Preface
1 Branch = rameau, which is a small branch. Think of the palm branches of Palm Sunday, which is called Rameaux, just like this book. In this work, ‘branch’ will always translate rameau. All footnotes belong to the translator.
Format-father
1 Sol-fa notation was invented by Guido D’Arezzo, who used the first syllables of the first lines of the hymn ‘Ut queant laxis’ to designate the notes (though in English, we say ‘do’ instead of ut).
2 In French, accounting is comptabilité, which reads as countability. So when Serres is using the term in the broad sense, I will render it as ‘countability’.
3 The news = la nouvelle, which normally means a piece of news or news referring to some specific thing. Les nouvelles means news in general. But Serres seems to be playing with language here. He is clearly referring to new things or newness, but normally he would write that as nouveauté. Later he refers to La Bonne Nouvelle, Christianity’s Good News, so he is referring to news in this sense as well as the newness that’s opposed to the monotony of the format. I don’t see much purpose in distinguishing nouvelle from nouvelles in this translation. I merely advise the reader to keep in mind that ‘news’ in this work can also have strong overtones of the new.
4 Trave = travail, which derives from the Latin tripalium, a torture device having three stakes.
5 Prevision = prévision, which would normally be translated as prediction (as in the previous paragraph), but given the emphasis on sight in this passage, prevision seemed more apt.
Science-daughter
1 I know but don’t comprehend = je sais, mais ne connais pas. Savoir and connaître both mean to know. So to try to render Serres’s point into English, I have resorted to ‘comprehend’ for the verb connaître and ‘comprehension’ for the noun connaissance. But, at times in this chapter, I will also translate the latter two terms as ‘understand’ or ‘knowledge’.
2 The word escient is mostly used in the phrase à bon escient [advisedly, wisely] in contemporary French.
3 Corneille’s Horace, Act 3, Scene 5. This phrase uttered by the old Horatius has been called one of the most sublime in French literature. ‘What did you wish that he should do against three?’ Old Horatius: ‘That he die.’
The adoptive son
1 Rom. 7.6.
2 ‘Wall, city and port, refuge from death’, French readers will easily recognize the opening lines of Hugo’s Les Djinns, except in the poem mur [wall] is plural.
3 A line from Ronsard’s ‘Elegy against the Woodcutters of Gâtine’.
4 Ferdinand Brunetière (1849–1906) was a French literary critic who wrote a book called L’Évolution de genres dans l’histoire de la littérature [The evolution of genres in the history of literature], in which he applied Darwinism to literature.
Event
1 Pascal famously wrote: If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have been different.
2 Mark with their strikes heartbeats, coups d’état and coups de théâtre = marque de ses coups les coups de cœur, coups d’État et coups de théâtre. Clocks mark with their strikes or blows all the following strikes, too.
3 Sense = sens, which can designate either meaning or direction. I have made use of ‘sense’, appealing to its less obvious mathematical sense of directionality as well as the more obvious sense of meaning.
4 The first sentence of Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Repentance’ (III 2, F 740; VS 804b).
5 L’Arlésienne is the name of a short story as well as a play by Alphonse Daudet. The situation described here does not appear in the short story but may possibly be found in the play.
6 To quote the cited passage from Geometry (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017): ‘Certain things traverse the sieve, others not [pas]: here we find not only the meaning of the word “to flow” but also that of “to pass”, whose unity, in its course, is designated by the pas [step], when advance is positive, but that in the contrary case, when it doesn’t pass, we name, not far from negation, with the pas of ne … pas. The unity of the time that passes must be doubled into this advancing course and this immobility frozen by some obstacle stopping the progress.’ Pas can mean either step or the adverb not. Of course, Serres also sees pas in passer, to pass.
7 Temps can mean both time and weather in French. So the one kind of temps comes close to the other kind of temps.
Advent
1 In contemporary French, encontre mostly only exists in a few phrases meaning something akin to contrary to or against. But in Old French, it meant a meeting or encounter. Contemporary French says rencontre.
2 He disrupts communication because parasite in French also has the meaning of broadcast interference or static.
3 A First World War memoir by Jacques Péricard, but also a cry used of old to wake up soldiers in barracks.
4 To you, with you = À toi, avec vous. Toi is the pronoun for the second person informal. Vous is the pronoun for the second person formal or the second person plural.
5 Arrivals = advenues, a word related to avènement, advent. Both words signify arrival. All English forms of arrive in this passage translate a French word related to avènement. More generally, every instance of ‘arrival’ translates avènement or advenue in this work.
6 Natured and naturing refer to Spinoza’s distinction of natura naturata and natura naturans.
Today
1 For ‘excite’ and ‘suscitate’, it might be best to consult their respective etymological meanings of to set in motion, and to arouse or call into life. Ressuscité, of course, means to call back to life, here the one called back into life.