ISBN: 9780811216548
Author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Translated from French by Ralph Manheim

With a contribution by William Vollmann

Publisher Information: New Directions

Publication Date: 2006/05/17

Topical Subject Header: Fiction

Journey to the End of the Night

C$24.00

Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic—boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at society’s idiocy and hypocrisy: Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of cruelty and violence that hurtles through the improbable travels of the petit bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu: from the trenches of WWI, to the African jungle, to New York, to the Ford Factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor. Ralph Manheim’s pitch-perfect translation captures Céline’s savage energy, and a dynamic afterword by William T. Vollmann presents a fresh, furiously alive take on this astonishing novel.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894–1961) was a French author best known for his works Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan. After returning from war with a partially paralyzed right arm, Celine worked with the passport office of the French Consulate in London, later moved to Africa to work for a French lumber company, moved back to France, lectured about tuberculosis for the Rockefeller Foundation, and earned a medical degree from the University of Rennes. It was while he worked as a doctor that he turned to writing. He had a successful, albeit controversial, career as a writer until he suffered a stroke in 1961 and passed away.
Ralph Frederick Manheim (1907–1992) was an American translator of German and French literature. After graduating from Harvard, Yale and Columbia, Manheim spent time in Munich and Vienna. His first major work was translating Hitler’s Mein Kampf into English with all of its grammatical errors and awkward phrasing intact. Manheim won many awards in his lifetime, including a MacArthur Foundation (1983) “genius” grant. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a National Book Award and honors from PEN. The PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation is awarded to mark major lifetime achievement in the field of translation.