Co-publishings and translations

Farmers around the world are being pressured by half a dozen giant corporations to grow genetically engineered crops. What are the possible downsides for them, particularly for those hundreds of millions of farmers living in developing countries? On their environment? On their health? On their independence? On their traditional export crops? On their access to the marketplaces of their own countries? This important book comes out of a dialogue between farmers’ representatives and experts.

Available in English: “Brave New Seeds” ; Zed Books Publishers

Year of publication : 2004

Europe is arising. For the last fifty years, step by step, a new geographical space and political entity have been forming. Among the sites of memory devoted to the recent history of Europe, the Jean Monnet Foundation, in Lausanne, has a number of archives with rare texts that allow people to follow and better understand how the idea of the European Union gained momentum across the years, both before and during World War II. Its documents are the core of this collection. The texts presented in this volume are used to shed new light on the “European institutional machinery.” This angle shows that the construction of modern Europe was not necessarily “technocratic,” but rather, like any original project, the result of trial and error, hesitations, conflicts that are often forgotten today, and a real dynamic.

Year of publication: 2001

While Europeans are in a struggle or in forced coexistence with nature, the Chinese are, according to Confucian tradition, in symbiosis, in communion, mutually dependent. “We look at each other, the sky and I, without tiring”, sings the famous poet Li Po, cited by Yue Dai Yun. In the countless legends recounted by Yue Dai Yun, man is or becomes nature: how many young girls and (formerly human) gods or goddesses have been transformed into hills and their tears into streams? Mountains, river water and the immensity of seas are not things in China, but living realities that teach man time, death and the insurmountable. As a result, says Yue Dai Yun, we must “not force ourselves or, worse, oppose nature, but rather adapt to ourselves.” For many Chinese people, nature is the source, not the object, of intellectual thought. There is nothing like climbing, for example, to think: “The succession of mountains has no limits for the Chinese, for it represents the elevation of their mind and the expansion of their thought.” Let us not seek out the East-West opposition throughout these two texts. Doesn’t the aforementioned Chinese veneration for high reliefs correspond to our own tradition, that of the Sinai and the Thabor, not to mention the mount of the well-known Sermon? Would our mystics argue when the Chinese say, according to Yue Dai Yun: “There are mountains beyond the mountains; there is another world beyond ours”? And does China have a monopoly on wonder? The magic of nature’s products, which Miao women take to market in autumn, these wild, dazzling red fruits, these leaves of palm – Aristotle also knew this magic. His ideas, according to Anne Sauvagnargues, “were always limpid, full of rocks, animals, men and the starry sky that we observe at night when we lie on the ground.”
Reading these two very different, very literary texts, the reader learns about visions of the world and of nature that were often inherited from the distant past. Distant? Not really! The story of saving the moon", in which Yue Dai Yun heroically took part in her childhood, tells us how much traditional myths permeate men and women today and just may give them the strength to fight for a less despoiled nature

Year of publication: 1999

Two top-level researchers – a French geophysicist and a Chinese philosopher – talking about death: quite daunting for a reader unaccustomed to academic language. Not to fear. Professor Tang Yijie, president of the Academy of Chinese Culture, and Xavier Le Pichon, professor at the Collège de France, talk about their fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, about their beliefs and their faith. Above all, about life.
Tang Yijie and Xavier Le Pichon have met several times to discuss the essential issues of existence. These two texts thus do not present a simple comparison. They respond to each other, with a nearly pedagogical concern for addressing the other’s culture and for presenting – and questioning – the most representative features of their own civilizations.

Although he considers the place of Christian culture within European culture to be “no doubt excessive,” Xavier Le Pichon chooses to approach the mystery of death from his personal perspective as a Catholic. In the European context, he lucidly shows the extent to which death – formerly incorporated into life and a reminder that “the fate of man is eternal happiness” – has become, through the centuries and with the advance of medicine, an event that is increasingly tied to the pain of living. A passage toward the light, yes, but at so high a cost! Impressive, for example, are these words written by his father on the approach of death: “Death is the most important act of life; it is like the seal affixed to a letter written with so many tears, so much blood and suffering. It is the crowning achievement of life.”

Year of publication: 1999

When we learn that a “Grand Diviner” existed long ago during the Middle Kingdom, a sort of oneiromantic secretary of state placed at the head of an “office of divination,” and when we read what Jin Siyan writes on the role of dreams in her own life, we understand that for the Chinese, dreams are a serious affair. Is it for the sake of counterpoint that Maurice Bellet rues the difficulty of Western man – “this dreamer who does not know himself” – to do the same? Not quite. Philosopher, psychoanalyst, priest and occasional novelist, Maurice Bellet knows and loves dreams after having worked with and on them for other people and for himself and after having long studied their creative value. Although he mentions himself only rarely in his contribution to this book, his analyses and parables reveal his true essence, as they contain much more experience than abstract speculation.
Jin Siyan attaches no more importance to the detached speculation of life. Formerly a teacher at the University of Beijing, lecturer at ENA and professor of Chinese civilization and comparative literature at the University of Artois, her interest is in recounting. She recounts the everyday dreams of her happy rural childhood, those of the legends and myths of ancient China; she describes ghosts and what the dream was in such troubled times as the Cultural Revolution.
For very different reasons, the two writers discuss the dream as mediator. For Maurice Bellet’s Western man, built on divisions – soul/body, subject/object – the dream is a sort of interface “at the junction of mind and body.”
For the Chinese, generally unfamiliar with this type of opposition, the dream is nevertheless an emissary. “It moves unhindered, Jin Siyan tells us, oscillating between the worlds of yin and yang.”

Year of publication: 1999

Symbol of progress and of the reasoning process that tirelessly seeks to explain the real and the fate of the universe, science is also an extraordinary locus of dialogue between cultures via its tendency toward the universal.

Pierre Léna, an astrophysicist, lays out a “promenade of science” mentioning questions that everyone asks themselves. Isn’t science, the search for the invisible through visible appearances, only the domain of specialists? A patient exercise in proof or an elaborate mathematical structure, maybe even a subtle relationship between truth and change?

A specialist in the human gene, Yang Huanming offers the Chinese perception of science, tied to cosmology, wisdom and the vision of the universe and the forces that drive it. He also addresses the ethical dimension in terms of the human genome.

The geography of time zones instructs us that when Paris goes to sleep, Shanghai wakes up. But if you ask a Chinese writer and a French writer to tell you what night is, they won’t talk (much) about sleep. Tang Ke Yang, a young specialist in comparative literature, and Martine Laffon, a philosopher, are too fascinated with the many facets of night to leave its riches to slumberers. The journey that they each propose to us, to the end of the night of their souls – and of their civilizations – is an invitation to see in the dark what we don’t see, to look into the night of the other to better understand him and to better understand ourselves.
They say that night illuminates. Gone is the fear of the child lost in the darkness; a mysterious alchemy emerges by which the night, as if by surprise, reveals something to us about the infinite. Tang Ke Yang and Martine Laffon have each had personal experience with it. One of them discovered in the night a “space of nonchalance in our life horsewhipped by reason”; for the other, nocturnal time reveals “what the eye and the other senses can no longer distinguish, for they have forgotten what they knew so well in the light of day.” Sleepless nights, those (so French) nights of mischief, once-forbidden nights in China when no one could stroll without special permission, nights of intoxication and nights of lucidity, nights of Pascal and Descartes when they did their best thinking, inner nights and trap-nights, nights of lamps, red lanterns and Chinese candles, nights celebrated according to Christian tradition, night of writers and poets. Based on this litany of evocations set forth by the two writers, we can categorically deny the doubt expressed in passing by Martine Laffon: “And what if night were only night?”

Year of publication: 1999

Translated from Portuguese (Brazil) into French by Flavio Corrêa de Mello

Ruisseaux d’Afrique (Benin), 2012; 37 pages
Original edition: Pallas Editora (Brazil)

Rooted in African daily life, in the streets of Bamako and Conakry, in the fishing port of Cotonou, on Tunisian soil, or redolent of Afro-Brazilian heritage, the 281 tales, documentaries, albums and novels that make up the catalogue are just waiting to be discovered. Books by nine independent publishing houses from Africa (South Africa, Benin, Madagascar, Mali, Morocco, the Republic of Guinea, Rwanda, Tunisia) and from Brazil are now available in France, Belgium and Switzerland!
If you would like to diversify your stock, read in Bambara, in Arabic, in English, in Portuguese, in Kinyarwanda, in Malagasy, in French, if you are simply looking for some escapism… the solution is here… just turn the pages !

The Alliance distributes all the books contained in the catalogue.

Download the catalogue here.

The “African readings” catalogue was created with the support of the Ile-de-France Region.

This collection, which takes its title from an iconic verse by Fernando Pessoa, is a veritable invitation to a journey through sixteen tales by
authors from Brazil, Guinea-Bissau and Angola.

Year of publication: 2010; 224 pages; 14 X 21 cm; ISBN: 978-85-347-0294-2

To access the youth catalogues, click here and here.

These catalogues are available from the Alliance. Contact us telephonically or by email for all enquiries and orders.

This poetical text, writing by Béatrice LALINON GBADO, is a real homage for Woman, a wonderfull poem illustrated by several senegalese artists working with the technic of “under-glass”.

Year of publication : 2006,
48 pages,
24 X 24 cm

1001 activités autour du livre is not about learning to read but about giving children from 2 to 11 years old and beyond a passion for books and reading. How can you achieve this? By playing, drawing, inventing, talking, miming... all thanks to books. This playful and original work of practice and experience makes you want to devour all the others! An authentic tool for child education professionals and attentive parents.

Initially published by Éditions Casterman in 2013.
Date of publication (Pan-African version): September 2020
A specific adaptation for this pan-African co-publishing has been made by Philippe Brasseur; the co-publishers have also updated and adapted to their contexts and environments some of the references of the book.

A book co-published by 11 publishing houses in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean: AGO Média (Togo), Atelier des Nomades (Mauritius), Editions Bakame (Rwanda), Editions Elondja (DRC), Ganndal (Guinea), La Farandole des livres bookstore (Niger), Gashingo (Niger), Jeunes Malgaches (Madagascar), Editions Ntsamé (Gabon), Ruisseaux d’Afrique (Benin) and Vallesse (Ivory Coast).

This co-publishing bears the label “Fair Trade Book”.

This solidarity co-publishing is the result of a workshop on children’s literature organised by the Alliance in Abidjan in May 2019, as part of the International Conference of Independent Publishers 2019-2021. It received the support of the Centre national du livre.