Gennie Luccioni, writer, critic, reader and translator at Éditions du Seuil, or the editorial birth of the bestseller Le Petit Monde de don Camillo
Viviana Agostini-Ouafi
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Title
Gennie Luccioni, writer, critic, reader and translator at Éditions du Seuil, or the editorial birth of the bestseller Le Petit Monde de don Camillo
Abstract
The life and work of Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni (1912-2005), a feminist writer and Freudian psychoanalyst who became famous even abroad from the 1970s onwards, have been little explored with regard to the beginnings of her intellectual and professional career. To fill this gap, this contribution focuses on the period 1945-1951, during which Lemoine-Luccioni collaborated with the journal Esprit and the Éditions du Seuil as a writer, literary critic, editorial reader and translator, signing her writings as Gennie Luccioni. She contributed to the French success of Giovanni Guareschi’s works, in particular by translating the adventures of Don Camillo and the communist mayor Peppone. The first volume, Le Petit Monde de don Camillo (1951), quickly became a bestseller, with 800,000 copies sold, and in its wake gave rise to a rich film production. To recover this period of her life and prevent it from being lost to editorial memory and rendered invisible, we consulted the Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni and Éditions du Seuil collections held at the IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine) archives in Normandy. The editorial genesis of this famous translation will thus be illustrated, among other things, through the study of unpublished documents.
Keywords
Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, Éditions du Seuil, history of translation, Le Petit Monde de don Camillo, history of book publishing