James Strachey - The Translations

The Translations

In one of his last letters to Freud, Ernest Jones wrote that 'You probably know you have the reputation of not being the easiest author to translate'. Certainly when translation into English first began, 'the earliest versions were not always felicitous...casual and at times fearfully inaccurate'. With the coming of the Stracheys, however, 'translations began to improve: in 1924 and 1925, a small English team brought out Freud's Collected Papers, in four volumes' which have been described as 'the most vigorous translations into English' of all time.

Nevertheless the 24 volume Standard Edition remains Strachey's crowning glory. 'It is a heroic enterprise. Where necessary, it offers variorum texts; it wrestles with intractable material...and it introduces each work, even the slightest paper, with indispensable bibliographical and historical information'.

The most 'obvious flaw in this translation was the substitution of esoteric neologisms for the plain German terms Freud preferred', so that for example his "I" and his "It" become the Ego and the Id. Lacan took particular exception to 'the translation of instinct for Trieb ...thus basing the whole edition on a complete misunderstanding since Trieb and instinct have nothing in common'. Bruno Bettelheim went still further, arguing that 'anyone who reads Freud only in Strachey's English translation cannot understand Freud's concern with man's soul'.

While accepting that 'Strachey's translation was also an act of interpretation and it has not been hard to find spots where he went astray', the fact remains that 'Freud was delighted with the work Strachey succeeded in doing'; whilst even into the Twenty-First Century 'the German editions have relied on Strachey's editorial apparatus, which should be a testimony to what he accomplished'.