Abstract

In a Preface, the translator says: “This is a translation of all of Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’être et le Néant.” She earned hard and earned well the right to make this satisfied statement. It was a task of intimidating dimensions. Sartre’s vocabulary and style, in this, his major philosophical opus, are grim, graceless and disheartening. Seldom has the French language had to suffer so much in giving birth to a philosopher’s ideas. American translations of the minor works, hitherto available, have sometimes had the effect of making the obscure absurd; their explanatory introductions have sometimes been quite silly. Of Miss Barnes’s translation, it must be said that she has succeeded admirably in being both accurate and readable. She has not just transposed Sartre’s words but his thought into an English which “reads English” and not just transliterated French, and which makes Sartre not less understandable in translation than he was in the original. Where the translation remains barely intelligible, the fault is not hers. The Introduction, too, is of high quality and gives us, in forty pages, an intelligent exposition and acute appraisal of Sartre’s ontology which compares favourably with anything hitherto written about Sartre in English. There is a useful and accurate glossary of technical terms of Sartrean philosophy and a Name Index which give the English volume important advantages over the French.