In the couple days while my computer was in the crapper, I did a lot of beer drinking reading. Among the tomes I perused was a copy of 어린왕자 (The Little Prince…ou, en français Le Petit Prince). I have no idea how this book came to be in my possession. I didn’t purchase it, I have no memory of receiving it as a gift, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t steal it.
So I read this work, for the third time in my life. The first time I read it, I was an elementary school student. At that point I thought the story was a lot of fun, probably in part due to the fact that there was a poorly animated Little Prince cartoon on Nickeloden at that point in my life.
In my high school French class, I again read The Little Prince, this time in its original language. This reading was not as enjoyable, primarily due to the fact that I was not a fan of my French class, but reading about baobab trees beat the pants of the endless stream of, “J’ai un rendez-vous avec David en vingt minutes,” that was my high school French class.
Reading it this week (in language number 3) I found myself loathing the book and all of the characters. Perhaps I’ve become an adult and no longer find the adventures of the small alien noble engaging or magical. If anything I found the Prince to be annoying. Perhaps I’ve become too Korean, but when the Prince first appeared, I found him to be incredibly rude.
For those of you with no knowledge of the Korean language, verbs are conjugated to show different levels of respect between speaker and listener. One would not address a stranger and a lover the same way, nor would a child address an adult the same way an adult addresses a child. So with that in mind let’s examine the Little Price’s first words.
“아저씨, 양 한 마리만 그려 줘!” (Mister, draw me a picture of only one sheep and gimme it!)
Traslated into English it doesn’t seem very rude, but the final word 주다 (to give) is conjugated in a form (줘) that would be used between close friends, or by adults speaking to small children, certainly not a child speaking to an older person they didn’t know well. He would have been much better off using 주세요, which is a much more polite way to demand something.
But rudness of the Prince aside, the thing that irked me the most about the book was how creepy the narrator, a pilot who had crash landed in the Sahara, was. A creepy loner guy who claims to have no real friends, he quickly befriends this small, sheep demanding child, due to his own sense of arrested development. The entire time I was reading the book I was creeped out at how much of a child molester the pilot was…the only thing missing was the mustache.
But as much as I hate this book, it holds a special place in the realm of junk I’ve read. The Little Prince / Le Petit Prince / 어린왕자 is more likely than not, the only book I will ever read in three languages…that is unless I decided to run away to Hong Kong, learn Cantonese, and read 三國志 again.
