SEGALEN (Victor). Odes. Paris: Les Arts et le livre, 1926. - In-8 elongated, 288 x 145. Chinese-style folded, under two woodblock boards with engraved title in full on first board, yellow silk cords. Pierre Saunier, Victor Segalen, l'Exote, n° 115 à 117. Posthumous original edition. " It was in June 1912, after handing over the manuscript of Stèles to the Lazarist brothers at the Pei-t'ang printing works, and while he was already working on Peintures, that Segalen began composing the Odes. During an opium-smoking session, while looking for a way to give more intensity to a prose text, he had the idea of returning to the verse of yesteryear and its rigorous metre - but instead of the classical alexandrine, he preferred Chinese prosody, from which he drew elements that were apparently more exotic [...] Odes proceeds inversely from Stèles, where form and presentation derive from the word fixed as a sign on the Chinese stone. Here, the aim is to fix what precisely cannot be fixed, except perhaps in memory. Thus, these new poems tend more towards musical transposition, the transposition of a state, a delirium or a highly intellectualized vision of the inner world, in short, of the ineffable" (Pierre Saunier, Victor Segalen, l'Exote, pp. 119-120). The edition was limited to 320 copies. One of 30 head copies on Korean paper, this one numbered 28, one of 15 hors commerce on this paper. A very well preserved copy. The covers are, as always, browned.