The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first publishedThe Little Princein 1943, only a year before his Lockheed P-38 vanished over the Mediterranean  during a reconnaissance mission. More than a half century later, this fable of  love and loneliness has lost none of its power. The narrator is a downed pilot  in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His  efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little, well, prince, who  asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't  dare disobey," the narrator recalls. "Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from  all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen  out of my pocket." And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's  imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.The Little Prince describes his journey from planet to planet, each tiny world  populated by a single adult. It's a wonderfully inventive sequence, which evokes  not only the great fairy tales but also such monuments of postmodern whimsy as  Italo Calvino'sInvisible  Cities. And despite his tone of gentle bemusement, Saint-Exupéry  pulls off some fine satiric touches, too. There's the king, for example, who  commands the Little Prince to function as a one-man (or one-boy) judiciary:I have good reason to believe that there is an old rat living somewhere on my  planet. I hear him at night. You could judge that old rat. From time to time you  will condemn him to death. That way his life will depend on your justice. But  you'll pardon him each time for economy's sake. There's only one rat.The author pokes similar fun at a businessman, a geographer, and a lamplighter,  all of whom signify some futile aspect of adult existence. Yet his tale is  ultimately a tender one--a heartfelt exposition of sadness and solitude, which  never turns intoPeter Pan-style treacle. Such delicacy of tone can  present real headaches for a translator, and in her1943 translation, Katherine  Woods sometimes wandered off the mark, giving the text a slightly wooden or  didactic accent. Happily, Richard Howard (who did a fine nip-and-tuck job on  Stendhal'sThe Charterhouse of  Parmain 1999) has streamlined and simplified to wonderful effect. The  result is a new and improved version of an indestructible classic, which also  restores the original artwork to full color. "Trying to be witty," we're told at  one point, "leads to lying, more or less." But Saint-Exupéry's drawings  offer a handy rebuttal: they're fresh, funny, and like the book itself,  rigorously truthful.--James Marcus