Page 131 - Gullivers

aimed at adults, examples include Alexander King’s 1929 edition from
The Limited Editions Club; Rex Whistler’s edition first published in 1930 and reissued in 1984; the collectors’ edition from the Folio Society with full-page colour lithographs by Edward Bawden, published in 1948; and most recently
Chris Riddell’s 2004 edition, with an appeal for adults and children alike, discussed
in Celia Keenan’s chapter in this volume. Several of these illustrated editions have been acquired for Dublin city’s collections and are available for research. For a
fuller discussion of some of the more noteworthy illustrators see Valerie Coghlan’s chapter ‘Picturing Gulliver’.
Gulliver’s Travels has been translated into scores of languages. The speed with which new translations followed the original publication is noteworthy, some just months after the first edition was published. French and Dutch translations made their appearance in January 1727, published in The Hague, and a French translation was published in Paris in March 1727. The first German translation appeared in Hamburg in 1727, and the first Italian translation was published in Venice in 1729. Other translations into
European languages continued throughout the eighteenth century, making it an international best-seller. A copy of Voyages du Capitaine Lemuel Gulliver en Divers Pays Eloignez, published in The Hague in 1730, was purchased by John Gilbert.
The imaginative influence of the book became apparent quickly. A sequel was written in French by the Abbé Pierre- François Guyot Desfontaines in 1730:
Le Nouveau Gulliver, ou Voyage de Jean Gulliver, Fils du Capitaine Gulliver, traduit
d’un manuscrit anglois par Monsieur
L.D.F. It purported to describe a voyage undertaken by Lemuel Gulliver’s son,
John. The Abbé Desfontaines was a correspondent of Swift’s and he translated the original work into French; many eighteenth-century French editions contain the sequel as the final part of the Travels. Two early French editions are available in the Dublin city collections, the first edition in two volumes, published in Paris in 1730 and an engraved edition in four volumes published in Paris in 1813. The first two volumes of the 1813 edition contain
Swift’s Gulliver while volumes three and four contain Desfontaines’ sequel. This sequel had a contemporary popularity and was translated into other languages
First edition 1726
VI. Dublin City Public Libraries’ Swist Collection
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