'Adolphe' de Benjamin Constant: postérité d'un roman (1816–2016) de Léonard Burnand et Guillaume Poisson (review)

The year 2016 was the bicentenary of the first publication of Adolphe. This lavishly illustrated volume, a cross visually between a collection of essays accompanying an exhibition catalogue and an auction house or antiquarian bookseller's catalogue, contains some twenty short essays by scholars from across the globe, grouped in four sections: 'Éditer Adolphe'; 'Traduire Adolphe'; 'Réécrire Adolphe'; 'Adapter Adolphe'. As these headings suggest, the collective concern is not with textual interpretation, but with the work's publishing history, its translation, and examples of creative endeavour it has inspired across various art forms: illustrated editions of the novel itself, further works of fiction, adaptations for the stage or screen, and even a bande dessinée. The essays are largely pièces de circonstance, with the authors enjoying a free hand in their approach to their brief. A number of contributors are content to offer factual surveys, while others adopt a more individual focus on a particular aspect or facet. Constant specialists will learn little that is new about their author and his novel, although Paul Delbouille's survey of the editions of Adolphe published in the author's lifetime provides an authoritative starting point for the advanced student, editor, or translator faced with a choice of text to adopt. The section on translations visits the UK and the USA, Germany, Spain, Hungary, Japan, and Iran. In the last three cases, the principal interest consists of the information divulged about the politico-cultural conditions prevailing in these countries at the time of the translations in question. The recent German translator of Adolphe, Eveline Passet, discourses on Constant's use of the colon and, with the aid of insights provided by modern grammarians, makes suggestive reference to other writers. Cecil Courtney and Paul Rowe adduce significant information about Constant's Edinburgh acquaintance, Alexander Walker, and his translation of Adolphe, although they also survey, more summarily, the English-language versions that have appeared since. The absence of consideration of Italian translations is compensated for by the disinterment of a short-lived operatic adaptation, Héllera by Italo Montemezzi in collaboration with Puccini's librettist, Luigi Illica, which was first performed in Turin in March 1909.Discussionof the inherently fascinating phenomenon of literary reworkings of the novel encompasses the versions by Constant's great-grand-nephew Guy de Pourtalès, Ève Gonin, Anita Brookner, Jacques Chessex, and Camille Laurens. Arguably the most revealing discussion of a tributary text is Silvia Lorusso's reading of Sophie Gay's now little-read novel Ellénore (1844–46). Gérard Gengembre's pertinent spotlight on Balzac's La Muse du département nonetheless omits reference to Alison Fairlie's discussion of the same subject ('Constant's Adolphe read by Balzac and Nerval', in Imagination and Language: Collected Essays on Constant, Baudelaire, Nerval, and Flaubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 80–95). Readers of François Rosset's hatchet job on Stanislas d'Otremont's novel La Polonaise (Paris: Julliard: 1957) are unlikely to be motivated to attempt a counter-assessment. The adaptations for the stage or cinema invariably start from the challenge presented by the lack of dialogue in Constant's novel. The volume is not without its attraction as a curiosity shop and may well inspire further research as well as appealing as it stands to aficionados of the novel and to bibliophiles.