By the time Doré’s edition saw publication, Poe’s most famous work had already achieved recognition as one of the greatest American poems. Its author, however, had died over thirty years previous in near-poverty. A catalog description from a Penn State Library holding of one of Doré’s “Raven” editions compares the two artists:

Rabelais, François (1994). Gargantua and Pantagruel: translated from the French by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux; with an introduction by Terence Cave. Translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux. Everyman's Library. p.324. ISBN 9781857151817. Published roughly a decade after the death of François Rabelais, a prominent writer and humanist in France, Les songes drolatiques was attributed to Rabelais by its publisher. Its title refers to the title character of Rabelais' most famous work, Pantagruel, and Breton claims in the preface that the pictures represent the last works of Rabelais before he died. [1] The word "drolatic" is an archaic term coming from French "drolatique", meaning "humorous" or "amusing". In the title it functions as an adjective for "dream", suggesting that the images were supposed to have been taken from the dreams of the giant Pantagruel. [2] Contents [ edit ] How the Inca Used Intricately-Knotted Cords, Called Khipu, to Write Their Histories, Send Messages & Keep Records It was with a similar intention and rhetorical use that Francisco de Quevedo gave the title Sueños to his poems written between 1606 and 1623, although among his work it is perhaps La hora de todos y la Fortuna con seso which would fit the best the woodcuts of Desprez. It is enough to read besides woodcut number 32 the tenth fragment of La hora de todos, or the following sonnet criticizing a woman wearing a fashionable crinoline.

Left-Handed : the Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel

The translation is also extremely free. Urquhart's rendering of the first three books is half as long again as the original. Many of the additions spring from a cheerful espousal of Rabelais's copious style. [...] Le Motteux is a little more restrained, but he too makes no bones about adding material of his own. [...] It is a literary work in its own right. [2] That latter quality belies the seven years of literary labor Joyce put into the book, all of it distilled into the events of a single day in Dublin, June 16, 1904, as experienced by Bloom, an “ordinary advertising agent” and a Jew among Catholics; the “rebellious and misanthropic intellectual” Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter-ego and the hero of his previous novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and Leopold’s “passionate, amorous, frank-speaking” wife Molly. (Payne represents Dedalus with Raoul Haussman’s The Art Critic and Molly with Hannah Höch’s Indian Dancer.) In this framework, Joyce delivers kaleidoscopic detail, from the quotidian to the mythological and the sexual to the scatological, all with a formal and linguistic bravado that has kept the reading experience of Ulysses fresh for 101 years and counting. Frame's edition, according to Terence Cave, "is to be recommended not only because it contains the complete works but also because the translator was an internationally renowned specialist in French Renaissance studies". [2] Donald M. Frame, with his own translation, calls Putnam's edition "arguably the best we have"; [c] but notes that "English versions of Rabelais [...] all have serious weaknesses". [30] Cohen [ edit ] a b c d e f g Parkin, John (2004). The Rabelais Encyclopedia. Edited by Elizabeth Chesney Zegura. Greenwood Publishing Group. p.122. ISBN 9780313310348.

You can see a great many of Doré’s illustrations for Gargantua and Pantagruel at Wikimedia Commons. The simultaneous extravagance and repugnance of the series’ medieval France may seem impossibly distant to us, but it can hardly have felt like yesterday to Doré either, given that he was working three centuries after Rabelais. On Tool Island, the people are so fat they slit their skin to allow the fat to puff out. At the next island they are imprisoned by Furred Law-Cats, and escape only by answering a riddle. Nearby, they find an island of lawyers who nourish themselves on protracted court cases. In the Queendom of Whims, they uncomprehendingly watch a living-figure chess match with the miracle-working and prolix Queen Quintessence. We noted earlier that Desprez’s designs unites the grotteschi of Italian and French humanists with the medieval drôleries, still alive in the popular tradition. This practice of the educated decorator is revealed in the execution of even the slightest details of the woodcuts, in his tendency to the arabesque, the flight of the feathers and plumes, the gracefulness of the lines of tapes and herbs. The drawings are loaded with a rhythm that lends lightness to these figures, while a different, heavier line would make them excessively sober, and even sinister. Many of them show how a seemingly superfluous stroke contributes to the definition of a gesture, the suggestion of movement, the balance of the composition, the playful associations. Rabelais, François (1999). The Complete Works of François Rabelais: translated from the French by Donald M. Frame; with a foreword by Raymond C. La Charité. Translated by Donald M. Frame. University of California Press. p. 3. ISBN 9780520064010.Breton’s decision to resist the urge to add any text to the images was a more serious and complex one than it seems. Note that we are in a world which fervently wanted to exploit the multimedia potential of the union of picture and text both as a mean of persuasion and as that of the ars memorandi, fixing things in the memory. The fundamental model of this combination was the emblem with its threefold structure where the central pictura was encircled by an inscriptio and a subscriptio, and with its established habits of reading. For a publisher it was therefore difficult to avoid the addition of some text. Rabelais grammairien. De l'histoire du texte aux problèmes d'authenticité", Mirelle Huchon, in Etudes Rabelaisiennes XVI, Geneva, 1981 a b Rabelais, François (2006). Gargantua and Pantagruel: Translated and edited with an Introduction and Notes by M. A. Screech. Translated by M. A. Screech. Penguin Books Ltd. p.xlii. ISBN 9780140445503. Odsbody! On this bureau of mine my paymaster had better not play around with stretching the esses, or my fists would go trotting all over him! [35] Screech [ edit ] Copsbody, this is not the Carpet whereon my Treasurer shall be allowed to play false in his Accompts with me, by setting down an X for an V, or an L for an S; for in that case, should I make a hail of Fisti-cuffs to fly into his face. [31] Smith [ edit ]