Genius Fan

I have a French language version of the combined accounts of Boswell and Johnson’s 1773 tour of Scotland, it’s called Voyage dans les Hébrides. My French isn’t good enough to fluently read this book (yet), but I’ve read the Boswell and Johnson accounts in English so I know the story and that enables me to pick my way through it and understand. I’m in the introduction to the volume, written by French journalist Maurice Denuzière. It’s always enlightening to read the introduction to any scholarly book. That’s where you pick up the key argument, the top line, the over arching proposition or thesis of the work. (I’m pretty sure Mortimer Adler recommends reading the introduction in order to set yourself up for a fuller and faster understanding of any work.

Denuzière uses some wonderfully descriptive language in teasing up the contents of these two accounts and it made me compare my preferred text for these tours (To The Hebrides, ed. Ronald Black), which has a ‘straight’ and informative preface, only. Denuzière, a writer whose six volume saga Louisiane, about French plantation owners on the banks of the Mississippi, was completed in 1987, has given the French reader many delightful descriptions of the contents: “The travellers faced the vagaries of transport: chaises, carts, boats, horses, ponies and…the shoulders of rustic and devoted Highlanders” and “They had to accept the vermin of the inn, inedible soup, a ship journey in a storm, long rides on deserted and misty moors, endless rain, biting winds. Sometimes they enjoyed rustic feasts with the lairds, lords of the isles, warm receptions at the hearths of modest peasants, lyrical exchanges with nationalistic bards and often heard, a little too often, for Samuel Johnson’s taste, the bagpipes.” [My translation, aided/ by Google Translate.] I don’t recall reading as evocative a tease as that for these accounts. English description for scholars and general readers is always couched in historical terms, explaining who the authors are, some context and the difference between the two accounts. We could take a leaf out of Denuzière’s Preface to encourage readers to give historical works a try.

Notes
Voyages dans les Hebrides: Translated from the English and annotated by Marcel Le Pape in collaboration with Marc de Pape, (Intro by Maurice Denuzière) (1991)
How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler (1972)
To The Hebrides: Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands fo Scotland and James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, (ed) Ronald Black (2007)