Very often it has been impossible to give any other than a literal rendering of such passages, if the thought of the original was to be preserved but in those cases where a choice was open to me, I have preferred the more literary to the more technical expression and I have been encouraged to do so by the fact that Amiel, when he came to prepare for publication a certain number of Pensées, extracted from the Journal, and printed at the end of a volume of poems published in 1853, frequently softened his phrases, so that sentences which survive in the Journal in a more technical form are to be found in a more literary form in the Grains de Mil. Another difficulty has been his constant use of a technical philosophical language, which, according to his French critics, is not French-even philosophical French-but German. Every here and there Amiel expresses himself in a kind of shorthand, perfectly intelligible to a Frenchman, but for which an English equivalent, at once terse and clear, is hard to find. The difficulties of the translation have been sometimes considerable, owing, first of all, to those elliptical modes of speech which a man naturally employs when he is writing for himself and not for the public, but which a translator at all events is bound in some degree to expand. It is, at any rate, in the hope that a certain number of additional readers may be thereby attracted to the Journal Intime that this translation of it has been undertaken. I believe there are many such to be found among the reading public, and among those who would naturally take a strong interest in such a life and mind as Amiel’s, were it not for the barrier of language. This translation of Amiel’s Journal Intime is primarily addressed to those whose knowledge of French, while it may be sufficient to carry them with more or less complete understanding through a novel or a newspaper, is yet not enough to allow them to understand and appreciate a book containing subtle and complicated forms of expression. Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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