Description
INSCRIBED BY T. S. ELIOT IN THE YEAR OF PUBLICATION
TO HIS FRIEND AND GERMAN TRANSLATOR OF THE WASTE LAND
ELIOT, T.S. Murder in the Cathedral. London: Faber & Faber, (1935). Octavo, original purple cloth, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box.
First complete edition of Eliot’s best and most successful play, 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 from T.S. Eliot, 5.vi.35.”
Widely regarded as Eliot’s best play—and certainly his most successful—Murder in the Cathedral is his dramatization of the 12th-century murder of Thomas à Becket. 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). Preceded only by a somewhat abbreviated edition of 750 copies in wrappers “printed for sale at performances of the play in Canterbury Cathedral” in May, one month prior to the present Faber & Faber hardcover edition (Gallup). Gallup A29b. 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).
Light foxing to edges, spine toned, cloth clean; price-clipped dust jacket with chip to slightly darkened spine head, extremely good. A scarce and desirable inscribed association copy.
