Ives The Essays of Montaigne/Volume 1/Preface

by Michel de Montaigne

PREFACE

I

THERE have been two translations of Montaigne’s Essays: that of John Florio, first published in 1603, and that of Charles Cotton, about 1670. The Florio translation was reissued in 1613 and 1632, but no other edition of it appeared until late in the nineteenth century. Within the past forty or fifty years it has been reprinted a number of times, but always without modification of the language.

The Cotton translation, on the other hand, has been “edited” by various hands, notably by William Hazlitt and O. W. Wight, and more recently by William Carew Hazlitt, by all of whom it has been considerably changed to suit their conceptions of Montaigne’s meaning.

It was while assisting in the production of the Riverside Press limited edition, in folio, of the Florio translation, some twenty-odd years ago, that the present translator became convinced of its entire inadequacy, in many places, as a faithful interpretation of Montaigne’s thought, and of its failure to reproduce what may, for lack of a better word, be called the essayist’s style.

“Florio, the first English translator and the one of late most frequently reprinted, has a freedom and fluency that is often called ‘Elizabethan’; but it is a fatal freedom and fluency for a translator; and it has little of Elizabethan weight and fullness of meaning; his abundance is constantly redundance; he has a tiresome use of clumsy compounds and is fond of useless synonyms, while with Montaigne one word is seldom the ‘synonym’ of another; each added word is an added thought. To illustrate this fully would take too much space, but a fair example may be found toward the close of the third chapter of the first Book, where in one sentence, that about Diomedon, Florio inserts the words ‘ruthless,’ ‘exemplar,’ ‘cruelly,’ ‘bloody,’ ‘I say,’ ‘earnestly,’ ‘revenge’; translates faict by ‘success’ instead of ‘action,’ making the sense unintelligible; translates paisable by ‘plausible’ (probably a misprint, but one that Mr. Henry Morley, as editor, accepts); and translates descouvrir (here meaning ‘to lay bare’) by ‘exasperate,’ again obscuring the meaning. The character — the quality — of the writing is thus changed throughout.… The passage, a part of which was just quoted above in the original, Florio translates as follows: ‘All this galiemafry which I huddle up here is but a register of my live-essayes, which in regard of the internal health are sufficiently exemplary to take the instruction against the hair.’ It could hardly be guessed that Montaigne’s meaning, paraphrased, is that the reader may profit by the author’s example if he reverse it.”^[1]

The Cotton translation, while in some respects much more faithful to the original, is marred by not infrequent, unexplained omissions, generally of obscure or puzzling passages.

For ten years following the publication of the Riverside Florio, the need, or desirability, of a new translation was always present at the back of the present writer’s mind, coupled with what seemed a hopeless ambition to undertake it. But finally, some twelve years ago, at the suggestion of Miss Grace Norton of Cambridge, who has been well known for many years, in France no less favorably than at home, as a devoted student of Montaigne, he set out upon the enterprise which is at last approaching completion.

It must be said that the work was done throughout with the continued unfailing encouragement and assistance of Miss Norton, without which it could hardly have been carried to an end. Every page of the first draft of the manuscript was read by her, and the rendering of many passages is due to mutual discussion. While it is in no sense such a translation as she herself would have made had conditions permitted, whatever merit it may possess is due chiefly to her advice. Moreover, the value of her learned and suggestive introductions to the several Essays can hardly be exaggerated.

II

The first edition of the Essays was published in 1580 and included only the first two books. The second, in 1582, contained some few slight, though not unimportant, additions; the third edition (1587) was practically a reprint of the second. The third book first appeared in 1588, in an edition called on the title-page the fifth, although no fourth has ever been discovered. In addition to the third book, this edition contained very considerable and important additions to, and changes in, the first two. This was the last edition published in Montaigne’s lifetime. He died in 1592.

In 1595 appeared the first posthumous edition, which contained additions even more numerous and significant, to the third book as well as to the others. This edition was the one used by both Florio and Cotton as the basis of their translations, and it has been reprinted, in French, innumerable times. The question of the authorship of, or responsibility for, the changes embodied therein aroused no special interest until the discovery, late in the eighteenth century, in a convent near Bordeaux, of a copy of the edition of 1588, which Montaigne had evidently used in preparing for a new edition. The title-page has been changed by substituting “sixth edition” for ‘‘fifth edition,” and adding the motto, “Vires atque eundo”; on the back of the title-page is a list of directions to the printer, and on every page of the volume are interlineations and marginal additions, erasures, substitutions, and re-writings, which, in many cases, leave almost no white paper visible. The volume is not in the original binding, and there are places where a careless binder’s knife has trimmed the page so closely as to cut off some of the written words, thus leaving something to conjecture.

The stupendous task of transcribing these manuscript additions was duly accomplished, with the result that a very large majority of them are found to be included in the posthumous edition of 1595. But that edition contains an appreciable number of other additions, together with some modifications of the manuscript emendations on the Bordeaux copy. It has been conjectured that these may have been written on loose or detached sheets, which became separated from the volume, or that they were made upon still another copy of the 1588 edition, which has never been found. But some doubt has been aroused by evidence that Montaigne’s fille d’alliance, Mademoiselle de Jars de Gournay,^[2] had a hand in some of them; so that it is the general consensus of opinion at this day that the Bordeaux copy represents the most authentic version available of Montaigne’s proposed revision; and the Bordeaux municipality has adopted it as the basis of its recently published sumptuous edition of the Essays, known as the “Édition Municipale.” This text, therefore, has been used in the present translation; but any variations from the edition of 1595, other than mere verbal ones, are given in the notes, where the term “Édition Municipale” is used, for brevity’s sake, instead of “Bordeaux copy of 1588,” except where the use of the latter phrase is made necessary for the sake of clearness. The problem of paragraphing has been one of considerable difficulty, for in none of the early editions of the Essays was there any division into paragraphs at all. In attempting to solve the problem, the constant aim has been to assist the reader.

In making additions to his text from one edition to another, Montaigne very often failed to fit them into place by the use of apt transitional words, so that the reader is often confused by the introduction of an apparently irrelevant passage, followed without warning by an abrupt recurrence to the line of thought interrupted by the interpolation. To avoid this disadvantage, the system has been adopted of indicating the different texts by the use of the letters (a), (b), and (c): (a) means that what follows is found in the edition of 1580; (b), an addition of 1588 in the first two books, or, in the case of the third book, the original text; and (c), an addition of 1595, that is to say, of the Édition Municipale. There are so few of the Essays (only five or six) which begin with an addition, that it may be assumed that the opening sentences are as they appeared in the first edition unless there is a note to the contrary.

The foot-notes are of four classes. (1) Translations of the passages quoted by Montaigne, chiefly from the Latin. These are entirely new and have been made specially for this edition. The attempt has been made to fit them into the context, in accordance with Montaigne’s manifest purpose. “It is worth while,” says Miss Norton, “to give this hint to the reader with regard to Montaigne’s quotations from the ancient poets. They are always as accurate as is needful, but not infrequently the essayist makes such use of them as disguises or even alters their original significance. He expresses by the words of another his own different thought. Those who trace these quotations to their source find an unlooked-for pleasure in discovering the skill with which Montaigne adorned his pages with them, in accordance with the fashion of the time. He repeatedly takes notice himself of the multitude of his quotations, sometimes with open satisfaction in their noble birth and in their interpretive nature, sometimes with amused recognition of their easy multiplication.”

(2) Citations of the authorities from whom Montaigne derived the facts and anecdotes and theories set forth in the text; and of the passages, chiefly from classical authors, which seem to have influenced his ideas and opinions in one way or another. Annotation of the Essays in this sense was first undertaken by Peter Coste, who was responsible for five editions in French in the first half of the eighteenth century. His work was very far from complete and his citations left much to be desired in the way of accuracy, but they have been generally accepted by editors of Cotton’s translation — one must believe, without a serious attempt to verify them. Later French editors have revised and amplified Coste’s work to some extent, but it remained for M. Pierre Villey, in his Notes to the Édition Municipale, to carry the work of annotation to a point that can hardly be surpassed. M. Villey had already published, under the most severe handicap imaginable, — that of total blindness, — two works of vast labor and erudition: Les Sources et l’Évolution des Essais, in two volumes, and Livres de l’Histoire Moderne utilisés par Montaigne. It is in the Notes based upon the second of these works, that he has carried the annotation of the Essays into a new field. The present translator has drawn rather freely upon these references to Montaigne’s modern sources; and in this respect the work differs from all previous editions of the Essays in English.

(3) The original text of obscure or doubtful words or sentences, and of passages with which some liberty has been taken in the way of paraphrase or a free rendering, so that the reader may, if he choose, translate for himself.

(4) Cross-references to other passages in the Essays with which comparison may, for one reason or another, be worth while. The examples given in the notes are merely illustrative; it would have been possible to add largely to their number.

An occasional reference to the variant readings of the Bordeaux copy will give some idea of Montaigne’s method of revision, and of the phases through which his thought was wont to pass. It would be quite impossible within reasonable limits to offer anything more than a very few suggestive examples.

The writer is deeply indebted to Mrs. Elizabeth Gilpatrick Stewart and Miss Charlotte Heath of the Harvard University Press for their faithful and most helpful work on the proofs, and to his friend and former associate, Lanius D. Evans of the Riverside Press, for reading the proofs in page form, correcting many errors, and making many suggestions of great importance. As the work of translating and preparing for the press has lasted so many years, it has been almost impossible to preserve entire consistency in such matters as the method of citing authorities and of printing quoted passages. Such inconsistencies as may be found are not of a sort likely to mislead, or even, perhaps, to attract the attention of anybody but a printer.

George B. Ives..

1. Grace Norton, Studies in Montaigne (1904), p. 256, note.
2. In 1635, she published an edition of the Essays, with a very long introduction signed by herself. She is referred to by Montaigne in affectionate and eulogistic terms near the end of chapter 17 of Book II. The term fille d’alliance did not, in this case, indicate any kinship, or even an adoption, properly speaking. Her introduction to her edition of 1635 is dithyrambic in praise of the Essays.