Chapter 1
1 Grand narrative = Le Grand Récit. Grand would normally mean big, the big narrative or story, but given the tradition of translating the phrase as the grand narrative, I have followed suit. All footnotes belong to the translator.
2 Scale = échelle, which can also mean ladder. Serres will play with this double meaning in ways that can’t be reproduced in English.
3 A reference to the legend of Ys.
4 Maintenant, que tiens-je en main? Maintenant, ‘now’ in English, literally means holding in one’s hand.
5 Univers bactériel is the French title of Margulis’ Microcosmos.
6 Defined integral = intégrale définie; undefined integral = intégrale définie, which would normally be translated respectively as definite integral and indefinite integral.
7 Ghost in French is revenant, which is based on the verb revenir, to return or come back.
8 To prevent confusion, the memory here and to follow is the faculty of memory.
9 Only used in a few French phrases, escient is not a common word. It basically means knowledge.
10 Fossils come out of graves = les fossiles sortent des fosses.
11 Agencies = instances, which can mean an authority with the power of decision or the agencies of the psyche in Freud’s psychology. I have used both of these translations – deciding authority and agency – in this work. But ‘agency’ may be misleading, giving too much of a sense of activity. Serres’ use of instance isn’t always clear. In a linguistic context, it can mean an instance of discourse. So it might loosely mean an instance of something, as it seems to on pages 51 and 139. Perhaps it should be taken in its etymological sense of instans, standing near or in, or even being in a stance. When it clearly doesn’t mean some kind of decision-making body or Freudian-style agency; or when it doesn’t obviously mean an instance of something, I’ll write it as ‘in-stance’ to differentiate it from the common English term.
12 The prefix for connaissance derives from the Latin com, with.
13 In the song La Garonne (Si la Garonne si elle avait voulu), the lyrics speculate on what the river might have done if it had deviated into different directions: ‘If the Garonne had wanted to … it would have melted the pole.’
Chapter 2
1 In its every species = sous toutes les espèces. The reference to the Eucharist is more readily apparent in the French. The basic meaning Serres is trying to convey is ‘in every form’.
2 Device = appareil. Set sail, earlier, is appareiller. Dentures, a kind of prosthetic, are also referred to as appareil in French.
3 Serres is using the image of a staircase. The word I translate here as ‘stage’, palier, also means a landing.
4 Enclosed farm = ferme, which is well named due to its resemblance to the French for closed or closed off, fermé.
5 Hyphen = trait d’union, which literally reads as union line.
6 Beyond = au-delà; below = en deçà. These terms are opposites in French. For instance, beyond the mountains and on this side of the mountains. For thresholds, ‘above’ and ‘below’ would be the best translations, but given that the ‘meta’ of ‘metaphysics’ is always understood to mean beyond, I can’t reproduce the opposition here.
7 Tablet = table, which can also mean table. The tablet here is of course the tabula of the tabula rasa.
8 Love one another only inside one’s group = aimez-vous les uns les uns [the ones, the ones]. The French for ‘love one another’ is aimez-vous les uns les autres [the ones, the others].
9 Card = carte, which can also mean map. Serres will play with this double meaning at times in this work. I’ll use whichever one seems more relevant to the context and occasionally both.
10 This is my translation of a 1549 French definition of ‘culture’.
11 Piraeus = Le Pirée, which in French could be construed to be a man’s name.
12 The quote is from La Fontaine’s The Cockerel, the Cat and the Young Mouse.
13 La belle noiseuse means something like the quarrelsome beautiful woman, but Serres is mainly interested in noise so I shall hereafter translate it as ‘the noisy beauty’.
14 The Trace of the Step = La trace du pas, which would normally be translated as footprint. But given the importance of trace in this passage, I’ve given the literal translation.
15 Noise = noise, which originally meant noise but now means quarrel, hence the reference to violence. White noise = bruit blanc; a few lines down background noise = bruit de fond, bruit being the common word for noise these days. Serres will mostly use the latter term. I will translate both terms as ‘noise’, except where bruit is paired with fureur, sound and fury.
16 Giraudoux’s Supplément au voyage de Cook has been translated as The Virtuous Island.
17 Piece of news = actualité. ‘News’ in the following sentence is nouvelles.
18 Bossuet, Sermon on Death.
19 Reunion, Accord = Retrouvailles, accordailles. Accordailles would usually mean betrothal, but here the notion of accord or agreement seems more in line with the text.
Chapter 3
1 Attempts = Essais, which could also mean essays.
2 See Corneille’s Horace, v. 1301–18.
3 This is truer in French, for which the word viabilité can also mean the practicability of a road.
4 One = on, which is an impersonal pronoun. I will hereafter put ‘one’ in quotes whenever there is any possible confusion with any other sense of the English word, such as the number one. Sentences with this pronoun are often translated into a passive construction. I will make of point of not doing so only when it is important for the context.
5 The etymology of on goes back to the Latin homo.
6 The ferret and woods refers to a children’s game similar to ‘Hunt the Slipper’. The children play it while singing about the ferret of the woods who runs: the ferret, it’s running, it’s running; the ferret of the woods, my ladies …
7 Re-membered = remembré, which in French has nothing to do with memory.
8 ‘Reed’ is a reference to Pascal’s famous ‘man is but a reed’.
9 A reference to Pascal’s quote ‘through space the universe encompasses [comprend] and swallows me up like a point; through thought I comprehend the world’.
10 Number = nombre. Besides the numerical meaning, nombre also has a rhetorical one: the harmony resulting from a certain arrangement of words in prose or verse.
11 In French, ‘genuine or counterfeit’ reads as true or false.
12 From the monologue [my translation]: What is this oblong capsule used for? An inkpot, monsieur, or a scissors box?
13 Play = jeu, which can also mean game.
14 Moral conscience = conscience morale. Conscience can also mean consciousness.
15 Bad consciousness = mauvaise conscience, which would normally be translated as ‘guilty consciousness’, but I feel that would obscure Serres’ point.
16 In French, scapegoat is bouc émissaire, literally emissary goat.
17 Excluded middle or third = tiers-exclu, which normally means excluded middle but in French reads as excluded third.
18 The latter part of this sentence refers to the refrain of the ‘La Marseillaise’.
19 Consciousness = conscience, which could equally mean conscience.
20 Triturated = triturer, whose Latin etymology is to thresh. Beaten = battre, which should be translated as ‘thresh’ here, but that would obscure Serres’ point.
21 The quote is from the French biologist François Jacob.
22 ‘The Horla’ is a short story by Maupassant. Serres reads hors là in the title: outside the there.
23 Illness = mal, which is also the French for evil. In the following two subsections, where mal is used in both senses, I will render it as ill, otherwise it will be translated as evil or illness, depending on the context.
24 Get to work in the coal mine = aller au charbon, or go to the coal, which is an idiom for getting to work or rolling one’s sleeves up.
25 The Miserable = Miséreux, which also and more usually means the poor or the destitute, but in this section the poor don’t seem to be at issue so much as the miserable or wretched. So miséreux, misère and misèrable have all been rendered as some form of misery or wretchedness. Nevertheless, in the previous and following sections, these words do mean the destitute. Unfortunately, it is not possible to reproduce this double meaning in English.
26 The Three Blind Men of Compiègne is a medieval story in which a young mischievous cleric sees three blind men walking a little too surely asking for alms. So he decides to test them by offering them a crown, which he does not give. Of course, each of the blind men assumes one of the others received the money, which leads to problems when they go to a restaurant.
27 The French word la découverte evokes discovery and uncovering more than the corresponding English term, excavation. Hence hereafter and in the subsection title I’ll make use of ‘uncovering’.
28 Loyauté can mean honesty as well as fairness and uprightness in behaviour.
29 The quote is from Georges Guynemer, a top French fighter pilot who went missing during the First World War.
30 Without = sans; with = par. There is no opposition in the French between these two prepositions.
31 In French, ‘to live’ is vivre, and ‘to survive’ is survivre, so there is a stronger linguistic tie there than in English. Vivre de [to live from] in the following sentence has the sense of subsisting because of something, for instance, living by one’s pen or intelligence, by bread alone, living on a salary or on a vegetarian diet, or living off one’s savings. ‘Living from’ seems to summarize all these meanings best.
32 Traverse = traverse, which contains the French preposition vers, towards; encounter = rencontre, which contains contre, against.
33 Voluble = volubiles, which may also be intended in its Latin etymological sense of turning around, rolling. The French word once meant changing and inconstant.
34 The original French made no mention of ‘and English words’.
35 Vers most often means towards. Interestingly, the ward of ‘towards’ derives from the same Latin root as the French vers. I will translate it as towards but will retain the French when that particular word is at issue.
36 Parler petit-nègre means to speak pidgin, however the word nègre has become highly offensive.
37 Topological variety = variété topologique, which would normally be translated as topological manifold.
38 Tip and turn = verser.
39 Whenever the phrase ‘to bustle about’ appears in this book, it translates s’agiter. Hereafter, I will at times render s’agiter as some form of agitate.
40 Genitor, it creates Him = Géniteur, il Le crée. It is not entirely clear what the intended referent is for the masculine pronoun here: il. Every noun in the preceding seven or eight lines is masculine except harmony, difference, genesis and metre. My best guess would be the Spirit of Love or perhaps the Son, probably intended as the same thing.
41 The word Deo was left out in the French edition. I’ve assumed this was a mistake and reinstated it.
42 Qu’est-ce qu’une bonne histoire et qu’est-ce, enfin, que l’Histoire?
43 You and me, we like mustard; you and he, you go to the seaside = toi et moi aimons la moutarde; toi et lui allez à la mer.
44 One is hot = on fait chaud, which isn’t said in French. It is hot = il fait chaud.
45 You and you = tu et toi, which are the subject case and the object case.
46 Name = nom; pronoun = pronom.
47 Redressing = redressant, which I would usually translate as ‘rectifying’. Rectification has a broader sense of correcting mistakes than ‘redressing’ does, not to mention the added meaning of conversion.
48 Figure = figure, which could also mean a figure of speech.
49 Nuisible means pest and literally reads as harmful.
50 Material or hard(ware) = matérielles ou dures; logos-based and soft(ware) = logicielles et douces.
51 First World War = Première Guerre mondiale; globalization = mondialisation.
52 Inches and feet = pouces et coudées [cubits], which refer to thumbs and elbows.
Chapter 4
1 Implicates = implique, which contains pli, the French for fold. It would usually be translated as ‘implied’. But the term’s archaic sense of folding or intertwining also seems to be at play here.