The Execrable Speech

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1894-1961).

Bagatelle per un massacro. Milan, Edizioni Corbaccio, 16 April 1938.

8° (194x125 mm). 335, [1] pages. Original publisher’s wrappers. A very good, uncut copy, marginal foxing, minor wear to extremities of upper cover.

Provenance: twentieth-century label ‘Casa del Libro Dott. Leandro Benussi & Co’ on the lower cover; twentieth-century label ‘Libreria del Castello’ on the front pastedown.

First edition of the Italian translation of Bagatelles pour un massacre, the controversial pamphlet by French writer and doctor Louis- Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, better known as Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Céline worked as a doctor in Paris’s poorer districts: “from his first-hand knowledge of the sufferings of the Parisian poor, Destouches might have been expected to sympathize with socialism but instead he identified increasingly with right wing politics in the run up to, and during, the Second World War” (N. Chare, Execrable Speech: Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Bagatelles pour un massacre, p. 53).

Céline’s pamphlet, which presents his extreme anti-Semitism, was first printed in its original language in 1937, contributing to the acclimatization, in France, to the anti-Jewish legislation of the future Vichy regime.

The Italian translation presented here was produced by the Piedmontese writer Luigi Alessio (1902-1962), who published his work under the penname Alex Alexis. He had a tormented life: in 1920 he abandoned his studies to join Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863- 1938) in his Fiume enterprise, participating in the epilogue of that venture. Since then he had spent his life between Turin and Paris, studying, founding periodicals and writing, but always struggling. Despite Alexis’s Italian language being influenced by the prose of the bookish D’Annunzio, the rhetoric he employs is far from Céline’s shocking revolutionary speech, yet the translation still represents an interesting testament to Céline’s reception in Italy.

N. Chare, “Execrable Speech: Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Bagatelles pour un Massacre”, Textual Ethos Studies: Or Locating Ethics, 26 (2005), pp. 53-66.