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Can someone translate this?


The first comment of joaorico quotes the translation of paragraphe 3rd,4th and 5th of the full quotation in french.


Yes. Here’s a slapdash translation of the other paragraphs, using a lot of rusty French and a little Google Translate. Let me know if there's anything to correct.

- - -

When I finally made contact with the mathematical world at Paris, one or two years later, I ended up learning, among a lot of other things, that the work that I had done in my area with the means at hand, was (pretty much) something well known to "everybody", under the names of measure theory and of Lebesgue integrals. To the eyes of the two or three seniors to whom I had spoken of this work (or even shown a manuscript), it was a little as if I had simply wasted my time, by re-doing that which was "already known". I do not recall having been disappointed, before. At that moment, the idea of collecting "credit", be it the praise or let alone the interest of others, for the work that I was doing, would have been foreign to my spirit, still. Besides, my energy was well enough spent in familiarizing myself with a completely different milieu, and, more, learning that which was considered at Paris the equivalent of a B.A. in mathematics.

However, in thinking back now on those three years, I realize they were in no way wasted. Without even knowing it, I had learned in solitude that which was essential to the mathematician's work - that which no teacher, truly, could teach. Without ever having it said to me, without having met anyone with whom to share my thirst for knowing things, I was, however, aware, "in my gut", I would say, that I was a mathematician : someone who "did" math, in the full sense of the term - like you "make" love. Mathematics was becoming for me a mistress always welcoming of my desire. Those years of solitude had formed the basis of a confidence which has never been shaken - neither by the discovery (disembarking in Paris at the age of 20 years) of the whole extent of my ignorance and of the immensity of that which it would be necessary to learn : neither (more than 20 years later) by the uproar of my leaving for good the mathematical world ; neither, in these last years, by the frequently pretty crazy events of a certain kind of "burial" (anticipated and painless) of my person and my work, orchestrated by my closest friends of old. . .

- - -

[other paragraphs; see above]

- - -

The infant, he has no difficulty being alone. He is alone by nature, even if occasional company doesn’t displease him and he knows to reach for his mother’s breast, when it’s time to drink. He knows well, without having had it said to him, that the breast is for him, and that he knows how to drink. But often, we have lost contact with that infant in us. And constantly we pass next to better things, without deigning to see. . .

If in these Récoltes et Semailles I address myself to someone other than myself, it’s not to the "public". I address myself to you, who reads me as one person, and to one person alone. It’s to them, and you, who know how to be alone, to the infant, that I would like to speak, and to other people. The infant is often far away, I know it well. There, he’s seen all the colors, for ages and ages. He’s hidden God knows where, and it is easy, often, to stumble upon him. You would swear he’s been dead since forever, that he had never existed at all - but I am sure that he’s there sometimes, and very much alive.

And I know also what the sign is, when I’ve been heard. It’s when, despite all the differences of culture and destiny, that which I’ve said about my person and life finds echo and resonance in you ; when you also find there your proper life, your proper experience of yourself, on a day on which you were not, perhaps, giving attention to it. It doesn’t mean anything along the lines of "identification", to something or someone distant from you. But maybe, a little, that you rediscover your proper life, that which is closest to you, in going over the rediscovery that I did of mine, through the pages in Récoltes et Semailles, and up to these pages that I am in the process of writing even today.



for the whole piece in context see the translation by Roy Lisker: http://www.fermentmagazine.org/rands/promenade2.html




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