Clare Carlisle's editie van George Eliot’s vertaling van #Spinoza’s Ethica op komst

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would have become the first edition of Spinoza's controversial masterpiece in English, but the translation remained unpublished because of a disagreement between Lewes and the publisher.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.