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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1804

I have not reached the end.

It is true, he has only to shake his paw... but all of it falls to the ground. As for us, we build with our bricks and our marbles (though not without ornaments). His precious stones will be plundered; our stones will remain standing.

Sunday, January 29.

At Villeneuve, at Le Clos. The almond trees in blossom.

January […]1.

Whoever “calls a cat a cat” is neither artist nor poet. It is not enough for a work to express the name and quality of its subject, so to speak; it must offer an image of it. How can one make this understood?

“A cat named Rodillardus,” says Lafontaine. I have read in a teller of fables That a certain Rodillard, the Alexander of cats, The Attila, the scourge of rats... There is the name of a cat surrounded by history.

To write, to write! It is a talent, it is a craft, and it is an art. Practice teaches the craft, taste lets one divine the art.

“But he does not finish his phrases” (he said). And they, they do not finish their thoughts. — To finish one’s thought! It takes a long time, it is rare. It gives extreme pleasure. For every finished thought enters minds easily. Such thoughts do not even need to be beautiful to please. It is enough for them to be finished. The state of the soul that had them communicates itself to other souls and carries its repose into them.

To offer incense in earthen vessels and wooden perfume burners. — Nor praise in common terms.

Another rain and another fair weather than the rain and fair weather of other men.

I put a building where a passage is needed.

February 1.

In things without form, one notices no faults in the proportions. There are none. In liquids that are mixed, one likewise does not distinguish what is heterogeneity. So with books, with writings... But here everything is molded, and nothing must be imperfect.

Books. When one puts one’s passions into them, the passions supply; but reason...? (To write with one’s bile.)

February 2.

— D-n-n- [Denon.] Let him roll his gravel and his glass trinkets.

T175.The unnamed he retains his paw without being assigned a person or animal identity. Precious stones and building stones preserve the shared stone image and the contrast between plunderable jewels and a structure that stands.

T176.The French idiom means speaking plainly, but its cat is retained because the following literary examples depend on that animal. Name and quality are distinguished from an image.

T177.The name Rodillardus in the prose quotation and Rodillard in the verse remain different. The three verse lines stay inside their containing paragraph, with the ellipsis unfinished; the translation does not add rhyme at the cost of the names or comparisons. The prose opening is from La Fontaine’s Conseil tenu par les Rats (II.2), whose text at the Institut de France reads Rodilardus. The verse is from Le Chat et un vieux Rat (III.18); the Barbin text transcribed on Wikisource has un second Rodilard, where Joubert’s edition prints un certain Rodillard. These differences are retained in both languages.

T178.The three terms remain separate. Practice teaches the métier, while taste enables one to divine the art; neither is converted into an acquired set of rules.

T179.The unnamed he and the emphatic they, they remain distinct. The repeated finishing of a thought is not reduced to grammatical completion; its repose passes from the originating soul to others.

T180.The opening infinitive has no expressed negation, though Nor introduces the second fragment. The English preserves the discontinuity without supplying a prohibition. Cassolettes are rendered as perfume burners beside the incense.

T181.The weather image remains open. It is not resolved into a definite account of private moods or separate physical weather.

T182.The building occupies a place that needs a way through. The spatial image is retained without replacing it by an explicit diagnosis of Joubert’s prose.

T183.The English uses the usual term for the edition’s unusual étérogénité. The mixed liquids remain an analogy for books; the claim that there are no faulty proportions in what has no form is not softened into a mere inability to detect them.

T184.Fournissent is left without a supplied object, and the question about reason remains unfinished. Bile retains the bodily image rather than becoming anger alone.

T185.Verroteries denotes small glass objects or ornaments. Their material remains distinct from the gravel; the abbreviation and the edition’s supplied name are preserved.