Table Of ContentEMILE
---------,.,.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
EMILE
or On Education
Introduction, Translation,
and Notes
B Y
B
BOOKS
A Member The Perseus Books Group
(If
TO T H E M E M O R Y O F
VICTOR BARAS
M Y S T U D E N T AND F R I E N D
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778.
Emile: or On education.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. Education-Early works to 1800. I. Title.
LBgz.Eg 1979 370 78-73765
ISBN-10 0-465-01931-5 (pbk.)
ISBN-13 978-0-465-01931-1 (pbk.)
Foreword, Introduction, English translation, and Notes
copyright O 1979 by Basic Books,
Printed in the United States of America
DESIGNED BY VINCENT TORRE
DHAD 0708 09 50 49 48 47 46 45 44 43 42 41 40
Contents
Foreword vii
Introduction 3
Note 29
E M I L E or On Education
PREFACE
Explanation of the Illustrations
BOOK I
BOOK I1
BOOK 111
BOOK IV
BOOK V
Notes
Index
Foreword
w'N I WROTE the preface to my translation of the
Republic, I did not have to argue the importance of the book; I had to
justify only the need for a new translation when there were so many
famous existing versions. With Emile the situation is the reverse: there
is general agreement that the only available translation is inadequate in
all important respects, while the book itself is not held to be of great
significance and has little appeal to contemporary taste. However, this is
not the place to make a case for Emile. I can only hope that this transla
tion will contribute to a reconsideration of this most fundamental and
necessary book.
The translation aims, above all, at accuracy. Of course, no intelligible
translation could be strictly literal, and simply bad English would mis
represent Rousseau's very good French. Style cannot be separated from
substance. But unless the translator himself were a genius of Rous
seau's magnitude, the attempt to imitate the felicity of his language
would fail and would distort and narrow his meaning. One would
have to look at what one can say well in English rather than at Rous
seau's thought. He is a precise and careful writer. He speaks of a real
world of which we all have experience, no matter what our language.
He, above all writers, thought he spoke to all men. The translator
must concentrate on making his English point to the same things Rous
seau's French points to. And this is best done by finding the closest
equivalents to his words and sticking to them, even when that causes
inconvenience.
Every translation is, of course, in some sense an interpretation; and
thus there can be no mechanical rules for translation. The question,
then, is what disposition gUides the translator: whether the impossibility
of simple literalness is a fact against which he struggles and a source of
dissatisfaction with himself, or whether he uses it as an excuse to
display his virtuosity. As with most choices, the right one is least likely
to afford opportunities for flattering one's vanity. The translator of a
great work should revere his text and recognize that there is much in
it he cannot understand. His translation should try to make others able
to understand what he cannot understand, which means he often must
prefer a dull ambiguity to a brilliant resolution. He is a messenger, not
a plenipotentiary, and proves his fidelity to his great masters by re
producing what seems in them to the contemporary eye wrong, out
rageous, or incomprehensible, for therein may lie what is most im
portant for us. He resists the temptation to make the book attractive or
relevant, for its relevance may lie in its appearing irrelevant to current
thought. If books are to be liberating, they must seem implausible in
the half-light of our plausibilities which we no longer know how to ques-
[v ii]
FOREWORD
tion. An old book must appear to be old-fashioned, and a translator
cannot lessen the effort required of the reader; he can only make it
possible for the reader to make that effort. Therefore the translator will
try to imitate the text, insofar as possible following sentence structure;
he will never vary terms Rousseau does not vary, but where Rousseau
repeats a particular French word, the translator will also repeat its
English equivalent; he will never choose English words whose origins
are in later thought, even though Rousseau may have been the inspira
tion of that thought. This is what I have tried to do, but I have often
failed. A verb of capital significance for Rousseau like sentir and its
various derivatives-such as sentiment, sensible, sensibilite-simply de
fied reduction to Rousseau's unity of usage. Sometimes I have had to use
"feel" and its derivatives and sometimes "sense" and its derivatives; and
a very few times I have had to use an English word with an entirely
different root (always trying to link it with "sense" or "feel"). On the
other hand, I have been fortunate with other important words like
nature and its derivatives; and the reader can be sure that if they
occur in the translation, they are in the original French and vice versa.
This translation is meant to give the reader a certain confidence that he
is thinking about Rousseau and not about me, as well as to inspire in
him a disconcerting awareness that, to be sure, he must learn French.
The notes have been kept to a minimum in order not to distract from
the text; and the intention behind them was to permit the reader to
confront the text without feeling hopelessly dependent on expert mid
dlemen. Interpretation will be available in the volume of commentary
to follow. The notes are limited to translations of citations from other
languages and identification of their sources, to mention of a few im
portant textual variants, and to explanations of some difficult words and
references whose meanings Rousseau took for granted but are now
obscure. And in order to avoid a morass of questionable scholarly con
jecture about the influences on Rousseau, the notes attempt to locate
only those passages in the works of other writers to which Rousseau
explicitly refers. It is Similarly treacherous to try to interpret one of
Rousseau's books in light of another, for every phrase is conditioned by
his specific intention in each work. An understanding of the whole can
be attained only by a firm grasp on each of the parts; to interpret a
passage in one book by a passage in another is to risk misunderstand
ing both and to deny their independent intelligibility. There are, thne
fore, such cross-references only where Rousseau himself indicates that
they are appropriate. All this is done in the conviction that the profound
reader need not be the scholarly reader-and vice versa.
The French editions of Emile used for the translation were those of
Fran~ois and Pierre Richard, published by Gamier, Paris, 1939, and
of Charles Wirz and Pierre Burgelin, pages 239-868 in Volume IV of
Rousseau's Oeuvres Completes, edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel
Raymond, Bibliotheque de la PIeiade, Gallimard, Paris, 1969. I gen
erally followed the text of the first edition of Emile and refer in the
notes to significant variations provided by the various manuscripts and
a copy of the first edition in which Rousseau made changes for a
complete edition of his works that was to be published in 1764.
[ viii]
FOREWORD
I undertook this translation with a selfish motive: I thought it the
best way to familiarize myself with a book which was very alien to me
but which seemed to contain hidden treasures. One of the results of
this project has been a new sense of what it means to be a teacher and
of the peculiar beauty of the relationship between teacher and student.
Only Socrates rivals Rousseau in the depth and detail of his understand
ing of that most generous of associations. And learning from Rousseau
has given me the occasion to learn from my students while teaching
them. Over the past eight years I have given several classes on Emile,
and the interest it provoked gave evidence of its usefulness. By students'
questions and suggestions I have been led toward the heart of the text.
It provided a ground for community among us in the quest for under
standing of ourselves. As this translation progressed, I have used it in
my classes, and my first thanks go to all those students who read it
and corrected it, testing it in the situation for which it was intended.
They are too numerous to mention, but I should like to single out Joel
Schwartz, Janet Ajzenstat, Sidney Keith, John Harper, and Marc Plattner
who went over it with particular care. MyoId friends Irene Berns,
Werner Dannhauser, and Midge Decter also helped me greatly.
I also want to thank the Canada Council, the John Simon Guggen
heim Foundation, and the Earhart Foundation for their generous as
sistance which made it possible for me to do this work.
The Introduction is a revised version of "The Education of Democratic
Man" which appeared in Daedalus, Summer 1978, and is reprinted with
the permission of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
ALLAN BLOOM
Toronto, June I978
[ix]
