After Strachey

Letters

Vol. 29 No. 21 · 1 November 2007

From Anthony Curtis

While it is true, as Adam Phillips says of Freud, that the translations in the Standard Edition are essentially the work of one man, James Strachey, it should be remembered that extensive work was done by the late Angela Richards on the Pelican Freud Library, and it was those translations that reached the general reader (LRB, 4 October). After Richards graduated from Oxford in the early 1950s with a degree in modern languages, it became her full-time job to retranslate Strachey by checking his text against Freud’s. Several of the Pelican volumes, such as The Interpretation of Dreams (1976), acknowledge her contribution on the title page with the line: ‘The present edition revised by Angela Richards’. She was the youngest daughter of Noel Richards (née Olivier), one of Rupert Brooke’s loves, and it has been suggested that James Strachey, who had an affair with Noel, was her father. At any rate his indebtedness to her work on the translations is acknowledged in the fact that he left her his share of the Freud royalties.

Anthony Curtis
London W8

Vol. 29 No. 22 · 15 November 2007

From Markie Robson-Scott

Adam Phillips writes that he always admired Strachey’s translation of Freud and that other translations, such as those by my late father, W.D. Robson-Scott, had not been illuminating (LRB, 4 October). It is interesting that, at the outset at least, Strachey was less than enthusiastic about the task of translation. Ernest Jones, in a letter to Freud of 5 December 1927, wrote that Strachey was disinclined to take on the translation of Future of an Illusion because his

intolerance of work, about which you doubtless know more than I do, has not been improved by his having eight patients a day … After half an hour’s pressure all I got from him was a promise that he would try dictating the translation of one chapter as an experiment to see if it would be less laborious that way. Just after that, it happened that Robson-Scott, who has been three years in analysis with me … showed me some translation work he had done from the German. His work is purely literary and he is in some ways more gifted than Strachey in felicitous expression. So I asked Strachey if he would like some help from him. Greatly relieved he begged that Robson-Scott should do the translation on the condition that he revised it, which I shall of course do myself.

In February 1928 Jones wrote to Freud that the translation is ‘almost finished and is excellent’; it was published later that year.

Markie Robson-Scott
New York

Vol. 29 No. 23 · 29 November 2007

From Michael Robertson

As a professional German-English translator, I have found myself increasingly perplexed each time I read Adam Phillips’s essay on the new Penguin translation of Freud (LRB, 4 October).

As a consultant for Penguin, he suggested to the publishers that ‘each of the books should be translated by a different person, and that there should be no consensus about technical terms.’ He suggested that the ‘general editor should not read German,’ and that there should be ‘as little scholarly apparatus as possible … and no indexes, given what indexes imply about a book and its genre’.

It says a great deal about the current management at Penguin that following these suggestions, they appointed Phillips himself as the general editor. If he was not supposed to know any German and the individual translators were forbidden to co-ordinate terminology, why was there any need for the translators themselves to know German? The project would have been completed much more quickly and less expensively by employing a troupe of Chinese monkeys with keyboards. So much more open to unexpected combinations and possibilities, so unconstricted and free, so life-affirming. And those terrible anal-retentive indexes, which might enable readers to locate information they were looking for: so 20th-century, so superego.

Michael Robertson
Augsburg, Germany

From George Donaldson

Anthony Curtis remarks, in connection with James Strachey’s translation of Freud, that ‘it should be remembered that extensive work was done by the late Angela Richards on the Pelican Freud Library’ (Letters, 1 November). Although Curtis is right that The Interpretation of Dreams in the Pelican Freud Library acknowledges her contribution on the title page with the line ‘The present edition revised by Angela Richards’, he isn’t correct to state that ‘it became her full-time job to retranslate Strachey by checking his text against Freud’s’ in relation to her work on the Pelican Freud Library as distinct from her work on the Standard Edition.

The acknowledgment, ‘The present edition revised by Angela Richards’, in Volume IV, The Interpretation of Dreams (and also in Volume VI, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious), became during the mid-to-late 1970s the subject of a protracted dispute between the Institute of Psychoanalysis and Penguin about the nature and extent of her contribution. The dispute ended with the Institute, who shared the copyright of James Strachey’s translation with her, securing the withdrawal of the claim of revision. Penguin’s solicitors had to admit that no revisions or additions to the text of Strachey’s translation for the Standard Edition had been made in the Pelican Freud Library, but only corrections and amendments; and they advised Penguin to revert to the description of Angela Richards’s role in earlier volumes.

This reversion is evident in subsequently published volumes and in reprintings of The Interpretation of Dreams and Jokes, which simply state: ‘The present volume edited by Angela Richards’.

Curtis further mentions that Strachey left Richards ‘his share of the Freud royalties’. James Strachey died in 1967. Angela Richards was appointed editor of the Pelican Freud Library in 1968. Whatever else might have motivated him to leave her his share of royalties, he could not have done so to acknowledge his indebtedness for her extensive work on the Pelican Freud Library, but only to acknowledge his indebtedness for her extensive work on the final volume of the Standard Edition, Indexes and Bibliographies, including its 60 pages of ‘Addenda and Corrigenda’ to the 23 preceding volumes.

George Donaldson
University of Bristol