Paperback / softback | |
May 22, 1997 | |
9780801856662 | |
English | |
French | |
856 | |
32 | |
8.25 Inches (US) | |
5.00 Inches (US) | |
1.85 Pounds (US) | |
$48.00 USD, £35.50 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
History of My Life, Volumes 9 and 10
Volumes 9 and 10 contain descriptions of Casanova's first visits to England, Prussia, Russia, and Poland. In all these countries he gained access to the Courts. Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia join the roster of potentates entertained and charmed by the adventurer. Though beginning to age, and ruing it, Casanova still manages to exert a powerful attraction on women.
Because every previous edition of Casanova's Memoirs had been abridged to suppress the author's political and religious views and tame his vivid, often racy, style, the literary world considered it a major event when Willard R. Trask's translation of the complete original text was published in six double volumes between 1966 and 1971. Trask's award-winning translation now appears in paperback for the first time.
About the Authors
Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice in 1725. His parents, both actors, wanted him to become a priest, but their hopes were dashed when, at sixteen, he was expelled from seminary for immoral misconduct. Probably best-known for his reputation as a womanizer, Casanova was in turn a secretary, a soldier in the Venetian army, a preacher, an alchemist, a gambler, a violinist, a lottery director, and a spy. He translated Homer's Iliad into Italian and collaborated with Da Ponte on the libretto for Mozart's Don Giovanni. He retired in 1785 to the castle of a friend—Count Waldstein of Bohemia—in order to write his memoirs.
Reviews
"Trask has written a version in an English fully contemporary yet remarkably Italian in sensibility. With admirable restraint and refinement, he has conveyed the zest and sensuous delight of the original."
"These memoirs are compulsive reading... they are the work not only of a highly accomplished seducer but of a literary artist of the highest talents."
"Casanovists consider Trask's version the definitive English translation."
"Trask expertly rendered this text into English in 1966, and his is the English version to read... Compulsively readable... Certainly, few books better convey the sheer, exuberant joy of being alive and young than these reminiscences."
Endorsements
"Casanova is unsurpassed as the recreator of the daily talking interests of 18th-century Europe. He ranges from slut to patrician, from closet to cabinet, waterfront to palace. He is superior to all other erotic writers because of his pleasure in news, in gossip, in the whole personality of his mistresses."
"The Chevalier de Seingalt was a most remarkable man, who had some of the qualities of greatness... Has any novelist or poet ever rendered better than Casanova the passing glory of the personal life?—the gaiety, the spontaneity, the generosity of youth: the ups and downs of middle age when our character begins to get to us and we are forced to come to terms with it; the dreadful blanks of later years, when what is gone is gone. All that a life of this kind can contain Casanova put into his story. And how much of the world!—the eighteenth century as you get it in no other book; society from top to bottom; Europe from England to Russia, a more brilliant variety of characters than you can find in any eighteenth-century novel."
Johns Hopkins University Press | |
Volumes 9 and 10 | |
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From 18 | |
Paperback / softback | |
May 22, 1997 | |
9780801856662 | |
English | |
French | |
856 | |
32 | |
8.25 Inches (US) | |
5.00 Inches (US) | |
1.85 Pounds (US) | |
$48.00 USD, £35.50 GBP | |
v2.1 Reference | |
Other Titles by Giacomo Chevalier de Seingalt Casanova
History of My Life, Volumes 1 and 2
History of My Life, Volumes 11 and 12
History of My Life, Volumes 3 and 4
Other Titles by Willard R. Trask
History of My Life, Volumes 1 and 2
History of My Life, Volumes 11 and 12
History of My Life, Volumes 3 and 4
Other Titles in BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
Light the Road of Freedom
Cancer with Hope
Killing Season
Other Titles in Erotic confessions & true stories
Behind the Mirror
Cancer with Hope
The Lost Books of Jane Austen