Myra Breckinridge Around the World
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Italy, 1969
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Japan, 1969
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Germany, 1969
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Netherlands, 1970
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Finland, 1979
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This first row of covers (above), some of the earliest translations of
Myra Breckinridge, has several images of Myra at her most
provocative. Although the Japanese edition merely shows a circle of
mini-Myras - the image is adapted from the U.S. first edition - no
American publisher would have dared issue the book with a cover as
provocative as, say, the German, Dutch or Finnish covers seen here. In
fact, Vidal's long-time British publisher, Heinemann, would not publish
the book, and the publisher he found instead required some
judicious excisions in the text. Yet most of these erotic European
covers appeared contemporary with the English-language first editions.
FEATURED PAGE: A
slide show of Myra Breckinridge covers
The Polish translation of Myra could only come about after the
fall of Communism in that country, and the Turkish edition on a Moslem
country is still something of an anomaly. Both of these covers depict
Myra's duality (i.e., her androgyny). Three 21st Century foreign editions
of the novel take different approaches. The very strange Slovene
translation seems to picture Olive Oyl from the Popeye cartoons -
hardly how one would think of Myra! The Russian and French editions, both
of which include Myron, go for more abstract-cum-erotic
representations.
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Poland, 1992
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Turkey, 1995
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Slovenia, 2001
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Russia, 2002
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France, 2002
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