This translation of Amiel’s “Journal Intime” is primarily addressed to
those whose knowledge of French, while it may be sufficient to carry
them with more or less complete understanding through a novel or a
newspaper, is yet not enough to allow them to understand and appreciate
a book containing subtle and complicated forms of expression. I believe
there are many such to be found among the reading public, and among
those who would naturally take a strong interest in such a life and mind
as Amiel’s, were it not for the barrier of language. It is, at any rate,
in the hope that a certain number of additional readers may be thereby
attracted to the “Journal Intime” that this translation of it has been
undertaken.
The difficulties of the translation have been sometimes considerable,
owing, first of all, to those elliptical modes of speech which a man
naturally employs when he is writing for himself and not for the public,
but which a translator at all events is bound in some degree to expand.
Every here and there Amiel expresses himself in a kind of shorthand,
perfectly intelligible to a Frenchman, but for which an English
equivalent, at once terse and clear, is hard to find. Another difficulty
has been his constant use of a technical philosophical language, which,
according to his French critics, is not French--even philosophical
French--but German. Very often it has been impossible to give any
other than a literal rendering of such passages, if the thought of the
original was to be preserved; but in those cases where a choice was
open to me, I have preferred the more literary to the more technical
expression; and I have been encouraged to do so by the fact that Amiel,
when he came to prepare for publication a certain number of “Pensées,”
extracted from the Journal, and printed at the end of a volume of poems
published in 1853, frequently softened his phrases, so that sentences
which survive in the Journal in a more technical form are to be found in
a more literary form in the “Grains de Mil.”
In two or three cases--not more, I think--I have allowed myself to
transpose a sentence bodily, and in a few instances I have added some
explanatory words to the text, which wherever the addition was of any
importance, are indicated by square brackets.
My warmest thanks are due to my friend and critic, M. Edmond Scherer,
from whose valuable and interesting study, prefixed to the French
Journal, as well as from certain materials in his possession which
he has very kindly allowed me to make use of, I have drawn by far the
greater part of the biographical material embodied in the Introduction.
M. Scherer has also given me help and advice through the whole process
of translation--advice which his scholarly knowledge of English has made
especially worth having.
In the translation of the more technical philosophical passages I have
been greatly helped by another friend, Mr. Bernard Bosanquet, Fellow of
University College, Oxford, the translator of Lotze, of whose care and
pains in the matter I cherish a grateful remembrance.
But with all the help that has been so freely given me, not only by
these friends but by others, I confide the little book to the public
with many a misgiving! May it at least win a few more friends and
readers here and there for one who lived alone, and died sadly persuaded
that his life had been a barren mistake; whereas, all the while--such
is the irony of things--he had been in reality working out the mission
assigned him in the spiritual economy, and faithfully obeying the secret
mandate which had impressed itself upon his youthful consciousness:
“_Let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave
behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be most useful so_.”