Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

January 2.

Their physics is a lantern in which they have put no candle.

And Condillac. His statue: a body without a soul, a house without an inhabitant, a place without a master. — A fiction that could have been ingenious, but that is fit for nothing.

Abbé Delile in Milton. Never has he shown himself so like Virgil, even when translating him.

January 4.

Much swelling in minds and much leanness in style: one of the characteristics of this age.

January 6.

Virgil. In him, indeed, even the sublime is gentle.

“Everything that shows itself uncovered stirs only the senses.” (L.L.) That is very well said.

Idiotisms. Must be placed in style like folds in a drapery. Only breadths around them can excuse them.

January 7.

Bossuet. In such times there would not have been enough learning to fill such a mind, nor enough subjects to exercise all its powers, nor enough tranquility to leave him free use of his vast capacity... Enough light to enlighten him, enough intelligence to understand him.

January 8.

These idiotisms seem by their very familiarity to testify to a greater sincerity. In the end they please because they seem to show the man even more than the author, which Pascal regarded as a cause of the pleasures certain books give.

January 9.

— Indeed, a little black dust is enough even for men to overthrow cities, to split the hardest rocks, and to shake mountains.

Abbé Delile. This man has nothing in his head but sounds and colors, but see what he makes of them.

January 13.

Of literary old age. — The reason is that youth follows fashion and must follow the rule. The last age follows its taste and seeks its ease.

— Whether beautiful verse is made in the soul and not in the mind. For the mind is exterior. Of the dwelling and the different enclosures of the soul. The imagination (literary) is nearer the center there than the mind.

T47.Their has no named antecedent. Physics retains physique as the account of nature being criticized; the lantern remains unlit because no candle has been put inside it.

T48.The three comparisons for Condillac’s statue remain separate. Could have been preserves the unrealized possibility of an ingenious fiction. Propre à rien means fit for nothing here, not something literally without property.

T49.The source spells the name Delile. The final him is read as Virgil: the comparison is with Delile’s earlier act of translating Virgil. No wording from an English Milton or Virgil translation is used.

T50.The printed French has sublimé, with a final acute accent, independently checked in the facsimile. The English reads the nominal expression le sublimé in context as the sublime; the source’s anomalous accent remains in the French.

T51.Idiotisms are constructions peculiar to a language, sometimes contrary to ordinary grammatical rules, as described in the Académie’s 1798 dictionary. They do not mean idiocies. The folds, drapery, and surrounding breadths retain the textile image of plis, draperie, and largeurs. The detached Must sentence follows the source’s omitted subject.

T303.The finite plural Doivent follows the noun fragment Idiotismes.; no extra subject is inserted into the French.

T52.Sciences is rendered learning, with the broader historical sense of branches of knowledge rather than only the modern natural sciences. The initial negative governs the first three quantities; the final two Enough phrases follow the ellipsis without a repeated verb or negative. The translation leaves their relation to the negative visibly unfinished.

T53.The physical image suggests gunpowder, but Joubert calls it black dust; the English keeps that phrase. Even for men preserves the comparison’s unexplained emphasis without adding a divine agent.

T54.The last age means old age in the stated literary comparison. Youth follows fashion and must follow the rule; the English does not reverse the latter obligation into a statement that youth actually follows it.

T55.The opening Si is read as a detached inquiry, Whether, without a supplied answer. Mind and soul remain distinct. The dwelling, enclosures, exterior, and center sustain the spatial metaphor.