Dostoyevsky's " Бе сы"plus Anna K arenina plus amour-propre

[David Powelstock]

There is a French tradition (Mandeville, Rousseau, others) of distinguishing
*amour-propre *from *amour de soi, *the latter being more positive, close to
'self-esteem,' while the former is more negative. There is a substantial
discussion of this distinction and its history in Jerrold Seigel's
remarkable *The Idea of the Self. *Svetlana, your memory is astounding--*Emile
*is the locus classicus for this in Rousseau's works.

I don't currently have access to all my translations of *Zapiski*, but
Matlaw has, "I am terribly vain." I much prefer this to P&V's rather clunky,
"I have a terrible *amour-propre.*" "Uzhasno samoliubiv" is simple, direct,
energetic--as is Matlaw's translation. Presumably because *amour-propre *has
no adjectival form, much less one that would be familiar to Anglophones, P&V
turn it into a noun. This dissipates the contentious, speech-like vigor that
characterizes so much of the UGM's text. That would be more forgivable if
there were no alternative; but there is: 'vain.' It is at least as accurate
as *amour-propre*, and has the added virtue of being as clear in English as
'samoliubiv' is in Russian.

Cheers,
David

David Powelstock
Brandeis University

P&V frequently create nouns out of adjectives in order to accommodate what
they judge to be the more accurate word



On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 1:48 PM, <greniers at georgetown.edu> wrote:

> Dear Robert,
>
> Thank you for your straightforward answer!  That means that I probably did
> not quite understand "amour-propre".  "Self-esteem" is an unquestionably
> positive term here in America, as far as I can tell, while amour-propre
> seemed more like samoliubie to me, not all positive.  I may have
> inadvertently misrepresented Prof. Robert Belknap's lectures.  Maybe it was
> in connection with "Emile" that he mentioned it.  It's been 30 years...
>
> Thanks again, and all the best,
> Svetlana
>
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