NADJA - COMPARISON OF NADJA EDITIONS 1928/1963

par Henri Béhar

February 11, 2022

Readers and critics have wondered about the reasons that led André Breton to modify the text and even the illustrations of his volume dedicated to the one who called herself Nadja, because it is "the beginning of the word hope". Among the various studies of transformations, we have retained that of Claude Martin, "Nadja and the better-saying", Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France, March-April 1972, 72nd Year, n° 2, p. 274-286, notably for textual variants, and that of Jean Arrouye, "Photography in Nadja", Mélusine, n° IV, 1982, p. 121-153, for illustrations. They are both accessible on the Internet, so we dispense with reproducing them here (which does not exclude very inspiring and justified observations).

However, for fifty or even forty years, our digital tools have made considerable progress, so that everyone has, with their usual word processor, the possibility of automatically and without subjective intervention comparing two states of the same text. It is obvious that, for a volume, it is better to resort to a tool better adapted to its object.

This is why I suggested to Lila Marchant, university graduate, doctoral student at ENS Lyon, to proceed with the confrontation of the original edition of Nadja 1928 with the one that is now in everyone's hands 1963, using the MEDITE software, produced by the OBVIL laboratory of Paris IV University: MEDITE | OBVIL (sorbonne-universite.fr)

We will see below what this gives, for the text only, digitally captured and carefully revised, without any intervention from anyone.

It is up to each person to form their own opinion on the necessity and value of the modifications desired by André Breton. However, it seems to me that certain typographic variations were introduced by the publisher's composition service, without the author's intervention. If only for the accented capitals, adopted by the said service after the Second World War. In any case, the author accepted them by giving his approval to print!

However, the work should not stop there, and the curious reader could, if he wishes, in turn confront the two printed versions of 1928 and 1963 with the proof sets preserved by the author, available on the André Breton site (this also applies to illustrations). Better yet, he can afford the leisure of confronting these different states with the original manuscript, held by the BnF, and now available in facsimile from Éditions de la rue Gallimard!

The Mélusine site will be happy to insert here, in a good place, the works proposed by our readers.

Henri Béhar

Download the comparison of the 1928 and 1963 versions of Nadja