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VOLTAIRE’S LETTRES PHILOSOPHIQUES IN ENGLISH: THE SEDITIOUS VOICE OF THE FIRST TRANSLATION

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posted on 2019-05-29, 02:42 authored by Guy Rooryck, Lieve Jooken

Abstract This study confronts the English text of Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (Letters concerning the English Nation), which appeared in 1733, with three modern translations by Ernest Dilworth (1961), Leonard Tancock (1980) and Prudence L. Steiner (2007). The analysis focuses in particular on the thirteenth letter, devoted to John Locke, and the fourteenth letter, which compares Descartes and Newton. Adopting a more incisive voice than the modern versions, the original English translation, attributed to John Lockman, invokes the seditious aspect of Voltaire’s account of Locke’s empiricism and Newton’s cosmology in direct terms. In doing so, the contemporaneous Enlightenment translator reproduces what Berman calls the ‘signifiance’ of the original text as he explicitly emphasises Voltaire’s illocutionary intent. Thanks to its historical simultaneity (“simultanéité historique”, Annie Brisset) the 1733 English text therefore forcefully conveys the message that Voltaire expresses in more reticent censorship-wary terms in the French version. The modern translations, on the other hand, reproduce this more evasive voice and no longer transmit the marks of subversion, which Lockman amplifies defiantly.

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