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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1807

January 4.

Voltaire is clear as water. Bossuet is clear as wine, and that is enough. He nourishes and strengthens.

That one consoles one for the others (Mme de Chateaubriand).

January 6.

... all the pleasures she does not bless (religion).

January 7.

Before the Lord. Those to whom God is always present.

January 8.

The devotees of the sciences have their temples and chapels in what they call athenaeums and museums.

January 10.

That astonishes, — one examines it and “that remains true,” as Chênedollé said today.

January 11.

Animals. In fable, they speak. They are almost men. In reality, they do not stand in the same relations to us, and we do not have the same duties toward them. They do not give us their milk and wool; we take it from them. There is no benefaction where there was no will. Finally, if they could complain, we would be in the wrong. But the poets who complain in their name are not right, unless they make them speak in person, as La Fontaine does. See his fable of The Man and the Snake. The ox’s speeches to the cow are admirable there. Rouche’s tirade is ridiculous.

January 13.

Dream of the constellations withdrawing from the sky and setting one after another at sunrise. Beauty of the weather. Magnificence of the spectacle. Among the constellations, some were setting in the south and others in the north.

St Ange, that writer distinguished by so much talent and stupidity, has said, well or badly, a beautiful thing that [his] long experience had taught him, by chance. Here it is: “...There are no difficulties one cannot overcome by attacking them from above, as Perseus attacked Andromeda’s monster,” that is, as he explains, “by hovering above it on the wings of imagination... and by surrendering to those happy liberties it discovers in its delirium and is astonished to discover... The interpreter’s art” (the art of translating would be better) “has been for me an art of enthusiasm.” (Preface to the Fasti, page xxvi.)

— He has taken this line as a kind of epigraph: Genius, star of the world, shine on the ungrateful.

The imbecile!

Innocent. One is not innocent when one harms oneself.

One need not be young to be good, learned, judicious, enlightened, eloquent, etc., wise, etc., and finally to be right.

Physical sciences, useful to life. Moral sciences, useful to happiness, to the soul.

T1.The repeated clear keeps the comparison between the two writers and the two liquids. The final He refers to Bossuet, with the nourishment and strength of wine still active in the image.

T2.The demonstrative identifies Mme de Chateaubriand through the source’s parenthesis. The person consoled is unexpressed; English one supplies only the generic object required by the verb, without naming another person. The others remain unnamed.

T3.The fragment’s feminine pronoun is identified by the closing religion. English she preserves that personification without supplying a governing clause.

T253.The opening ellipsis and fragment remain; the parenthetical la religion identifies the feminine pronoun.

T4.Before the Lord translates the Latin Coram domino. The following phrase names those to whom God is always present; it does not reverse that relation.

T5.Devotees, temples, and chapels preserve the religious comparison. Athenaeums and museums retain the historical institutional names without narrowing them to today’s exhibition buildings.

T6.The argument distinguishes animals in fable from their relation to people in reality. The source’s singular le after milk and wool is retained as it in English. Benefaction preserves the distinction between something taken and something intentionally given; the passage remains Joubert’s assertion. The ox’s speeches to the cow follows the printed à la vache rather than substituting another conjunction. Rouche remains the legible name; a possible lost final letter is not supplied.

T254.The paragraph continues at the top of page 584. The facsimile confirms unaccented eut. Two independent facsimile inspections read only Rouche at the right edge of page 584; a lost final r is possible, but is not certified or silently supplied. The singular le after lait et laine and the phrase discours du bœuf à la vache remain unchanged.

T7.The south and north remain the directions of setting within the dream. Neither is replaced with west on astronomical grounds. Beauty of the weather reads temps in the surrounding scene; the compressed nominal observations remain separate sentences.

T8.The quoted singular d’elle follows the plural difficulties in the source; English it retains that uneven reference, while the later it refers to imagination. The bracketed his follows the source’s [sa]. Joubert’s correction from the interpreter’s art to the art of translating stays outside the quotation. Fasti translates the shortened Fastes title; the page number remains xxvi.

T9.The verse remains an internal line of this paragraph, followed by the separate exclamation The imbecile! Star preserves astre, and the ungrateful renders the people designated by des ingrats. No unprinted author is supplied for the verse.

T10.Innocent preserves the repeated root and its connection with not harming. The italic printed Innocens can be read as the Latin adjective innocent or harmless, adopted here; it can also be the historical French plural innocents, a spelling attested by the Académie in 1798. The following French sentence concerns harm done to oneself.

T258.Phisiques retains the printed i. The damaged au at the right edge is restored from surviving traces and the following bonheur. Both clauses remain nominal.