COCTEAU Jean - Lot 12

Lot 12
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COCTEAU Jean - Lot 12
COCTEAU Jean Autograph MANUSCRIT, The Cape of Good Hope and Poems,[1915-1917]; 9 albums in-fol. (31.5 x 23.2 cm) with beige cloth cover, drawing albums with detachable sheets (Chapron Coquelin Sucr brand). Important complete manuscript of a very first version of the poem The Cape of Good Hope, with superb graphics. In this long poem, written during the Great War in homage to his friend Roland GARROS, Cocteau poetically transposed, with a magnificent formal freedom, the experience of air flights, with interesting research to graphically translate (then typographically, following Mallarmé) the movement and speed in the living space of the page. Cocteau considered The Cape of Good Hope to be his first real book, after disavowing his first three collections. The notebooks are numbered by Cocteau on the cover in green ink from 1 to 8 and 8 bis. On the first notebook, he wrote the title in capital letters: VOCABULAR. POESIA, and in Book 6: THE CAP OF GOOD HOPE. The first notebook is a kind of setting in motion the great poem, in search of an inventiveness in the layout of the poetic text. According to Pierre Caizergues, the manuscript of the other eight notebooks gives "the oldest state of the poem", cut into songs, to which Cocteau added a "Dedication" and a "Preamble": "the eight songs themselves succeed each other in the same order as the original edition. This manuscript has many variants[...]. They concern the lexicon or syntax of the text itself, but also the way in which it occupies the space of the page: crosswording, various geometric arrangements, games on simultaneity" (Complete poetic works, Bibl. de la Pléiade, p. 1562). Booklet No. 1, in purple ink, contains six contemporary Cape Town pieces. It contains the primitive versions of three poems from Poésies (1917-1920) (Éditions de la Sirène, 1920), two poems from Embarcadères (Fata Morgana, 1986, after another manuscript), and a poem on PICASSO that seems unpublished. With the
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