“‘What are the two major inventions of French and British culture?’ ‘Where France is concerned: the language of the eighteenth century, and soft cheese’”. Muriel Barbery’s (2008, 266) endorsement—or that of her narrator and heroine, the discerning concierge Renée—of the linguistic “invention” is well supported in the work of Sylvain Maréchal. Though not considered a premier stylist of the age, nonetheless Maréchal displays a command of rhetoric coupled with a passionate flow of ideas and language—what he might term energy or movement—allowing a glimpse into the culture at large.
But translating Pour et Contre la Bible differs from translating any other of Maréchal’s work. This is because it is not a primary original work such as a novella, treatise or poem, but an extended commentary on another text known to Maréchal only in translation. And not only in one translation but many, for the Bible came down to Maréchal, as it comes to us, virtually a palimpsest incorporating levels and layers, translations of translations reflecting different cultures, histories, and religions. Some versions attempt to be faithful to a source, others consciously revise according to current manners or doctrines. Maréchal had several French versions of Biblical material at his disposal: individual books of scripture (e.g., Psalms), dramatic or poetic treatment of specific episodes or figures such as Susanna, Judith and Esther, as well as the entire corpus. Any of these might reflect a Catholic or a Protestant scholarship translating into French, with greater or less fidelity, the earlier French or the Latin of their source (generally St. Jerome`s Vulgate). This Latin in turn, if Jerome’s, translated earlier Greek material which relied on Hebrew or Aramaic sources. When working with Biblical material, then, one might replace Umberto Eco`s image of “translation as negotiation” (Eco 2003) with “translation as mise-en-abîme”.
A major difference that readers may note between their own Bible and the one commented and translated here is the order of texts and texts included. This is largely because of Apocrypha: texts whose divine inspiration has been doubted and debated down the centuries at various religious councils. They are usually considered canonical by the Roman Catholic Church and therefore included in and as scripture. Most Protestant or Jewish authorities have not agreed, so in their Bibles the Apocrypha will be excluded or attached in an appendix as useful, historical, but not of equal authority to canonized scripture. That said, there are many more texts—other gospels, other apocalypses, other letters, other mystical treatises—that have not qualified as official (see Barnstone 1984) but that can considerably enhance the reader’s appreciation of
The layering of Biblical translations is a situation that Maréchal himself found frustrating, as he makes clear both in his commentary and in the handwritten notes to his personal Bible, held at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. Often, he is contemptuous of a translator’s lack of fidelity to (Latin) Biblical language, whether because of the translator’s prudishness or a general fear of offending contemporary sensibilities through a crude but striking metaphor. Elsewhere, the French interprets terse Latin rather than giving an exact or literal equivalent. In Ecclesiastes, for instance, where the Latin reads “laudavi magis mortuos quam viventes” (I have praised the dead more than the living—Trans.) the French has “I have said that it is better to be dead than to live”, bringing the sentiment down to a more prosaic level.
Maréchal often gives a Latin verse with a French translation by Sacy—his primary source—the latter in square brackets. It is often the case that Sacy’s French does not faithfully render his Latin source, and where both are given, the reader who knows Latin will spot these discrepancies. My effort has been to translate all the French—Maréchal’s and Sacy’s—as accurately as I can and to mark significant discrepancies from the Latin in my notes. Maréchal did annotate his translation. I have indicated with his initials all of his notes; where I have added something to a note of his, I have placed the addition in square brackets and specified “—Trans.”; unsigned explanatory notes are mine.
In my notes, I use BCE and CE (Before the Common Era and Common Era) rather than the more traditional BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini: year of the Lord). Contemporary scholarship generally prefers to avoid the heavy ideological burden of the older system. The archaic spelling of Biblical names has been adjusted to modern usage, and occasionally I have modernized a phrase for the sake of fluency, while hoping to maintain as much as possible of the author’s eighteenth-century French sensibility. Last but not least, I use “humanity”, “humankind” or “people” for the human species rather than the original French “homme” (man) in order to avoid sexual specificity where it is clearly not intended. Some may complain, not unjustly, that this lends more universality to Maréchal’s ideas than they really have, given his relegation of women to second-class citizenship (an attitude not uncommon among revolutionaries of the time). It is an infidelity I admit without a blush, not least because women would necessarily be included in Maréchal’s recommendations on religion and moral virtue. I have also replaced the ubiquitous French “on” (one) with the more contemporaneous “we”. As Robert Alter observes, “The practise of translation…entails an endless series of compromises, some of
Roman numeral headings for the Biblical books were used by Maréchal and have been preserved as conveying a sense both of the period’s classicism and the commentator’s erudition. My table of contents is in accord with Maréchal’s headings, though Pour et Contre lacks a table of contents as such.