Some Fruits of Solitude: Wise Sayings on the Conduct of Human Life (review)

Book Reviews Edited by Thomas D. Hamm Some Fruits ofSolitude: Wise Sayings on the Conduct ofHuman Life. By William Penn. Ed. by Eric K. Taylor. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2003. 167 pp. Illustration and note. William Penn was a seventeenth century gentleman, educated in classics , law, and theology. Known principally for founding Pennsylvania, he was also a remarkable and wide-ranging writer. The products of his pen are elegant, deliberate, meticulous, and radically foreign to modern readers . In Some Fruits ofSolitude, Edited into Today 's English, Eric K. Taylor tries to bring Penn's collection of maxims and reflections on life to contemporary readers. There are several considerations that must be balanced when translating a text. Among them: 1)To pick words in the target language that best express the original writer's meaning. 2)To preserve the original writer's voice, style, and personality. 3)To keep the work within its original culture and avoid introducing anachronistic elements. 4)To produce an accessible and inviting text for a contemporary reader. Often these objectives are in conflict. For example, the accurately translated racial, social, and political attitudes of one age can be an impediment to a reader in another time and place. The goal is a balance, giving each objective an appropriate share in the final product. Some of the translations achieve that goal. Penn's maxim: "Temperance. To this a spare Diet contributes much. Eat therefore to live, and do not live to eat. That's like a Man, but this below a Beast." Is translated as: "A moderate, simple diet contributes much toward self-control. Eat to live; don't live to eat. The former becomes a man, the latter is below a beast." Overall, however, the book fails to consistently find its footing. A few examples are sufficient to illustrate. In maxim #21, Penn wrote: "Here is man. ... If we consider his Make, and lovely Compositure; the several Stories of his lovely Structure." Taylor transforms Penn's admiration for the human body into: "Consider how awe-inspiringly we are made, and the multiple levels of our nature." Book Reviews55 As a noun, "make" refers to the style of an item's construction. "Compositure" adds an appreciation for the careful positioning of each part. Together with the word 'order', this evokes Penn's awe at the graceful, harmonious, indeed wondrous, form that results. This is an argument by design for the existence of God—but Taylor's "aweinspiringly " fails to carry the depth of Penn's meaning. Worse, the phrase is awkward, giving the impression that Penn was overwhelmed by his material. Penn followed this with an earthy expression of admiration for digestion —even for the waste produced by the divinely designed human body: "His divers Members, their Order, Function and Dependency: The Instruments of Food, the Vessels of Digestion, the several Transmutations it passes." In Taylor's translation, these lines are cleansed—stripped ofthat physical power—producing a very different image: "Consider our many parts, each with their proper functions and interdependency . Consider the digestive systems: the different organs. . . ." In the next line, Taylor yanks Penn out of his proper time. Penn wrote: "And how Nourishment is carried and diffused throughout the whole Body, by most innate and imperceptible Passages. How the Animal Spirit is thereby refreshed, and with an unspeakable Dexterity and Motion sets all Parts at work to feed themselves." In the seventeenth century, the soul was believed to control the various organs and muscles through the medium ofthe "animal spirits," a kind of fluid that circulated throughout the body. Taylor substitutes "how the brain and nervous system are refreshed. . . ."—a perfectly reasonable statement coming from a man of the twenty-first century, not from William Penn. More serious are the occasions where Taylor simply gets it wrong. In maxim #48, Penn wrote: "If thy Debtor . . . prove insolvent, don't Ruin him to get that, which it will not ruin thee to lose." Taylor translates this as: "If your debtors ... fail to pay you, don't ruin them to get what won't ruin you to lose." An insolvent debtor is someone unable to pay a debt, not a person who has simply failed to...