Diotimos Reading Desk

Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.

← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

March 15.

Glimmers that make one impatient because they show nothing.

— These are what I call gashes rather than strokes.

... these are only metaphors of habit. They must be of necessity, of temper, of ecstasy, of conviction. In a metaphor, finally, there must always be something sudden and being born, or sublime.

And these interrupted works give at least experience of the mind’s operations.

Architecture of words. (Add) in which everything is made with words that can hold themselves in the air. Add again: like sounds. And seek what can give sounds this quality, or what properly constitutes a sound and makes a noise such a thing or not.

Yes. They do speak of the rules of cooking. But in what they say, I do not sense those of taste. I find neither proportions nor seasonings in it.

— and how many good ideas come in an attic with rats in it — when the weather is bad.

Longinus’s chapter entitled “that figures need the sublime.” Figures need the sublime as fire needs air, as air needs space. It may not be true that figures need sublimity precisely; but they need at least the ideal, a certain vastness in ideas. Without that, they have no place, no suitable space. They are put into what is full, where nothing outlines them or shows them to advantage, where they are, so to speak, a too much. So when you wish to use a figure, first make and prepare a region for it. Region is the suitable word here.

Besides, I suspect that Longinus’s title is more ample and better than his chapter. I am going to see.

P. S. The chapter is not bad, but the title is worth more.

Darts that are not thrown.

March […].

... with that laughter that seems to rejoice in evil.

For words are labels. And it is in seeking them that things are found.

— like those acts of justice that corrupt those who perform them.

Figures. They have the faculty of producing them, but not the skill to place them.

What leaves good taste, but to enter great taste.

T261.The fragment preserves the paradox of glimmers that fail to reveal anything; no missing object is supplied.

T262.Entailles are cuts or notches; traits can be strokes, pointed remarks, or telling features. The cutting and drawing contrast is retained, without assigning a more specific object than the source provides.

T263.Humeur is temper or disposition, not necessarily humor in the comic sense. The repeated de phrases remain deliberately compressed. “Being born” preserves the living image in naissant; the final alternative, “or sublime,” is not made into a tidy list of equivalent qualities.

T264.The add, add again, and seek directions belong to Joubert’s text. They are not translator instructions. The closing distinction follows son and bruit: a noise may or may not constitute a sound in the sense being sought. No musical definition is supplied.

T265.The sustained culinary vocabulary gives goût both its bodily and critical senses. The unidentified plural subject is retained, as are the absence of proportions and the absence of seasonings.

T266.Grenier à rats describes an attic inhabited by rats. The surrounding fragment does not identify a building; the two dashes are retained.

T267.The corresponding heading appears in chapter XV of Boileau’s French translation of On the Sublime. Joubert shortens that heading, then proposes the ideal and spaciousness as a more exact requirement. His two following paragraphs record an intention to reread the chapter and a subsequent judgment; P. S. belongs to the notebook text.

T268.Figures is the rhetorical term, sustained through a spatial image. Le plein is what is full, opposed to the space a figure needs. The deliberately awkward “a too much” preserves Joubert’s substantivized un trop, and “region” retains the word he expressly singles out.

T269.The verb lancés suggests darts or missiles. Traits also denotes strokes or pointed expressions; the translation chooses the physical object while leaving its possible literary application open.

T270.Mal may be evil or harm. The fragment leaves the person laughing and the occasion unidentified.

T458.The day is obscured at the gutter and is not inferred from sequence.

T271.Them refers to words, while things are what the search discovers. The shift from active seeking to things being found is retained.

T272.The paradox remains unqualified: it is the acts of justice that corrupt their agents. The fragment does not identify a judicial proceeding or supply an explanation.

T273.The distinction between bon goût and grand goût is maintained literally. The fragment presents a departure from one in order to enter the other, not a simple lapse into bad taste.