Saint-Exupéry's honest writing style is fully preserved.
The Little Prince, translated by literary critic Hwang Hyeon-san

While essays and thesis persuade with their argumentative devices, poems and novels move the heart with their style.
For example, when the fox in The Little Prince says, "You only know what you tame," there is no evidence that this is true.
Only the author Saint-Exupéry's honest and passionate writing style can make us believe in the truth of these words and move us.
- Hwang Hyeon-san

Powerful sentences move the heart.
Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince is filled with sentences that have the power to move the hearts of readers and remain in their memory longer than any other novel.
It is not because those sentences explain what they mean with flowery rhetoric or elaborate arguments.
Hwang Hyeon-san, who translated “The Little Prince,” which is being published by Open Books this time, explained that the source of its power is the author Saint-Exupéry’s honest and passionate writing style.
The simple, unadorned, and pure words exchanged between the Little Prince and the Desert Fox, which still resonate deeply with countless readers around the world today, are perhaps due to the power of Saint-Exupéry's writing style, imbued with his sincerity.

This story is not limited to “The Little Prince.”
As he said, “In literature, style and thought are created simultaneously,” understanding the “power of style” is a key part of reading and translating literary works.
Professor Hwang Hyeon-san, a French literature scholar and literary critic, has established a strong position in literary translation with his translations that combine a delicate understanding of the original French texts, precise and beautiful sentence structure, and keen literary insight.
Open Books' "The Little Prince" is the result of his painstaking efforts to fully capture Saint-Exupéry's honest writing style, carefully considering each and every word and line while retranslating and refining the work.
It was an approach to the world of children that Saint-Exupéry sought to capture with boundless sincerity through his simple language.
While translating this work, Professor Hwang Hyeon-san reflected on the difficulty of [crossing the world of children with adult language], and came to the conclusion that [if we translate it as the author wrote, without forcing it and without underestimating children's reading ability, we can finally approach the world of children].
As he said, the ideology of [naturalness] is not [nature] itself, forcing [childhood] to fit the eye level of children would be nothing more than [underestimating children].
The only truth he could convey in his translation was to be infinitely transparent in front of the author's writing style that captured the world of children.
This is also in line with his approach to translation, which is wary of excessive paraphrasing, keenly attentive to the voice of the work, and insists on a translation that is as faithful to the original text as possible.


Open Books' translation of "The Little Prince" is a translation that fully embodies the translator's spirit of trying to correctly realize the literary value of this work.
In addition, the Pleiades edition of the French publisher Gallimard, translated by Professor Hwang Hyeon-san, is the official text of the French [Little Prince] books that is officially cited in academic papers and other publications.
From selecting the original text to finalizing the translation, we aimed to create a definitive Korean edition that faithfully preserves the value of the original text, especially among the many [Little Prince] editions published in Korea.

A novel dedicated to children and to adults who were children themselves.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.

Everyone encounters [The Little Prince] at least once at the threshold of growth.
Translated into over 160 languages ​​and selling over 100 million copies, it is one of the world's most widely read books, a novel that serves as an introduction to the reading experience for countless readers.
And it is also a work that gives me a deeper meaning every time I reread the sentences I read as a child as time goes by.
This may be because mature insights about life and relationships are beautifully incorporated into a story that appears simple like a fairy tale.

As is well known, in the preface, Saint-Exupéry dedicated the work to his close friend Léon Werthe, and asked for forgiveness from children for dedicating the work to adults.
And he cleverly concluded the preface by saying that he would instead change the dedication to [Léon Werthe as a child].
This preface shows that this work is not only for children, but also for all adults who have lost their childhood and become adults.


This novel, which illuminates the contradictory world of adults through the innocent eyes of a little prince from another planet, provides readers living in the adult world with a chance to reflect on their lives.
The image of the little prince coming from [Asteroid B612] and talking to adults evokes a sense of nostalgia, like a prototype of our lost childhood.
The king, the vain man, the drunkard, the businessman, the lamplighter, and the geographer that the little prince met during his travels are all distorted versions of adults living in the contradictions that dominate reality.
As Professor Hwang Hyeon-san pointed out, they each live their lives absorbed in their own work in their own way, but they are unable to form true relationships with anyone other than themselves.
A king who divides everything in the world into himself who commands and others who are commanded; a vain man who is only interested in himself; a drunkard who cannot escape his own circular logic because he cannot escape from himself; a businessman who perceives the world only in terms of ownership divided into what is his and what is not his; a geographer who considers everything in the world an object of knowledge but has never personally encountered any of them are all fragments of this kind of person.

However, humans can only establish true relationships with things they have painstakingly cultivated and nurtured, and only through these relationships can they expand their own existence.
According to Hwang Hyeon-san's teacher, [taming] means [establishing a relationship with something that is not oneself, and making oneself part of its life and making it part of one's life].
As the message of this work is, [what is important is invisible to the eye], it is invisible, but it makes an object into a unique value to someone that cannot be replaced by anything else in the world.
The things that the Little Prince conveys in this book in simple language cannot be reduced to the exchange value calculated and accepted in the adult world.
The little prince's choice to risk his life for a single flower may seem foolish to adults, but it reminds us of the precious values ​​we have lost.

Every time we reread [The Little Prince], we are brought back to a place where we look back at the most important things in our lives, but also the things that are forgotten or lost, the things that are [invisible].
This is probably why this story has resonated with readers around the world, regardless of age or gender, to this day.
It is time to reread this work, which I read as a child, in a newer and more complete translation.