Marc-Antoine Eidous

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Marc-Antoine Eidous (* 1710 or 1727 in Marseille ; † 1780 or 1790 ) was a French translator and one of the main contributors to the Encyclopédie for the subjects of heraldry , blacksmithing and horse riding.

life and work

Eidous as a translator

The life of Marc-Antoine Eidous is only known in outline. He initially served as an engineer in the Spanish army and then went to Paris in the 1740s , where he worked as a translator. For about thirty years, Eidous translated mainly English-language works into French. Among other things, he translated George Campbell's A dissertation on miracles (a response to David Hume's Essay on miracles ), Francis Hutcheson's Inquiry into the original of our ideas of beauty and virtue , Adam Smith's Theory of moral sentiments, and Horace Walpoles The Castle of Otranto . He also translated books from Latin, Spanish (such as the multi-volume work of the Jesuit father Joseph Gumillas (1686–1750) on the Orinoco ) and other languages. Friedrich Melchior Grimm reviewed a number of these translations in his magazine Correspondance littéraire and made several negative comments about Eidous' achievements. In a meeting in 1766, Grimm mocked that Eidous couldn't take more than fifteen days to translate a volume. And around three years later, Grimm even stated that Eidous was the worst of the poor French translators.

Contributor to the Encyclopédie

As a contributor to the Encyclopédie , Eidos was presumably advertised by Diderot . Eidous and Diderot had known each other since 1744 at the latest, when they were both among the translators of Robert James (1703–1776) Medical dictionary . And as early as 1746, Eidous was mentioned as the recipient of the payment in the books of the Paris publisher André-François Le Breton . Between 1746 and 1748 Eidous received a sum of more than 2,900 livres for his lexicon articles . If one compares this sum with his roughly 450 - mostly very scarce - articles that he contributed to the first four volumes, then Eidous was well paid for his work on the Encyclopédie .

Diderot was evidently not particularly satisfied with Eidous' contributions. According to Luneau de Boisjermain , Diderot is said to have said about Eidous' articles on heraldry that they were "lean" and "badly made". In 1754, Diderot brought in Claude Bourgelat to examine Eidous's contributions to equestrian art and related subjects. When Bourgelat expressed dissatisfaction and offered to work himself, he took over Eidous' task. Although Bourgelat's contributions did not appear until the fifth volume of the Encyclopédie , he and not Eidous was already mentioned in the foreword to the fourth volume as the main contributor to the fields of farriers and riding. Eidous contributed only one article to the fifth volume; after that his collaboration ended.

The years after 1758

Between 1758 and 1762 Eidous appeared as a professor of mathematics in Geneva and then returned to France. In 1765 he and Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach published a translation of Jonathan Swift's History of the four last years of the Queen and between 1777 and 1780 a translation of William Robertson's History of America . After that his track is lost.

Works (selection)

Eidous as a translator

  • Joseph Gumilla : Histoire naturelle, civile et geographique de l'Orénoque et des principales rivières qui s'y jettent… traduite de l'espagnol sur la seconde édition par M. Eidous , Avignon 1758. Volumes 1 , 2 and 3 available online via Gallica , the digitization project of the French National Library.

Eidous as a contributor to the Encyclopédie

literature

  • Alexandre Cioranscu: Bibliography de la littérature française du dix-huitième siècle. Volume 2: D - M. Paris 1969. Contains a list of Eidous' translations on pages 761–762.
  • Article “Eidous, Marc-Antoine”, in: Frank Arthur Kafker: The encyclopedists as individuals. A biographical dictionary of the authors of the Encyclopédie , Oxford 1988, ISBN 0-7294-0368-8 , pp. 128-130.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alfred Saurel, Dictionnaire des villes, villages & hameauc du département des Bouches-du-Rhône , Marseilles 1877, p. 115 gives 1710 as the year of birth and 1780 as the year of death, while Paul Masson [ed.], Les Bouches-du- Rhône: encyclopédie départementale , Volume 4, 2nd edition, Paris 1931, p. 191 names 1727 as the year of birth and 1790 as the year of death.
  2. ↑ Frank. A. Kafker / Madeleine Pinault-Sørensen: Notices sur les collaborateurs du recueil de planches de l'Encyclopédie , in: Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie 18-19 (1995), p. 214.
  3. ^ "Je crois qu'il ne lui faut que quinze jours pour traduire un volume", in: Grimm, Correspondance littéraire , Volume 7, p. 150 (October 15, 1766). Quoted here from Kafker, The encyclopedists as individuals , p. 128.
  4. ^ "Le plus mauvais de tous les mauvais traducteurs français", in: Grimm, Correspondance littéraire , Volume 8, p. 313 (March 15, 1769). Quoted here from Kafker, The encyclopedists as individuals , p. 128.
  5. ↑ “Pauvre science, pauvrement faite; elle est aussi maigre dans le discours que bouffie dans les planches ”, Extrait d'un mémoire présenté en 1768 , in: Diderot, Œuvres complètes , ed. Dieckmann et al., here quoted from Kafker, The encyclopedists as individuals , p. 128 .
personal data
SURNAME Eidous, Marc-Antoine
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French translator and contributor to the Encyclopédie
DATE OF BIRTH 1710 or 1727
PLACE OF BIRTH Marseille
DATE OF DEATH 1780 or 1790