Monkey Tricks or Foul Play? the ‘retranslation’ of Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau
Introduction
The first time I became aware of Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew), was during my student years. In a Close Reading Course we students had to read the main work of Hegel, the Phänomenologie des Geistes, (Phenomenology of Spirit). In this work Hegel referred without mentioning names to the novel of Diderot. He described the character of the nephew as a typical example of a parasite in society, and what’s more, as someone who struggles with a consciousness which is torn apart by contradictory feelings.
Well, I don’t want to talk about Hegel here. I just want to tell you how Rameau’s nephew and I first met. The novel Le Neveu de Rameau is a dialogue between two men, the first-person narrator Moi, ( I ), the philosopher and his conversation partner Lui, ( he ), the nephew. They meet in a French pub and talk about all kinds of things like genius, morality, education, women, philosophy and music.
During Diderot’s lifetime nobody knew about the existence of this novel. Diderot didn’t speak about it either with friends nor relatives; nor is there any evidence in his correspondence to be found. He just kept the work in a drawer.
Dowry
It is worth noting that Diderot had a daughter. He wanted to give her a nice dowry, but unfortunately he was not a wealthy man, he had to work for a living. So Diderot had to make up a creative solution. In my opinion he succeeded very well in doing so: he made an agreement with no one less than the empress Catherine II, tsarina of Russia. The agreement implied that she bought his entire library, under the condition that he could use his books during his lifetime, and at the moment that he would die, his books had to be sent to St. Petersburg.
This deal yielded Diderot a considerable sum of money at once and furthermore he received a yearly allowance because the empress appointed him as librarian of his own library.
When Diderot died in 1784 indeed his entire library – except a small part that remained in the possession of his daughter - was moved from Paris to St. Petersburg, including several manuscripts, and among them Le Neveu de Rameau.
The unknown manuscript
In these days a German young man, called Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, was head of the school for officers in the Russian army. Klinger had a free entrance to the court and to the Hermitage. He was able to sniff around in Diderot’s work and he discovered the manuscript of Le Neveu. Immediately he realized the value of this yet unknown story. So he smuggled the text out of the country, handed it over to his friend Friedrich Schiller in Germany, who in turn gave it to Wolfgang Goethe.
Goethe was very enthusiastic too. So enthusiastic that he translated the French text into the German language. So, here we have the most peculiar situation of having Le Neveu de Rameau published for the first time ever, in German, titled Rameau’s Neffe, ein Dialog von Diderot, (Rameau’s Nephew, a Dialogue by Diderot ), while the French public had even never heard of its existence.
Lost
However, in 1805 the work did not attract much attention. It is the time when Napoleon entered Germany and understandably the German people didn’t have much interest in books coming from French writers. This lack of interest endured until 1818, when the publisher Belin in Paris decided to edit a new publication of the collected works of Diderot. In the supplement the publisher added a remark about the disappearance of the French manuscript of Rameau’s Nephew, because you should know that after Goethe had made the translation, he had sent the original back to St. Petersburg and unfortunately on the way back the manuscript disappeared. It has never been found back…
So, in 1818 only a German text of Le Neveu existed and no French text was available. In those years the gossip circulated that Goethe made up the story himself and that there wasn’t a French version at all; but of course Goethe refuted these rumours with great indignation.
Found?
In 1821 two young French aristocrats, Joseph-Henri de Saur and Léonce de Saint-Geniès, revealed a sensational fact: by a coincidence they had discovered the original manuscript of Le Neveu. They published the work in the same year, under the title Le Neveu de Rameau, by Diderot, never published before. The work got a very warm reception in the press, it received some favourable reviews.
Nevertheless, the euphoric mood lasted not very long. In 1823 the two aristocrats were forced to confess that they had not found the original manuscript at all: they simply had made a translation of the German text themselves. They were forced to make this confession because someone else claimed that he was the owner of the original manuscript: the publisher Brière, who asserted that he had received the original personally out off the hands of Diderot’s daughter. Unfortunately Brière was not able to show his copy because this copy too had mysteriously disappeared…
Both sides got engaged in a controversy which was fought out in the media; at last Brière wrote to Goethe with the request to speak out a judgement of Solomon: could Goethe please tell the world which version was the authentic one, the one that Goethe had used some twenty years before for making his translation? The world had to wait a year before Goethe answered: according to him the version of Brière was the original. So the two gentlemen lost the battle and for at least seventy years the version of Brière has been considered as the authentic one.
Not until in 1891 the entire case became finally clear, when the French librarian Georges Monval discovered by accident at a little bookstall along the Seine a manuscript that was unmistakably in the handwriting of Diderot, entitled ‘Satyre 2e’. It was shown to be the most original version of Le Neveu. Scholars consider this publication as the basic version of the work.
In the meanwhile, the so-called original Le Neveu de Rameau the fake version, has provided some interesting results…
