Zoals
bekend maakte de Engelse schrijfster George Eliot een vertaling van Spinoza’s Ethica. Het zou de eerste vertaling in
het Engels geweest zijn, ware het niet dat die in haar tijd nooit werd uitgegeven. Wel
verscheen hij ruim een eeuw later bij de Universiteit van Salzburg in Oostenrijk:
Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics. Translated by George Eliot. Edited by Thomas Degan. Salzburg: Institut für
Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1981.
In
het blog van 26 oktober 2018 over ”George Eliot’s #Spinoza,” dat o.a. over Clare Carlisle ging,
stelde ik al vast: “Het ziet er dus naar uit dat er een nieuwe uitgave van deze
eerste Engelse vertaling van de Ethica door George Eliot op komst is.”
En
inderdaad gaat dit jaar, waarschijnlijk in november (volgens Amazon), bij Princeton University Press verschijnen:
Spinoza's
Ethics. Translated by George Eliot. Edited by Clare Carlisle. Princeton
University Press, to be published: 10/12/2019 - 384 Pages. [cf. Waterstones – ook als paperback]
An authoritative edition of George
Eliot's elegant translation of Spinoza's greatest philosophical work.
In 1856, Marian Evans completed her
translation of Benedict de Spinoza's Ethics while living in Berlin with the
philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. This would have become the first
edition of Spinoza's controversial masterpiece in English, but the translation
remained unpublished because of a disagreement between Lewes and the publisher.
Later that year, Evans turned to fiction writing, and by 1859 she had published
her first novel under the pseudonym George Eliot. This splendid edition makes
Eliot's translation of the Ethics available to today's readers while also
tracing Eliot's deep engagement with Spinoza both before and after she wrote
the novels that established her as one of English literature's greatest
writers.
Clare Carlisle's introduction places
the Ethics in its seventeenth-century context and explains its key
philosophical claims. She discusses George Eliot's intellectual formation, her
interest in Spinoza, the circumstances of her translation of the Ethics, and
the influence of Spinoza's ideas on her literary work. Carlisle shows how Eliot
drew on Spinoza's radical insights on religion, ethics, and human emotions, and
brings to light surprising affinities between Spinoza's austere philosophy and
the rich fictional worlds of Eliot's novels.
This authoritative edition
demonstrates why George Eliot's translation remains one of the most compelling
and philosophically astute renderings of Spinoza's Latin text. It includes
notes that indicate Eliot's amendments to her manuscript and discuss her
translation decisions alongside more recent English editions.
De George Eliot-vertaling verschijnt volgens de uitgever in januari 2020
BeantwoordenVerwijderenhttps://press.princeton.edu/titles/14763.html