‘The Little Prince’ turns 80

The admiration for this seemingly simple story has not faded and five million copies are still sold a year today, according to the Gallimard publishing house, which managed to launch the book in France in 1946. Since then it has continued to publish this short novel of barely 120 pages that are admired by readers of all ages and parts of the world, maintain their editorial success and inspire creators who highlight their introspective nature.

The novel, whose number of copies sold is incalculable, is the second most translated book in the world after the Bible, with the last one in 2022 into the Sephardic dialect of Haketi, which brings the number of official translations to 500, according to Gallimard.

The first edition in Spanish was in Argentina, in 1951. And “The Little Prince” can be read in Friulan, Romansh, Ladino, Palatino, Quechua, Konkani, Esperanto, Venetian, Languedocian Occitan, Aragonese, Basque, Galician, Catalan and Asturian.

In the text, delicately illustrated by Saint-Exupéry, childhood is vindicated as a territory in which to recover the essentials and the young Prince talks about it while traveling through planets making friends.

“If it has a universal scope, it is because it deals with universal themes very simply and at the same time with great depth. Among them, perhaps the one that unites us all, which is childhood, the nostalgia of being children”, Pedro Mañas, author of children’s literature, comments to EFE.

Originally published by the New York publisher Reynal & Hitchcock on April 6, 1943 in English, the work deals with love represented in the fragility of a rose or friendship embodied in a fox that wishes to be tamed while instructing humanity in a crisis of values. during world war II.

The adventurer and aviator Saint-Exupery wrote the novel while serving as a military pilot from New York and it would not be until 1946, after his death in a plane crash in 1944, when the book was published in a Europe already liberated from Nazism.

Only then could Leon Werth, an anarchist and Jewish journalist and writer, to whom the author dedicated the work as his best friend, read it.

A fundamental part of the narration are its illustrations, original watercolors by the author that today decorate all kinds of promotional objects related to the character.

For the illustrator María Hesse, it is “a very naive drawing that gives that aspect of returning to childhood.”

The anniversary is remembered by publishers such as Gallimard, which has launched a special collector’s edition with a limited print run of 3,000 copies.

Or Salamandra, responsible for its distribution in Spanish since its birth, which in March published the interactive children’s book “The Little Prince: Where are you fox?” and the English-Spanish version of the work.

WITH INFORMATION FROM EFE.