COURIER Paul-Louis Éloge d’Hélène, traduit d’Isocrate.

First edition.

Paul-Louis Courier (1772-1825) remained famous for his pamphlets but was also a brilliant Hellenist. His translation of Isocrates’ Éloge d’Hélène, in which Theseus, the popular leader who commanded his country in such a noble and law-abiding manner, serves as a pretext for expressing his thoughts on the political situation of the time.

Printed in March 1803, L’Éloge d’Hélène was Courier’s first published work. Some contemporaries did not understand the translator’s intention and thought he had betrayed the author. After the volume was published, Courier wrote to his friend Jean Schweighaeuser, who had clearly missed his intentions: ‘If the episode of Theseus is of no interest today, I have missed my goal. Here, as in everything else, I have taken almost nothing from Isocrates. You have not realised that I wanted to give a new work under an old title. It is quite the opposite of what current authors do…’. On 7 May 1803, Le Journal des Débats reported on this work in the following terms: ‘It is not as a Hellenist, or even as a translator, that the author of the Éloge d’Hélène should be judged.  It is not as a Hellenist, or even as a translator, that the author of the Éloge d’Hélène should be judged. In truth, I do not know why he advertised this work as a translation, for it is not a translation at all, at most it is an extremely free imitation… [he] took from Isocrates only the ideas that suited him […] in a word, he remade the Praise of Helen after Isocrates, but in no way after him”. This attitude of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors to the translation of ancient texts is not uncommon. James Macpherson is often remembered for completely rewriting Celtic mythology when he transcribed Ossian. The process was so recurrent that in the first third of the nineteenth century, literary scholars called it ‘supposed translation’. Subsequently, this practice of pseudo-translation was much appreciated by the Romantics. Mérimée, Nodier and Nerval experimented with it, finding it a way of testing new poetic devices. As we know, Paul-Louis Courrier’s approval of Bonaparte’s attitude was short-lived, and he soon became scandalised by Napoleon’s policies, as evidenced by his famous letter of 1804 (Nous venons de faire un Empereur…).

[Bound with :] GRUET. Les Adieux d’Hector et d’Andromaque. A play which shared the prize of the Académie Française in 1776. Paris, Demonville, 1776. 11 pp.- MURVILLE. Les Adieux d’Hector et d’Andromaque. A play which shared the prize of the Académie françoise in 1776. Paris, Demonville, 1776. 12 pp.- And 139 pp. ch.103 to 242, of a translation containing: Les Amours d’Héro et de Léandre; Coluthus ; La Prise de Troye ; L’Épicurien ; La Romance de l’Hermite.

A good copy.

Provenance: Charles Demandre (1805-1875) poet and bibliophile, the copy also bears his ex-libris as well as that of Viollet-le-Duc.