| Diderot began his professional career as a translator of English texts, translating Stanyan's Grecian History in 1743, Shaftesbury's Inquiry concerning virtue, or merit in 1745,and collaborating on a translation of James's Medicinal Dictionary in 1746-48. His conception of the English and French languages as stated in Lettre sur les sourds et muets and his ideas on translation as revealed in his "Observations sur la traduction de l'Essai sur l'Homme de Pope par Silhouette" provide the basis for an examination of these translations with a view to identifying the possible formative influence of this early experience on Diderot's style and on his approach to writing in general. The influence of English may be seen in his gravitation to the concrete words and images of the texts he translated, reflecting his admiration for English as a language "full of images" and possessed of a great capacity for "painting." His sensitivity to these qualities and effort to inject them into his own language helped him to achieve his own distinctive version of the hieroglyphic synthesis he posited as the utmost goal of language in Lettre sur les sourds et muets.; But in addition to the influence of English, there was that of the translation process per se. An examination of Diderot's subsequent works reveals that the experience of translating had a permanent effect on his relationship with his text and with his reader, that he adopted the ambiguous posture of translator, with its intriguing mix of dependence and liberation, as the model for all his writing, re-assuming that posture not only in his later translation of Edward Moore's The Gamester, but in fact re-creating it in all his works. The distinctive features arising from the translation model account, paradoxically, for much of the "originality" of Diderot's work. |
