Translated essay: Denis Diderot, Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown
Accompanying Article: The Philosopher’s Room: Diderot’s Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown
- Submitting institution
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Courtauld Institute of Art
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 57
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
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- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Translated essay and accompanying article
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- August
- Year
- 2016
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- For this issue of the Oxford Art Journal, Scott published the article 'The Philosopher's Room' and the translation (with Kate Tunstall) into English of Diderot's essay 'Regrets on parting with my old dressing gown', which is the subject of the article. Scott researched and worked on both texts, simultaneously producing a draft translation of Diderot's essay with notes and illustrations. She was responsible for all the critical and scholarly apparatus of the translation, including identification of Diderot's 'things' and the sourcing of relevant illustrations.
Throughout the translation process, Scott felt it was important that the English translation should be as close as possible to Diderot's literary style, so that it could stand as both a work of translation in its own right and constitute a source for art historians. She therefore initiated a collaboration with Professor Kate Tunstall (Oxford), a literary historian whose translation of Diderot’s Rameau's Nephew was awarded a prize by the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Through face-to-face meetings, extensive discussions of the material, and exchanges of drafts, Scott and Tunstall reworked Scott’s draft translation. The quality and success of the work arises from this joint enterprise; Diderot’s vocabulary, syntax, allusions and references depends on a detailed knowledge of eighteenth-century art, its discourses and material culture, which Scott provided.
The article and scholarly translation work together to support Scott’s analysis of Diderot’s position on luxury and on hospitality by enabling a visualisation of the narrative and, more importantly, of the syntax, ironical gestures and materialised motifs deployed in his text. The ideas for the drawings that reconstruct the ‘Regrets’ and illustrate ‘The Philosopher’s Room’ emerged out of the process of translation. Visualisation of the narrative, in turn, informed Scott’s argument and Scott and Tunstall’s translation of Diderot’s fiction.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -