A 1761 Translator Admitted What He Lost. Then He Bragged.

The preface to the first English Eloisa is a confession, and I think it makes the translation easier to trust. It is also a boast, and that spoils the lesson I wanted from it. I will keep both facts in view. The useful rule comes from the gap between them. A translation should carry a visible ledger of what it lost, and the translator should not be the only one who writes it.

What Kenrick actually says

The translator was William Kenrick. The book was Rousseau's novel in letters, published in London in 1761 [2]. His preface opens with an odd motive. The original, he writes, "has been already twice reprinted." But he reports "the general opinion of my countrymen, that it was one of those books." Those books, he says, "could not possibly be translated with any tolerable degree of justice to the author." Then comes the turn: "this general opinion, I own, was my chief motive for undertaking the work." [1]

Read that twice. The reputation of impossibility is not a warning to him. It is the advertisement. A modern reader might call this branding, and I will not argue.

Now the admission. "I confess, the idioms of the two languages are very different." He adds that in some instances it will "be impossible to reach the sublime delicacy of expression in an elegant French writer." [1] That is a loss, named in the first person, with a verb of confession ("I confess") attached.

Then the boast, in the same sentence. The French language, he says, is "frequently so vague and diffuse." So it "must be entirely the fault of the English translator if he does not often improve upon his original." [1] The ledger has two columns, and Kenrick has put himself in the credit column.

He adds a method. The translator must "sit down with a design to translate the ideas rather than the words of our author." A reader who expects "a servile, literal, translation" will be "mistaken." [1] He says he "never could, and never will, copy the failings of my author, be his reputation ever so great." [1]

I should say what I did not do. I read the preface through the Gutenberg text. I did not compare his English with Rousseau's French line by line. So I make no claim about how well he kept his promises. My claim is about the preface as a text.

The thesis, stated narrowly

My working thesis was that a translator's note admitting loss makes the translation more trustworthy than one claiming fidelity. Kenrick shows the thesis needs a repair. Here is the repaired version.

A translator's claim is checkable only if it names what is at stake. "I kept the sense" cannot fail. "I lost the delicacy of the French idiom in some instances" can fail. A reader with both texts can find the instance. Or the reader can find that there was no loss, and that the confession was false modesty. A claim that can be wrong is worth more than one that cannot. I apply this same test to any critic's claim. I see no reason to excuse translators from it.

Kenrick passes the test in part. His admitted loss is vague ("in some instances"). His claimed gain is large and unmeasured ("often improve"). The ledger exists, but one party keeps it, and that party is also the beneficiary. Accountants have a word for that.

I would put the point this way. Confession raises trust only when it is specific enough to audit. A confession without an address is a pose.

Why a stated loss is information

Think of two prefaces for the same book. One says: "This translation is faithful to the original." The other says: "I lost the rhyme in chapter three, I flattened the dialect of the cook, and I added a sentence in chapter nine because English needs a subject there." The first tells you the translator's opinion of himself. The second tells you three places to look. It also lets you disagree with him on facts.

There is a second effect that is easy to miss. The second preface changes how you read the rest of the book, the part it does not mention. A translator who reports three losses is implicitly reporting that the rest passed his own inspection. That inference is not proof. But it is stronger than the silence of the first preface. The first preface gives you no way to tell a clean text from a careless one. (The three losses above are my invention, for illustration. They are not from any real book.)

What a visible ledger would hold

I propose a short block at the back of every translation, with four fixed headings. Fixed headings matter, because a free-form note lets the translator choose what to confess.

Heading	What goes in it
Lost	Features of the source that have no equivalent: rhyme, pun, register, a form
Added	Anything in the target text that the source does not contain
Changed	Substitutions, with the source word beside the target word
Doubtful	Passages where the translator is not sure of the source meaning

Kenrick's preface would fill two of these in vague terms (Lost: "sublime delicacy"; Added: "improvement"). It would leave Changed and Doubtful empty. The empty rows are the point. A translator can see at once what he has not said.

The form I love most makes the case in an extreme version. The Arabic maqama, as al-Hariri wrote it, runs on rhymed prose. English can imitate that continuous rhyme only by turning the story into a game of its own. An English version either keeps some rhyme and bends the plot, or keeps the plot and drops the rhyme. Either way the reader loses something. A ledger would state which. Then the reader could choose the translation by what it keeps. I stay with this general claim about the maqama. I make no claim about any particular English edition.

The strongest objection

The objection is serious. A ledger of losses invites the reader to read the translation as a defective copy. The book works, as Kenrick's presumably did for his readers, because the reader enters it without stopping to count. A note that says "here I failed" may break the spell. It may also hand a weapon to people who already say literature cannot cross languages. The impossibility opinion in Kenrick's own preface shows that such a view existed in 1761 [1]. Why feed it?

There is also an honesty problem on the other side. Translators are not neutral auditors of themselves. A ledger can become a way to take credit for being humble. Kenrick's own confession carries a boast inside it. That shows how easily the form is bent.

I answer in three parts.

First, the ledger sits at the back. A reader who wants the spell reads the text first. Nobody is forced to read the note. The cost of the ledger falls only on readers who choose to pay it.

Second, honesty does not feed the impossibility opinion. Vagueness feeds it. "You cannot translate this" is a claim about everything. A ledger that says "I lost these four things" is a claim about four things. By implication it says the rest crossed. A ledger is the best available reply to the sweeping claim, because it replaces a mood with a list.

Third, the self-serving risk is real. It is the reason the translator should not be the only author of the ledger. The fix is cheap: invite a second reader with both languages to add a line under "Doubtful" or "Lost." Scholars already annotate editions. My proposal is that the annotation travels with the text from the start, in a fixed place. A disagreement between the two hands is printed, not hidden.

I do not claim the ledger removes the spell-breaking cost. I claim the cost is smaller than the cost of a reader who cannot tell a careful translation from a loose one. That comparison is my judgment, not a measured result.

A small oddity in the text

One more thing in the preface made me smile. Kenrick complains that most translations "appear like a thin gauze spread over the original." He blames "the want of bread, the want of attention, or want of ability in the translator." [1] I suspect "bread" is a misprint, or a mistranscription, for "breadth." I mark that as a guess. It is a small, free example of what a ledger is for. A reader who finds a doubtful word in a translator's own sentence learns that texts lose things on every journey. That includes the journey from a printer's hand to a screen. If a preface about faithful transmission cannot be sure of one word, the case for "Doubtful" as a fixed heading makes itself.

What follows if I am right

If a stated loss makes a translation more trustworthy, then publishers who print translations with no ledger withhold the one piece of information that lets a reader weigh the book. Three things follow.

1. A translation without a ledger should be read as making an unfalsifiable claim of fidelity, and reviewers should say so.
2. Reviewers of translations should review the ledger as well as the prose. Is it specific? Is every heading filled or deliberately empty? Does a second reader dispute it?
3. A translator's honest confession ("I lost this") should count in the translator's favour. A confident claim of nothing lost should count against.

I can state what would change my mind. Suppose readers shown a ledger rate the same translation as less accurate than readers shown none, and the text is in fact the same. Then the ledger damages trust, and my thesis is wrong in practice. I have not run that test, and I cannot run it in this session. It would need two matched groups, one text, and a blind judge of accuracy. I would want it large enough to detect a difference of, say, ten points on a hundred-point scale before I called the result.

Kenrick wrote the first line of that experiment in 1761, when he told his readers where the French would not follow him. He then undid the good of it by telling them how much he had improved the French. The ledger is the part of his preface I would keep. The improvement column I would hand to someone else.

Afterword. The form of this piece is a ledger, and I let it decide what I could notice. It forced me to separate what Kenrick confesses from what he claims. I had expected a clean case before I read the text. I did not expect the boast.