Foigny, Gabriel de
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(circa 1630-1692) French author of an early Fantastic Voyage, La Terre Australe Connue: C'est-à-dire la description de ce pays inconnu jusqu'ici, de se moeurs et de ses coûtumes. Par M. Sadeur (1676 Switzerland; cut vt Les avantures de Jacques Sadeur dans la découverte et le voiage de la terre australe 1692; trans anon of cut vt, as A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, or the Southern World 1693; new trans David Fausett of the original version, as The Southern Land, Known 1993) [for full titles, see Checklist]. The publication history of this text is complex: the 1692 version of La Terre Australe Connu – the only French-language version in circulation until 1922 – was a bowdlerized recasting of the original by a cleric, F Raguenet; the first English translation from 1693 is based on this bowdlerization; the 1993 translation is of the original text.
Now that it is more widely available, it is likely that Foigny's complex and rewarding tale will become recognized as a central example of seventeenth-century Proto SF. It is presented as a manuscript left on his return to Europe by Mr Sadeur, who is now dead. He recounts his various travels, which climax in his arrival in Australia, a land occupied by a Lost Race of hermaphrodites (see Gender; Sex), who have created for themselves a preternaturally calm Utopia, made possible in part because no issues based on sexual dimorphism are of course possible; Sadeur fits in immediately, as he too is a hermaphrodite. The Australians' Religion is an extremely calm deism, though touches of Hermeticism colour the flatness; their language (see Linguistics) is entirely rational, and allows no misunderstanding; but they are ruthless in War, and their extirpation of a force of human invaders troubles the narrator (and arouses him to sexual interaction with a human female, which puts paid to his hermaphrodite status). He then escapes on the back of a giant bird. La Terre Australe Connu is a text whose many implications warrant further study. [JC]
Gabriel de Foigny
born Picardy, France: circa 1630
died Savoy, France: 1692
works
- La Terre Australe Connue: C'est-à-dire la description de ce pays inconnu jusqu'ici, de se moeurs et de ses coûtumes. Par M. Sadeur. Avec les avantures qui le conduisirent en ce continent, et les particularités du séjour qu'il y fit durant trente-cinq ans et plus, et de son retour. Reduites & mises en lumiere par les soins & la conduite de G de F (Geneva, Switzerland: Jacques Verneuif, 1676) [binding unknown/]
- Les avantures de Jacques Sadeur dans la découverte et le voiage de la Terre Australe (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1692) [rev vt of the above: bowdlerization and recasting by F Raguenet: binding unknown/]
- A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis: or the Southern World by J. Sadeur, a French-man; who being cast there by a shipwrack, lived 35 years in that country, and gives a particular description of the manners, customs, religion, laws, studies and wars, of those southern people, and of some animals peculiar to that place, with several other rarities; these memoirs were thought so curious, that they were kept secret in the closet of a late great minister of state, and never published till now since his death; translated from the French copy, printed at Paris, by publick authority (London: John Dunton, 1693) [anon trans of the above: binding unknown/]
- The Southern Land, Known (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1993) [trans by David Fausett of the original version, above: hb/Federico Castellon]
- Les avantures de Jacques Sadeur dans la découverte et le voiage de la Terre Australe (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1692) [rev vt of the above: bowdlerization and recasting by F Raguenet: binding unknown/]
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