Book Description

"In preparing his translation for an English audience, the anonymous translator made many references to English authors in his notes, among them More, Hobbes, Swift, and Milton. While he could also have used a variety of French comments on the duke's maximes as well, he deliberately chose to cater to his English readers by emphasizing English parallels and classical sources. In his introduction, Dr. Primer reviews the translation history of the duke's maxims and finds that some of the main characteristics of this translation were borrowed from the posthumously published French edition prepared by the Sieur Abraham-Nicholas Amelot de la Houssaye, whose presence in this edition is visible from time to time. The anonymous translator of selections from Amelot's edition adopted a more colloquial style than is generally associated with La Rochefoucauld's maxims; he also turns out to be significant not only as a translator but also as a reinterpreter of the central moral issue in the entire book. Most readers, including Jonathan Swift, had taken the duke's position on human nature to be the same as Hobbes's (stressing the human being's selfishness or natural egoism), but the translator/annotator finds that the duke's message is not inconsistent with the more positive view of human nature found in Lord Shaftesbury and in the poetry of Pope."--BOOK JACKET.