X.P., 2 Levriers... and at their feet, their prey!
A Few Words on Xavier Przezdziecki and "Le Destin des Lévriers"
Przezdziecki had a vision, that the family of Sighthounds is a breed apart. Le Destin des Lévriers is the greatest expression of that vision.
Those who love dogs love the eccentricity of opposites and will love Xavier Przezdziecki. It has been a pleasure and an honour to spend time in his living room and in his library — metaphorically speaking, for I never met him in his life but only through his text. Yet it is a text that takes you to the rooms of his domain, in his company. So vividly that it has hardly occurred to me to put questions to those who knew him alive.
This is a book devoted not merely to the furtherance of our knowing about his beloved Levrier, but to the furtherance of the breed itself, to its very recognition. He talks much of the past but most of all for its bearing upon the future. Two futures, indeed, the Levrier’s and our own.
I say talks, but you do hear his voice on the page. At times he is formal and I sense the damp tweed of his jacket and the correctness of his tie, as he encamps at his desk amidst constructions of books resembling nothing so much as the ruins he so loved. Indeed, amidst their pages he brushes away the dust that hides their treasures as if on his knees in some dig.
At other times I think we catch him by the chimney-piece, in cravat and cardigan now, in more expansively inventive mood as he reconstructs the activities of an ancient tribe or animal. His eccentricities, of mood, vocabulary or detail, make for much of the charm of the book. What he left perhaps undone or inconclusive is not to be repaired in a translation of this pioneering and visionary, technical as well as romantic work.
Science here is is cushioned by vision and concern. He handles science as a connoisseur handles claret, with care as well as relish. The label, its provenance, is to be checked ; the bottle, its vehicle, is to be looked after ; yet it is to be poured with curiosity and generosity. Celebration is preferred to pomposity or pretention. The odd splash is the price of passion.
I have been helped notably by Grian Wharton and Sir Terence Clark, both putting me right on many occasions, especially where technical terms are concerned. Yet the most tricky technical term has been to find the right word for the entire collective of the breed. Przezdziecki's vision, as I say, is that the Levrier is a breed apart. I have sought to stress this by using the word Levrier in English, preferring it to Greyhound — too useful for its specific designations, the English & Italian Greyhounds — and to Sight- or Gazehound, neither of them common in British English and both too suggestive of just one of the hound's special attributes. Przezdziecki also used Graϊoid, a term that is especially useful as an adjective, but I have come to think that it is enough to ask a new readership to cope with just one new word, the incidentally rather lovely Levrier, softened from its accented French form Lévrier which is in turn derived from lièvre — and thus suggests the hound's centuries-old special activity, the hunting of the hare.
With typical modesty, Przezdziecki begins his book thus :
"The final pages of this book, the third part, contain its finest passages. Its author is the almost unknown Flavius Arrian ; and so it falls first to lovers of the Levrier to revive his memory, a figure of high moral standing, a soldier, a stoic — and the author of the oldest document in history about the Levrier."
And the book opens with an image 9,000 years old, the earliest trace of the animal and closes with a translation by Malcolm Willcock of that fascinating Greek text from the second century. Even the illustrations — we reproduce completely those in the French edition, as Mme Rey, the author's widow, wished — convey Przezdziecki's characteristic passion ; most of the line drawings derive from sketches made by the author during his reading and his visits to sites and museums.
During his reading ? Yes, he had the endearing habit of taking pictures for his notes, from books, not by scanning (not yet invented) nor by photocopy (then cumbersome and pricey), but by sketching, just as he did when a Levrier came into view on an old cave wall or on the side of a vase in a museum. These sketches reveal a coup de crayon, as the French have it, a gift of touch and graphic expressiveness. After publication of the first French edition many originals and photographs were lost ; the remaining sheets came to live in a thick folder in a wardrobe — where Mme Rey found them in the inquisitive company of the translator. What a delightful moment. She had no idea that they had survived, amidst sheets also of meticulous manuscript and typescript, all testimony — were that needed ! — of the enormous effort his devotion demanded in the composition of this wide-ranging book, in an era before diskettes, word-searches and interim print-outs.
The private publication at last of an English version of Le Destin des Lévriers has been made possible by the generosity and unstinting energies of Mme Przezdziecka-Rey. All of us who have been involved are happy to dedicate this venture to her, mindful of the simple and powerful message that Przezdziecki spells out early on :
This is the ambition of my book : recognition of the Levrier as a species — which is no more than to recognise the truth.
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