Abstract
This chapter explores John Florio’s handling of a single word in Montaigne’s Essais, namely the modal adverb à l’aventure. There are a number of reasons why this adverb is important. First, it tends to occur in key passages of the Essais where Montaigne discusses matters such as religion, ethics and man’s ability to obtain true knowledge, often as part of a cluster of modal expressions. Second, the adverb belongs to the phônai skeptikai, the group of expressions associated by Sextus Empiricus with the Pyrrhonist suspension of judgement,1 and as such it bears on a much-discussed aspect of Montaigne’s thought.2 But the main argument for regarding à l’aventure as crucial to the understanding of the Essais is that Montaigne himself explicitly lists à l’aventure as one of a group of words that he particularly likes, writing in ‘Des Boyteux’ (III.11):
J’aime ces mots, qui amolissent et modèrent la témerité de nos propositions: à l’aventure, aucunement, quelque, on dit, je pense, et semblables. (Montaigne, p. 1600)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For a presentation of the phdnai skeptikai, see Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, translated by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge, 1994), 1.206–9.
For Montaigne’s own presentation of these expressions, see Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, edited by Denis Bjaï, Bénédicte Boudou, Jean Céard and Isabelle Pantin (Paris, 2001), p. 786 (II.12). All quotations are taken from this edition (based on the 1595 French text which Florio used), hereafter ‘Montaigne’.
As the adverb effectively belongs to the sceptical expressions, it is tempting to consider its presence in the Essais as evidence for Montaigne’s alleged scepticism. However, this disregards the fact that the adverb represents a frequently used part of the lexicon. One should also note that the adverb’s ability to function as a sceptical expression relies in most cases on its capacity to constitute an independent semantic unit (as a reply to a question, for example), and hence be inferentially developed into an explicature (on this term, see note 10); in the Essais this is however never the case; the adverb is always a constituent of an utterance. Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, by contrast, offers an excellent example where the adverb functions as a sceptical expression: when Panurge asks Trouillougan whether he will marry (‘me marieray je?’), the sceptical philosopher replies: ‘Par adventure’. François Rabelais, Les Cinq Livres (Paris, 1994), chapter 36, p. 771.
The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, translated by John Florio, edited by A. R. Waller, 3 vols (London, 1910), III, 283. Further references to this edition, henceforth ‘Florio’, in text.
One may note the variants ‘par aventure’ and ‘d’adventure’ (which Montaigne seldom uses), and several different spellings: ‘à l’aventure’, ‘à l’adventure’, ‘par adventure’, ‘par advanture’, etc. For a more detailed description of the adverb and its use in the Essais, see Kirsti Sellevold, ‘J’ayme ces mots…’: expressions linguistiques de doute dans les ‘Essais’ de Montaigne (Paris, 2004), ch. 1.
To provide a basis for comparison I will use two English translations, Donald M. Frame’s Complete Essays of Montaigne (1958; rpt Stanford, CA, 1965)
and Michael A. Screech, Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays (London, 1991),
then the Swedish translation by Jan Stolpe, Montaigne: Essayer, 3 vols (Stockholm, 1986–92). The omission of the adverb is infrequent: seven times in Screech, twice in Stolpe, never in Frame.
Procedural meaning has recently been linked to epistemic vigilance mechanisms, which include procedures for assessing the reliability, honesty and trustworthiness of the source of information. See Dan Sperber et al., ‘Epistemic Vigilance’, Mind and Language, 25 (2010), 359–93;
Deirdre Wilson, ‘The Conceptual-Procedural Distinction: Past, Present and Future’, in Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives, edited by Victoria Escandell-Vidal et al. (Bingley 2011), pp. 3–31.
The procedural content of ‘but’ introduces a contrast between the two statements. See Oswald Ducrot, Les Mots du discours (Paris, 1980),
and Diane Blakemore, Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers (Cambridge, 2002).
According to Ernst-August Gutt, a successful translation is one that achieves not equivalence but interpretive resemblance between source and target text, in other words one that (ideally) shares the same explicatures and implicatures as the source text, or has the same explicit and implicit content. Due to the differences between languages, however, the resemblance is not total but exists ‘in relevant respects’, that is, is defined in terms of relevance. See Ernst-August Gutt, Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context (Manchester, 2000).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Kirsti Sellevold
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sellevold, K. (2015). ‘Peradventure’ in Florio’s Montaigne. In: Demetriou, T., Tomlinson, R. (eds) The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401496_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401496_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48640-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-40149-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)