- English renderings
- author; writer; authors
Meaning
Auteur usually names an originating writer, but can extend to a progenitor; écrivain specifically concerns writing.
Use in the book
Taste may forgive an author’s false brilliancies when the attraction seems ingenuous: pretension revolts where error alone need not. The judgment joins the work’s effect to an inferred disposition without identifying the anonymous author. The first writers are elsewhere pictured as restrained by inexperience, while increasing ease in using a language also makes misuse easier. That historical-looking fragment should not be transformed into a rule about every beginner. The expression “author of a lineage” reveals a separate sense, with authors as ancestors or progenitors rather than makers of books.
Places to read
- II, p. 489, entry 8, ¶1An author’s ingenuous error is distinguished from pretension.
- II, p. 733, entry 4, ¶1Inexperience restrains first writers, while ease enables misuse.
- I, p. 407, entry 1, ¶1Authors can designate progenitors in a lineage.
Translation in this edition
The English translation uses ingenuously, not ingeniously. The damaged [misuse] on II.733 remains a contextual rendering, and “first writers” is not silently replaced by novice writers. Author is deliberately repeated in the lineage expressions to expose the French extension.
