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At least it was not translated into Latin.
Monday, March 27, 2017
BREAK OUT THE CHAMPAGNE BOTTLE
I launch my Freud lectures today. Let me offer one lovely tidbit as a preview. By common agreement, Freud's most important book is The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1900. My copy of the translation by an important analyst, A. A. Brill, dates from 1913. I got it secondhand for two bucks. Today we tend to think of Freud as old news, outdated, a relic, and nobody, but nobody, is shocked by his theories of infant sexuality. But it was not always thus. Pasted to the flyleaf of my copy is the following notice:
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Do you have any recommendations on translations? Brill was the basis for a Modern Library edition. Peter Gay, in his reader (which I got some time ago on the recommendation of a historian who is interested in psychoanalysis), uses the Strachey et al "Standard Edition." There is a more recent set of translations by Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst and essayist.
That is way out of my league. Peter Gay is a very good guide to these matters, but I am afraid I just do not know.
Strachey says in his preface (I was glancing earlier at an old paperback copy reprinting the Standard Edition translation) that he sorts out and identifies the various updates and changes Freud made over the years -- Strachey doesn't use *precisely* those words, but that's what it amounts to. (But of course that doesn't address the quality of the trans., which I can't opine on.)
p.s. except to say that my dim memory from having read it a long time ago is that the Strachey trans. puts it in readable enough English. But I haven't read any other trans. so have no basis for comparison.
For anyone who might be interested, Adam Phillips is the General Editor rather than translator of an edition of Freud's works published as the New Penguin Freud. As I understand it, Phillips invited a variety of literary translators with little or connection to professional psychoanalysis with the intention of presenting "a secular, literary Freud who is seen to be like every other writer: endlessly re-describable and re-translatable."
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