I want to add something to this well-known story and tell you about some discoveries I have made in the Bibliothèque National in Paris. Much has been written about Diderot’s nephew and Goethe’s translation. Although the existence of 1821’s publication by de Saur and de Saint-Geniès is known, there has been hardly anyone who has done some serious research about  the results. Because the so-called original appeared to be a fake and because afterwards the original text became available, no one was really interested in the text composed by the two aristocrats.  Scholars like Rudolf Schlösser in 1900 and Jean Fabre in 1950 consecrated only a few pages to the retranslation, but I suspect them of having done this just to demonstrate the immorality of the deed itself. They did not pay any attention to the content and it might be possible that later researchers have  followed  in their steps, just out of laziness. 

Differences

When I had a look at the translation of de Saur and de Saint-Geniès to compare their text with the German version I found some interesting facts: these men have been extremely creative. They have invented a substantial part of the novel.  Some stories in the dialogue appear to be made up by them. They even changed the end of the story: while in the text of Goethe – who did a proper translation – the protagonists Moi and Lui separate in the end and say goodbye to each other, de Saur and de Saint-Geniès decide to let them have dinner together, as if they wanted to indicate the social character of the French! But there is more. There are differences to be found in the passages about music; when it comes to telling naughty stories about women and in the descriptions of French behaviour. 

Now I would like to show some of the conduct of the couple in their translation. The following example is the moment when Moi and Lui discuss the definition of happiness, in the German text as follows:

ER: Nichts ist beständig auf der Welt. Am Glücksrade heute oben, morgen unten. Verfluchte Zufälle führen uns und führen uns sehr schlecht (Neffe, 745).  

In the big wheel of fortune, it says, you’re sometimes up but just as often down. The French text however states that the nephew is completely bound up in the subject. He addresses fortune direct and illustrates the subject with a metaphor: 

Rien de stable ici-bas que l’instabilité, je vous l’ai déjà dit : l’instabilité est donc mon unique espérance. Aujourd’hui la roue de la Fortune nous élève plus au moins vite, demain plus ou moins vite nous redescendons sous la roue qui finit toujours par nous écraser, quand elle est lasse de son jeu: comme un chat joue avec une souris souvent dans la farine même ; d’abord feint de la caresser, la pince et la mord après, et finit toujours par la manger. Nécessité, hasard ou destinée, tu nous entraînes, tu conduis tout…Tu conduis tout bien mal ! (Neveu,  241).

 (Translation: “Nothing down here is as stable as instability, as I’ve already told you, so instability is my only hope. Today the wheel of fortune lifts us up, but tomorrow we are going down to the point where we will get crashed as soon as fortune is bored with the game: like a cat she’s playing with a mouse; at first she pretends to caress it, then she grabs it and kills it, and finally she will devore it. Necessity, be it coincidence or predestination, you are toying with us, you direct all… You direct all pretty bad!”)

 It has occurred to me that the French translators unfold the events over and over again in a very extended way. The second example of their skills is how they handle with an ordinary gossip, Goethe had made this translation:

 Madam die und die hat auf einmal zwei Kinder gekriegt. So kann doch jeder Vater zu dem seinigen greifen…(Neffe, 641)  (Translation: “Mrs so and so got two children at once. Thus each father could grab his own…”)

The story becomes in the view of the couple a roaring farce:

Madame … que vous connaissez, est accouchée de deux enfans à la fois, garçon et fille. Je les ai vus ; et, chose singulière, le garçon est noir comme son nègre, et la fille blanche et blonde comme le petit commis de son mari… (Neveu, 230).  (Translation: “Mrs… you know her, has given birth to two children at once, a boy and a girl. I have seen them, and a curious thing, the boy is just as black as their negro servant, and the girl is just as white and blonde as their husbands clerical assistant…) 

In asking myself how to consider their translation, I searched in the Parisian library for other novels which they might have had “fabricated” together - and I found about twenty titles, written within a period of seven years. Every title tells a comparable story: their oeuvre consists out of fakes, plagiarism and imitations.

Expansion

The most striking example is their translation of a novel by Friedrich Maximillian Klinger (whom we already met at the start when he discovered at the Hermitage the unknown manuscript of Rameau’s Nephew), titled Faust’s Leben, Thaten und Höllenfahrt (1791), into Les aventures de Faust et sa descente aux Enfers (1825), (The adventures of Faust and his descént in Hell). In the preface de Saur and de Saint-Geniès boast about their own efforts. While Goethe did some nice work – so the couple says – and writers like for instance Klinger have produced some nice work as well in this field, it’s only thanks to de Saur and de Saint-Geniès that the French people will learn the Faust legend properly. While Klinger’s original narrative counts 195 pages, the translation expands into 836 pages. So here as well the notorious couple made use of their imagination…

A forgerie?

I would like to end with some considerations about the phenomena of the literary forgery. Does the retranslation of Le Neveu fall under the chapter of Monkey Tricks or should we consider the whole issue as a foul play? As long as literature has existed, there have been forgeries. The components that can be forged, are the legend of the work, the handwritten manuscript, the names of the author and the publisher and the translation. De Saur and de Saint-Geniès forged the legend of Le Neveu by pretending that they had found the original that was said to come from the estate of Diderot. But they also faked the translation by expanding the text with their own stories and ideas, pretending that those ideas were the mental legacy of Diderot.

In general there are several reasons why a forger takes all the trouble to create his forgery.  Most forgers are eccentric figures with antagonistic features. There is a kind of implicit criticism hidden in their acts. They think they can do better than the creator of the work of art, or they think that the original lacks something. In the case of Le Neveu the two aristocrats have done their utmost – so they claim – to translate and create a novel in the style of Diderot, one of the greatest writers France ever had. They meant they could do this better than Goethe, who, after all, was not a Frenchman…

It could have been the reason why they kept silent about their names as translators. Maybe it has been rather a practical joke with a slight serious intention, than real, foul play.

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…