TRANSLATOR'S COMMENTSby Grace Roosevelt Comments on the Translation Comments on the TranslationThe on-line English translation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile or On Education combines my own work with a translation by Barbara Foxley that was published as a part of the Everyman's Library collection by J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd (London) and E. P. Dutton and Co. (New York) in 1911. Barbara Foxley was born in 1860 in the United Kingdom. To my knowledge the only work she published was her translation of Emile. According to a brief entry in Who Was Who for 1951-60, Foxley was educated at Newham College, Cambridge, where she received an M.A.. She went on to serve as Headmistress of Queen Mary's High School in Walsall and Mistress of Method at Victoria University in Manchester. At the time of her death at the age of 98 she was Professor Emeritus at University College, Cardiff, in Wales. Foxley's 1911 translation of Emile admirably conveys Rousseau's passion, his insights, and the richness of his language. As a product of the late Victorian world, Foxley's text exemplifies the close correspondence between Rousseau's sensibilities and 19th century romanticism. The very "Victorianness" of Foxley's translation, however, can be off-putting to late 20th century readers. Many of her word choices make Rousseau's prose sound more flowery and archaic than it does in the original French, and she often added words, changed words, or simply changed the sequence of words for no apparent reason. Finally, for on-line reading, the Foxley version has the additional limitation of rather dense sentence structure in each paragraph. In an attempt to remedy these shortcomings in the Foxley translation, I have re-translated much of the text with the aim of making it more modern, more literal, and more readable. The resulting new translation is approximately 50% Foxley's language and 50% my own. To modernize the text, I have made many changes in word use, phrasing, and expression. Common words such as actions andvoir, which Foxley translated as "deeds" and "to behold," have been changed to "actions" and "to see." "Leagues" have been converted into "miles"; "sous" into "pennies." A phrase such as "the worst that can befall him" in the Foxley translation becomes "the worst that can happen to him" in mine. I have also tried to change the now somewhat archaic "shall" form of verbs in the future tense to the more informal "will" forms. In terms of its literalness, large chunks of the text have been completely re-translated. Modifying adjectives have been returned to Rousseau's original sequence and the English phrasing as much as possible now reflects his syntactical choices. Rousseau's famous opening sentence, "Tout est bien, sortant des mains de l'auteur des choses: tout dégénére entre les mains de l'homme," which Foxley translated as "God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil" appears in the on-line text as the more literal "Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man." There are innumerable other examples of similar changes. My most heavy-handed re-translating is in the first third of each Book where Rousseau lays out his pedagogical principles. It is these principles that form the living core of Rousseau's thought, and it is they that need to be translated as carefully and as "transparently" as possible. In the more anecdotal or narrative sections, however, where Rousseau proceeds to exemplify his principles, I often let Foxley's voice predominate, since in those parts of the work her more free-flowing sensibility does not seem at all out of place. A similar motive lies behind my decision to leave intact her translation of "The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar" in Book IV. Finally in terms of readability, I have changed long complex sentences into shorter simpler ones by replacing semicolons with periods. Rousseau himself was quite inconsistent with his use of punctuation (using commas, semicolons and colons rather inconsistently) so I feel little ambivalence about editing his original format in this regard. My revisions of Foxley's translation are based on Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond's edition of Emile in Rousseau's Oeuvres complètes, t. iv published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Editions Gallimard, in 1969. The on-line French version of the text, however, is scanned from Michel Launay's edition of Emile, published by Garnier-Flammarion in 1966. There may be a few minor inconsistencies beween the two sources. Comments on the NotesThe margin notes that are in the process of being electronically linked to the text aim to provide explication, clarification, and amplification of the meaning of Rousseau's Emile. Some notes simply identify a proper noun (e.g. Tartars, Lycurgus, Raymond Lulle). Others clarify concepts by leading the reader to additional examples of the concept in Rousseau's work, (e.g. nature, amour de soi, principles of political right); still others link Rousseau's textual references directly to those texts that happen to be on line ( e.g. works by Plato, Hobbes, or Locke). In constructing these references I often make use of the extensive notes provided at the end of the Pléiade edition of Emile. For the most part I resist including references to secondary sources, primarily because the scholarship on Rousseau is so vast. Obviously the selection of what to annotate and the content of each note reflect only one reader's sense of what is important in a text. My biases lie in the fields of political theory and educational philosophy, and in general I find Rousseau's thinking to be internally consistent and perennially provocative. Other readers may read Rousseau more critically or may find meanings that I have completely ignored. In order to open the text to other interpretations and commentaries we plan to include a Feedback box at the end of each Book. Intended AudienceFinally, a note on the the audiences that the Notes are intended for. In general I have assumed that visitors to the ILT website are people interested in education who are not yet experts on Rousseau and who may be reading Emile for the first time. The margin commentaries are therefore quite short and are intended to be starting points for reflection rather than conclusive interpretations. It is assumed that readers doing advanced scholarship on Emile will go beyond the on-line text to consult one of the more extensively annotated editions of the work in French. AcknowledgmentsIn all of the choices regarding the technical aspects of both the translation and the notes I am indebted to the director of the ILT, Robbie McClintock and to his staff. I am particularly grateful to David Miele, whose imagination, enthusiasm, and expertise have enabled the Emile project to become a reality.
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