Abstract
Chapter 15 of Book 2 of Montaigne’s Essais, ‘Que nostre desir s’accroist par la malaisance’ (‘That difficulty increases desire’), is placed under the sign of a double translation of which the first determines the essayist’s attitude towards the second. That first piece of translation is in fact the opening line of the chapter:
Il n’y a raison qui n’en aye une contraire, dict le plus sage party des philosophes.
(‘No reason but has its contrary,’ says the wisest of the Schools of Philosophers).1
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Notes
Les ‘Essais’ de Michel de Montaigne, edited by Pierre Villey, revised by V.-L. Saulnier (Paris, 1965), p. 612;
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M. A. Screech (London, 1991), p. 694. Montaigne and Screech are normally cited together from these editions, with parenthetical in-text page references in the form ‘pp. 612, 694’.
See Alain Legros, in Montaigne: Les Essais, edited by Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien and Catherine Magnien-Simonin (Paris, 2007), pp. 1311–16, 1892–1903.
Alexandre Tarrête, ‘notice’ to II.15 in Essais de Michel de Montaigne, edited by Emmanuel Naya, Delphine Reguig-Naya and Alexandre Tarrête, 3 vols (Paris, 2009), II, 763: ‘la volonté de se confier entièrement à la Providence’ (‘the determination to trust entirely to Providence’);
Essais de Michel de Montaigne, edited by André Tournon, 3 vols (Paris, 1998), II, 821: ‘un providentialisme de l’épreuve purificatrice’ (‘the providentialism of a purifying ordeal’), referring to the 1582 paragraph, but without linking it directly to the manuscript addition.
Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne, edited by Philippe Desan (Paris, 2004); the most significant other comment on Providence is the long section at 1.23, p. 121 beginning: ‘Si quelques fois la Providence divine a passé pardessus les regles ausquelles elle nous a necessairement astreints, ce n’est pas pour nous en dispenser’ (‘Though divine Providence has sometimes passed beyond the rules to which we are bound by necessity, it was not dispensing us from them’) (p. 137).
See Terence Cave, Retrospectives: Essays in Literature, Poetics and Cultural History, edited by Neil Kenny and Wes Williams (Oxford, 2009), pp. 117–26. Screech and Frame translate ‘contraste’ as ‘opposition’, following Florio.
‘Prudence’ is also ‘prudentia’, the judge’s ability to combine judgement and decision into ‘iudicium’; see further Francis Goyet, Les Audaces de la prudence. Littérature et politique aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 2009).
See John O’Brien, ‘De l’Oeconomicus à La Mesnagerie: La Boétie et Xénophon’, in Etienne de la Boétie: Sage révolutionnaire et poète périgourdin, edited by Marcel Tetel (Paris, 2004), pp. 45–62.
For example, Ian Maclean, Montaigne philosophe (Paris, 1996), pp. 33–5, on Montaigne’s understanding of the Aristotelian theory of opposites.
Bernard Sève, Montaigne: Des règles pour l’esprit (Paris, 2007), pp. 61–83.
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O’Brien, J. (2015). Translating Scepticism and Transferring Knowledge in Montaigne’s House. In: Demetriou, T., Tomlinson, R. (eds) The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401496_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401496_10
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