Description

INSCRIBED BY T. S. ELIOT IN THE YEAR OF PUBLICATION TO HIS FRIEND AND GERMAN TRANSLATOR OF THE WASTE LAND

ELIOT, T.S. The Confidential Clerk. London: Faber & Faber, (1954). Octavo, original blue cloth, original dust jacket.

First edition, inscribed by Eliot in the year of publication to his friend and German translator of The Waste Land, renowned literary scholar and philologist Ernst Robert Curtius: “To Ernst Robert Curtius with most cordial regards & admiration, from his friend T.S. Eliot, 23.iii.54.”

One of Eliot’s later comic plays, The Confidential Clerk was first produced at the 1953 Edinburgh Festival, in a version slightly shorter than this expanded first publication. Eliot’s plays “are in a blank verse of his own invention, in which the metrical effect is not apprehended apart from the sense; thus he brought ‘poetic drama’ back to the popular stage” (Britannica). Gallup A64a. Ernst Robert Curtius was Eliot’s friend and translator, an internationally respected literary scholar and philologist whose 1948 work European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (translated into English in 1953) remains a standard text. On the occasion of his friend’s death in 1956, Eliot wrote: “Certainly, in common with other English and French writers, I owe him a great debt, and perhaps I owe him more than does any other: for it was he who first brought my work to the notice of the German public? I have my own personal debt of gratitude to acknowledge to Curtius, for translating, and introducing, The Waste Land. Curtius was also, I think, the first critic in Germany to recognize the importance of James Joyce? Only a critic of scholarship, discrimination and intellect could perform the services that Curtius has performed” (Freundesgabe für ERC, 1956).

Book fine, dust jacket with one short closed tear at spine, bright and fine. An excellent inscribed association copy.