Julie, or the New Heloise (review)

REVIEWS 513 les enthousiasmes vertueux que le père de Rousseau lui avait fait goûter dans l'enfance. Ces enthousiasmes, pour l'écrivain, ne se séparent pas de l'éveil de la sexualité. Le gouverneur en retarde le moment afin de donner à son disciple l'occasion de les éprouver hors de sa sphère, lorsqu'il aura atteint l'âge d'homme. Bien entendu, il s'arrangera pour rendre le mariage d'Emile compatible avec 1'amour, mais il neutralisera la crise de 1'adolescence, qui se traduitpar la rébellion contre le père, en séparant provisoirement le jeune homme de son autre moitié et en fixant son attention sur les liens de la société. L'on regrette le traitement sommaire infligé à Emile et Sophie, roman auquel Claire Elmquist ne consacre que deux pages, quoique placé, de son propre aveu, sous le signe de l'abandon du père. Prise dans son ensemble, cette analyse n'est pas moins de nature à stimuler la réflexion. Elle suppose une lecture intelligente et lucide qui s'écarte souvent à propos des sentiers battus. L'on se prend à souhaiter que 1'auteur lui donne par voie d'articles le retentissement que les défauts évidents de son livre risquent de lui faire perdre en grande partie. Jean Terrasse Université McGiIl Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Julie, or the New Heloise. Translated and annotatedby Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché. The CollectedWritings ofRousseau, vol. 6. Hanover and London: University Press ofNew England, 1977. xxxi + 728pp. US$60.00 (cloth); US$25.00 (paper). ISBN 0-87451- 825-3. Rousseau's novel, a runaway best-seller in 1761, was enormously influential in Europe for the next fifty years. It is in revolt not only against many Enlightenment values but against the Enlightenment aesthetic of brevity and wit. It is a vast, symphonic, flowing composition, an epistolary narrative of few events and much feeling. Its style is lyrical if not overwrought. At the same time it is philosophical and didactic. In what is the first complete new translation into English for over two hundred years, Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché have risen admirably to the challenge of this sacred monster. Their volume duly includes Rousseau's two polemical prefaces. In addition it offers in English "Les Amours de Milord Edouard Bomston," a manuscript coda to the text of the novel. Included too are good reproductions of the twelve original illustrations, engraved by Gravelot following Rousseau's own detailed instructions, which are also provided here. There is a short Introduction by Philip Stewart, and a joint Note on the Translation. At the end we have the 1764 "Summary ofthe letters" (countenanced though not written by Rousseau). Other appendices offer a narrative chronology (digested from the authoritative Pléiade edition), a glossary of terms, and a bibliography. Finally there are seventy-five pages of editorial notes and an index. One regrets only that the running heads do not include letter numbers. The volume is handsomely presented and well bound. It is (apart from a gross error on the back cover about 514 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:4 the "unsuspecting" husband) a credit to its press and to the series. Anglophone readers could hardly ask for more. The translators define their aims as "accuracy," and "to stay as close as reasonably possible to the vocabulary and sentence structure of the original" (p. xxviii). In these they succeed remarkably. Very rarely they are over-literal: "de simples hôtes" should not be "simple" (p. 445) but "mere"; "les uns aux autres" is not "the ones to the others" (p. 262) but "to one another"; "tout étonné" (p. 477) is not "all surprised." Mistranslation is rarer still: "you hear me" (p. 522) should be "understand"; "avec attendrissement" is not "affectedly" (p. 484); much more important , the "rapports" of the soul are not I think "proportions" (p. 300) but "relations" (compare p. 689, line 2). Stewart and Vaché also undertake to convey key terms by consistent English renderings: "sensible [à]" is always "sensible [to]"; "honnête" is always "honest"— not "decent" or "proper." The weight of such terms may be emphasized: "patrie" becomes "fatherland," with a degree of deliberate elevation or period...