SMITH, Adam; GROUCHY, Sophie de (trans.)

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Théorie des sentimens moraux Second edition, first published in 1798, of Sophie de Grouchy's translation, the "the best available in her language" (Ross, p. 365), which brought Smith's work to a much broader French audience following two ineffectual translations, and which remains the standard French text. The edition includes de Grouchy's Lettres sur la sympathie, her notable contribution to moral philosophy.The translation was preceded in French editions by Marc-Antoine Eidous's translation of 1764, roundly criticized for its low quality and held by Smith to be responsible for the poor reception of his work on the continent, and Jean-Louis Blavet's translation of 1774-5, which was poorly disseminated. A manuscript translation by Louis Alexandre, Duc de la Rochefoucauld (1774) was abandoned and unpublished. In contrast, de Grouchy's translation was praised from the start and commended for its faithfulness to the original text. "Smith was no longer alive by the time Grouchy published her own translation (1798; he died in 1790), but it is safe to say that he would have been happier with hers, as she followed the text as precisely as she could, attempting to capture the tone and rhythm, as well as the multilayered meanings of his sentences" (Bergès and Schliesser, p. 9). The edition also includes a translation of Smith's Dissertation on the Origin of Language, first published in The Philological Miscellany, and thereafter appended to the third and subsequent editions of the The

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