Saturday, October 05, 2024
Anathema Sit
From Eric Thomson:
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I’ve been naive enough to fall for the blurb accompanying “une nouvelle édition des Essais (Bordeaux: Robert Laffont, 2019)… établie par Bernard Combeaud”, the text of which is “non pas ‘modernisée' et encore moins ‘traiduite’ en français moderne mais rajeunie et refraîchie, pour rendre enfin accessible … etc.’. Mendacious tosh. I loathe the sort of nannying editors that, to take a random sample, substitutes ‘vaillance’ for the ‘vertu’ the author wrote. A footnote would do, or an unobtrusive glossary such as furnish Chaucer editions, but tinkering and tampering with Montaigne’s text is beyond the pale. We don’t do the same with Francis Bacon as far as I know, and who’s afraid of the odd lexical puzzle, or a preconsonantal <s> or <c> lost in Modern French orthography? Anathema sit.
