Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

January 14.

Montesquieu. His lively sentence has been long meditated. His words, light as wings, carry weighty reflections. He has leaps and bounds for coming out of a depth.

January 2.

Milton. What great sense! and how many follies!

January 6.

The angels, in Milton, have a fan through which they look at their wings.

January 14.

These thoughts that come to us suddenly and are not yet ours.

I know too well what I am going to say. I know it too well before writing.

January 15.

F. V. said it very well, “descriptive style is only a nomenclature,” arid in some, painted and inflated in others.

He has an alexandrine mind.

He thunders upon the words; he rains hail upon the hemistichs. He is the thunderbolt-hurling Ragotin.

January 16.

Thomas. This man has a concave head. Everything is pictured in it magnified and exaggerated.

An antique head of Jupiter. How many projects conceived, how many thoughts, how many designs, and memories amassed, in the folds and in the furrows and swellings of this brow. And these prominent eyebrows that seem like the base and the foundation of all that, how many things they will move when they move themselves!

Among the antiques there is a Venus who is naked, but who holds out a garment (like a billowing sail) with which she is preparing to cover herself. That is the best one, and the one that may be called modest; for, through the disposition of the accessory, her nakedness inevitably makes one think of her modesty.

A Syrian Cybele. She is overloaded with ornaments; and through this clothing she is no longer anything but a queen. Through the accessory, not only does she belong to humanity, but she has a country.

A hero — raised above blows by the character of his stature, and by the character of his head, raised, above all, above fear.

Apollo and Diana. Through their features it is easy to make of them a Proserpina and a Satan. One sees Hecate in the Diana.

T56.Graves carries gravity and seriousness; weighty sustains its contrast with words light as wings. Leaps and bounds preserve the two movements out of a depth, without replacing that depth with a purely abstract difficulty.

T305.The source returns from 14 janvier to 2 janvier; the date and order are not normalized.

T57.The printed syntax makes their wings the object of look at: the angels look at their wings through a fan. No colon is printed before leurs ailes. The translation does not silently make the wings into the fan, even though that would be a possible editorial reconstruction.

T58.Nomenclature retains the technical name for a naming or listing system. Painted and inflated preserve the visual and swelling images of peinte et ampoulée. The initials remain unexpanded.

T59.The printed adjective is lower-case alexandrin. In this context of verse and hemistichs, alexandrine is read as referring to the metrical line. A reference to an Alexandrian cast of mind is grammatically possible; the unnamed he is not identified.

T60.A hemistich is a half-line of verse. The English makes hail explicit as a storm, rather than allowing the verb to suggest a greeting. Thunderbolt-hurling keeps the violent image of foudroyant attached to the name Ragotin.

T61.The source gives the head a concave shape and makes everything appear magnified within it. The translation preserves this optical comparison without correcting or elaborating its physics.

T62.Projects, thoughts, designs, and memories remain separately accumulated. The final verbs are future: the eyebrows will move things when they themselves move. The sculpture is not assigned a museum or catalogue number.

T63.Pudique and pudeur remain linked as modest and modesty. The garment’s arrangement makes nakedness suggest modesty. Accessory retains the artistic term for the accompanying object, here the held-out garment.

T64.The three paragraphs remain one printed block. Clothing makes Cybele a queen with a country; the hero’s stature and head lift him above blows and fear. Apollo/Diana and Proserpina/Satan retain their printed order without assigning a one-to-one correspondence that the sentence does not explicitly give.