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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

October 31.

Whether God adds to the soul of man, which is the same in all men, something that comes from him by making a ray shine within it.

October 30.

One can say of Don Quixote that he was a man whose courage troubled his senses as fear troubles those of others, and just as they see enemies to flee everywhere, he saw giants to fight everywhere.

Florian, in translating Don Quixote, has therefore changed the tempo of the air, the key of Cervantes’s music. The translation of the foreword is in this respect a masterpiece of fidelity.

He has applied to the outpourings of an abundant and rich vein the little leaps and murmurs of the brook. Little sound, little movement, very agreeable no doubt when it is a narrow trickle of water rolling over pebbles, but unbearable here because this gait is false when attributed to a broad flow of water filling its channel over very fine sand.

November 6.

In all labors of the mind, fatigue warns man of his powerlessness for the moment.

Ovid’s saying. And what (I tried) I strove to write was verse, is that of a poet powerless to resist himself. It is the chiming before the hour.

November 7.

Eloquence, the sciences, born in the same places from which the sun comes to us. Our west sees everything die. “It is from the north today that light comes to us,” Voltaire said. The north will freeze everything.

If I “judge your heart by your words,” Ch[êne] D[olé], you are swollen with much pride.

The ancients ordinarily used the vague word nearest the precise word, to give more pleasure to attention.

Our soul. It is a simple being? Yes, but clothed. God alone is simple, because he is unlimited.

It was said of Pythagoras that “he banished chance from the world.” Fine praise, certainly.

Of beauty in music. It is necessary that, for the beauty and merit of dissonance, that it be used by a man who knows harmony and thinks of it while fleeing it, just as, for the merit of caricature, it must be handled by a man who holds within him knowledge of the true type and thinks of it while departing from it.

November 8.

Unless one is one of them, one must defer to mathematicians on the truths of mathematics, and to the wise on the truths of morality.

Voltaire. He never excelled except in flattery and in the grotesque.

T152.Soit que opens a possible alternative or explanation without giving a second alternative or completing its governing construction. Whether preserves that suspension. The dates return from November to October in the source order.

T342.This date follows 5 novembre in source order; no chronological rearrangement is made. Soit que remains without an explicit alternative or completed governing construction.

T153.Mouvement de l’air is read musically as the tempo of an air or tune, followed by the key. The printed masterpiece of fidelity is retained despite the criticism on either side; possible irony is not made explicit in Joubert’s text.

T154.The vein suggests both a source of flowing water and the writer’s abundant inspiration. Little sound and little movement retain the repeated petit. Gait translates allure and preserves the transfer of a bodily manner of moving to water.

T155.The reference is Ovid, Tristia IV.10.26. The cited Latin text has temptabam, I tried, where Joubert prints both (conabar) and studebam. The English translates both of Joubert’s verbs and keeps their order and parentheses. The break after saying and comma after verse are also printed. The chiming before the hour links spontaneous verse to an inability to restrain oneself.

T156.The opening remains a participial fragment. Voltaire’s quoted line occurs in his 1771 Épître à l’impératrice de Russie, Catherine II, line 8 (Épître CXI in the Garnier edition, volume X, p. 435). Joubert answers its light with freezing; the English keeps his future tense.

T345.The opening is a participial fragment without a finite verb governing éloquence and sciences.

T157.The completions in Ch[êne] D[olé] are already bracketed in the source. The words about judging the heart remain a quotation within Joubert’s conditional address; no unidentified origin is assigned to that quotation.

T158.Simple carries the metaphysical sense of not being composed of parts, not the sense of naïve or unintelligent. The clothing metaphor and the repeated simple remain without an added explanation of their relation.

T159.The English retains the repeated that corresponding to the source’s que ... qu’elle. The man thinks of harmony while departing from it, just as the caricaturist thinks of the true type: the model or underlying form, not a typographical character.