JM: By coincidence, my online French tutor (Laura Lawless [sic]) has just been discussing that mysterious misleading spurious subjunctive “ne” without the “pas” as a “single negative” == a “positive!” Things ain’t never no how what they seem, innit?!
Elle a peur qu’il NE revienne (She’s afraid that he WILL come back)
But:
Elle a peur qu’il NE revienne PAS (She’s afraid that he WON’T come back!)
This quirk reminded me of Tu me manque which means I MISS YOU! While Je te manque means YOU MISS ME!
Getting this wrong may damage your love life.
Your example IS different, of course, and may be just Mallarme’s uncharacteristic translational glitch. BUT I’ld welcome a NATIVE Francophone opinion in view of the above counter-intuitive idioms. We are always at risk with CONDITIONALS involving mutliple negations! IF NOT-X THEN NOT-Y is NOT the same as IF X THEN Y! I recall a related debate on a debatable VN “syllogism” in Pale Fire. “No free man needs a God; but was I free?”
The English
“do ought [anything/something] unseemly” == “do naught [nothing] seemly”
would negate as
“do naught [nothing] unseemly” == “do ought [anything/something] seemly”
Here we have “do ought unseemly” translated as “NE font RIEN d’INCOVENANT” which I take to mean the OPPOSITE, viz “do NAUGHT unseemly.” Cox’s English would require “font QUELQUECHOSE d’incovenant?” With this reading, it would seem that Mallarme has indeed negated the IF clause and followed it by negating the THEN clause. This is still an ERROR (of logic), but perhaps not the error (of language) that Jansy reported!
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 16/09/2008 17:05, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
I - J.A. In my Library of America edition of the book, pg. 53, the title to Goodman's biography reads The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, with the article out front; JM: ...on page 4..."Tragedy of Sebastian Knight."
JM: On the other hand ( or cuff?) in vthe New Directions ed, we find "Tragedy.."with no araticle in the first chapter, b ut "The Tragedy" ( twice) in the seventh chapter. And the same occurs in The Library of America (Boyd's 1941-1951), on page 47 we get "The Tragedy"...
Indeed, a proliferating oversight. Perhaps...
Something equally intriguing occurred with Mallarmé, in one of his translations intended to "abolish randomness from writing."
Instead of George W.Cox's original euripidean "If the gods do ougth unseemly, then they are not gods at all", in Mallarmé this came out as "Si les dieux ne font riend d'incovenant, c'est alors qu'ils ne son plus dieux du tout" ( If the god don't do ought unseemly, then. In French a "ne" was added!)