that I had become one of those adults on the asteroids. I was still sad after reading it-but now the sorrow had a deeper meaning. It was the death of childhood that I was reading about.

This book is an absolute treasure.

Postscript

July 22, 2015 - I gave this book to my son a couple of days back. Hopefully he'll read it - he has yet to fully transform into a silly grown-up.

[Original review, Jul 24 2018]

This month, three plotlines in my life collided. I know Swedish and Norwegian well, and I'd thought vaguely from time to time that I'd like to learn Icelandic too; I've always been a great admirer of Tolkien, and I knew he had been interested in Icelandic; and I have a couple of Icelandic friends. But none of this had ever come to anything. Last week, however, Jupiter aligned with Mars and I entered the Age of Aquarius. I'd just finished reading n  Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earthn, which has many striking passages in Icelandic, Old Norse and Old English, and our friend K happened to be on Iceland. Fired with enthusiasm by Tolkien's love of these obscure but wonderfully poetic languages, I asked K if she could possibly get me one or two Icelandic children's books. I just don't know how to thank her: she turned up with not one or two but half a dozen books, including my favorite, Le petit prince. I spent the next few days carrying it with me everywhere, snatching all opportunities to try to make sense out of it.

For people who don't know anything about Icelandic, it has the same ancestor as Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. A thousand years ago they were the same language. But the mainland languages have evolved at a normal rate, while Icelandic, on its faraway island, has changed relatively little; so if you speak Swedish or Norwegian, it's like trying to read a language which for an English-speaker would be somewhere between Chaucer and Beowulf. You recognise a few of the words at once, others are more or less mangled, and still others are completely unfamiliar. The first impression is that it makes no sense at all. But I know Le petit prince, and I started trying to guess what word was what, just reading without looking anything up.

It was amazing to see how well this worked. For example, let me show you the following sentence:

Þar sem ég hafði adrei teiknað kind dró ég upp fyrir hann aðra af þeim tveimur myndum sem ég var fær að gera: myndina af kyrkislöngunni utanverði.

The first time I saw this, there were only a couple of words I felt at all sure about. Upp and var must be the same words as in Swedish ("up" and "was"). I soon figured out that ég was "I" (it is the same word in some Norwegian dialects), að was att ("that"), and hann was han ("he/him"). The words mynd and kind weren't like anything I recognised, but they were common, and having already come across them I realised they must be "drawing" and "sheep". As I read the book for the second time, the other words gradually fell into place too, and after a while I could read it as sort-of-Swedish:

Då som jag hadde aldrig tecknad får drog jag upp för honom den-andra av dem två teckningarna som jag var för att göra: teckningen av pytonormen utifrån.

which I might render into sort-of-English as:

Then as I had never drawn sheep pulled I up for him the-second of the two drawings which I was able-to make: the-drawing of the-python from-outside.

I recalled that there was a sentence something like this near the beginning of the story: it all made sense.

How does it work? I've been reading deep learning theory, and it's tempting to conceptualise it in terms of strengthening of neural pathways. I see a word I don't know, and I think of some words it could be: aðra to a Swedish-speaker first looks like ådra, "vein", and you only later think of andra, "second". This word occurs quite often. "Vein" never makes any sense, but "second" often makes good sense. So the pathway for ådra never gets strengthened but the one for andra does, and after a while my eyes just start seeing it as andra. The same thing happened with numerous other words. As I'm sure many language geeks will attest, it is such a weird and interesting feeling to find the sense emerging from words which initially looked like gibberish! I'm sorry if I've gone into too much detail here, but I wanted to explain what I mean when I say it's like doing drugs. You actually feel the text changing your state of consciousness.

Well, I'm hooked. Though so far, I've just barely started: the grammar is still a mystery to me. All the same, on my latest read-through I notice that the endings of nouns and verbs, which are first looked quite random, now seem to be displaying some recurrent patterns...
_________________________
[Update, Aug 6 2018]

I have been making efforts to understand in more quantitative terms what I've been doing here. First, I thought it would be a good exercise to try copying out the text of Litli prinsinn: this would force me to look carefully at every letter, and also give me a machine-readable version that I could analyse. I'm now about three-quarters of the way through (he has just said goodbye to the fox). I tried running my incomplete corpus, which contains about ten thousand words, through a script that Not and I developed last year.

The script is simple but quite useful. It counts frequencies for all the words in the corpus, then builds a hyperlinked concordance which shows me up to ten examples for each word. Every word is clickable, so I can take a word I'm unsure of in a sentence and see examples of that word in other contexts. There is a master index which lists all the words in descending frequency order. Here are the first 50 lines. The 'Freq' column gives the number of times the word occurs, and the 'Cumul' column gives the cumulative frequency:




All of these 50 words (to be exact, some of them are punctuation marks) are now very familiar to me, and as you can see they make up more than 50% of the text. I tried walking down the list to see when I stopped feeling confident. I can go as far as words with four or five occurrences, and I think I know what nearly all of them mean; that brings me up to about 400 words, and 75% of the total. When I look at words occurring two or three times, I start to feel uncertain, but I still think I know the majority of them. That gets me to 900 words and 86%. The 1600 words which only occur once are of course the hardest; but even here I feel I can guess a lot, perhaps a third to a half of them.

Copying out the text has sharpened my understanding of the grammar a good deal, and now I recognise quite a few endings. Though I'm still pretty hazy about the nouns. With multiple genders, multiple cases and marking for definiteness, there are many combinations, and I only know the most common ones.

It's surprising that one can extract so much information from a tiny sample of just ten thousand words. I'll see if I have the patience to finish this and then do Ævintýri Lísu í Undralandi as well...
___________________________________
[Update, Aug 8 2018]

I have finished copying out the text of Litli prins; the file now contains about 14,200 words and about 3,050 unique words. I made a small improvement to our script, so that it now creates an alphabetical index as well. This is very useful for finding copying errors: if I see two words close together which are almost the same, that often means that one of them is an error. Tidying up my copied text is not as tedious as I thought it would be. It's forcing me to look very carefully at everything and consolidate my extremely sketchy vocabulary.

I am sure there are still many errors left, but after this initial cleaning up pass I can look at my alphabetical index and get further on trying to understand the grammar. Here's a section showing forms of the word stjarna, "star", which occurs often in Litli prins.



Some of these are compound nouns: for example, stjörnufræðingur, literally "star-ologist" is "astronomer", and stjarnfræðiþingi, "star-ology-thing" is "astronomical congress". But what are all the others, most of which look like inflected forms? I can click on any of them and get a hyperlinked page of examples. For example, let's look at the page for stjörnu, which occurs 15 times:



I see that occurrences of stjörnu usually come after a preposition. For example, we have Hann hefir aldrei horft á stjörnu, "He has never looked at stjörnu", or En þú ert hreinn og þú kemur frá stjörnu, "But you are pure and you come from stjörnu". Most of the others are similar. Hm, looks like this is a dative singular? My suspicions are reinforced by the fact that Swedish used to have a dative; it disappeared long ago, but still survives in a couple of fixed expressions like till salu, "for sale", which has this -u ending.

Still a great deal more grammar to figure out! There are some improvements to the script that I hope to add soon, and which might help...
___________________________________
[Update, Aug 12 2018]

I have added another little improvement to our script. It now creates a hyperlinked version of the original text, with the words colour-marked to show how frequently they occurred in the text you've read so far. The initial version uses four colours. Words are in black if they occur more than five times, blue if they occur four or five times, green if they occur two or three times, and red if they occur once. Here's an example, the start of the visit to the Drunkard:



The colours let you see at a glance approximately how well I now understand the text. Look at the first paragraph:

Á þriðja hnettinum bjó drykkjumaður. Heimsóknin þangað var mjög stutt, en hún fyllti litla prinsinn miklu þunglyndi.

(At the-third planet lived drunkard. The-visit there was very ?short, but it filled the-little prince much ?depression)

Black words like hnettinum ("planet", I think in the dative) and mjög ("very") are quite familiar, and I am reasonably confident that I've guessed the green and blue ones correctly. Only two words, stutt ("short"?) and þunglyndi ("depression"?) are in red, and these are indeed the ones I feel least certain about. I'm pretty much guessing stutt from context. I'm more confident about þunglyndi, since I know from other examples that þung, cognate to Swedish tung, is "heavy", lyndi is probably something related to Swedish lynne, "spirit", and there is a Swedish word tungsint, "heavy-spirited/depressed".

This was an easier passage than average, and usually there is more red. But it feels motivating to think that, as I copy out more text and process it through the script, the red tide should start to recede...

[To Ævintýri Lísu í Undralandi ]

There's a huge place in my heart for this little world-in-a-book; I read it first when I was wee, again many times since. A review won't do it justice, so I'll quote one of my favorite passages and risk sentimentality:
---
"Nothing is perfect," sighed the fox.
But he came back to his idea.
"My life's very monotonous," he said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me.
All chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike.
And in consequence, I am a little bored.
But if you tame me, it'll be as if the sun came to shine on my life.
I shall know the sound of a step that'll be different from all the others.
Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground.
Yours will call me, like music out of my burrow.
And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder?
I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me.
The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad.
But you have hair that is the color of gold.
Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me!
The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you.
And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…"
---

Yes, I know!!

I know this book is a piece of brilliance and it supposed to be everyone's favorite, but for me, it is just....



I'm sorry, Little Prince.

Πόσο γλυκό!
Πόσο τρυφερό!
Και πόσο συγκινητικό!
Εντάξει, το παραδέχομαι, έκλαψα... λίγο.
Όσο το διάβαζα, χαμογελούσα σαν χαζή. Ευχόμουν να ξαναγίνω έτσι, αθώα!
Δεν ήθελα να τελειώσει με αυτό τον τρόπο, αλλά ξέρω ότι αυτό έπρεπε να γίνει.
Αγάπησα αυτό το μικρό βιβλίο για τα μεγάλα διδάγματα του και τα συναισθήματα που γεννά με τον πιο παιδικό τρόπο!
Θα το διάβαζα και θα το ξαναδιάβαζα και θα το ξαναδιάβαζα
Και θα το ξαναδιαβάσω
Ευχαριστώ για το τόσο όμορφο δώρο :)