Voltaire is not usually thought of as a rebellious underground writer. But at Wednesday night’s “Candide in the Preserving Machine,” a talk hosted by the Book History Colloquium at Columbia University, Alice Boone of the English and comparative literature department described the French author as the subject of heated controversy.
Boone, who is currently the curator of an exhibit on “Candide” at the New York Public Library, discussed the dissemination, translation, and reception of later interpretations and translations of Voltaire’s now-canonical 1759 satire. In the novella, Voltaire recounts the story of Candide and his overly optimistic mentor, Dr. Pangloss.
While “Candide” was met with immediate success upon its release, it was also the subject of criticism, remaining on the Vatican’s list of forbidden books for over 200 years. According to Boone, “Although the book was banned, it remained an underground best-seller, and the book’s status as a controversial book also added the desire for everyone to get their hands on it and to continue to write about it. It was a media event that kept radiating.”
Book history, the focal point of the talk, plays an integral role in understanding the resonance of the text and the impact of subsequent translations and interpretations of it. As Gerald Cloud, who organizes the Book History Colloquium, said, “A lot of people who are working in isolation here at Columbia are interested in intellectual approaches common to book history and the study of physical materials of intellectual culture. Colloquium’s goal is to get those people together.”
Boone addressed the relationship between “Candide” and the media in terms of the ways we can use book history to study reflexivity, or the way that sequels to “Candide” comment on themselves as adaptations.
In 1956, “Candide” was adapted as an operetta by Leonard Bernstein and performed on Broadway in several revivals. Boone explained that adaptations of a text like “Candide” illustrate the manner in which genre is constantly shifting and reflecting the changing literary culture of the time.
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