Volume 39, Number 18 · November 5, 1992
How Wise Was Montaigne?
By John Weightman
Michel de Montaigne: The Essays
translated and edited by M.A. Screech
Penguin/Allen Lane, 1,283 pp., $60.00
Montaigne and Melancholy: The Wisdom of the 'Essays'
by M.A. Screech
Penguin, 194 pp., $10.00 (paper)
Dr. Screech has done us a great service by producing a meticulous translation of the Essays in plain, contemporary English, and with no avoidance of those frank or obscene terms that Montaigne was not afraid of using. Of course, a twentieth-century translator cannot, in the nature of things, reproduce the quaint period flavor which gives such charm to the original English version of 1603 by Florio, but Florio was not always accurate, and it was inevitable that his work would be supplemented by subsequent translators. In 1685, Charles Cotton produced a version which shared the field with Florio's up to the end of the nineteenth century, both of them benefiting perhaps from the assumption that their archaic style gave them a sort of authenticity.
Review, 4935 words
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