More on Montaigne

I have generally been enjoying my exposure to his Essays.  It is somewhat interesting to read through the notes of the Florio translation and have the editors note the various places Florio mistranslated Montaigne - and increasingly just refused to translate "dirty" poems from the Latin.  For that matter, it is somewhat surprising just how often Montaigne talks about impotence or adultery.  He had a fairly relaxed attitude towards the latter, even apparently for wives cuckolding husbands, though I suspect he might have felt differently had it happened to him (as he would likely have admitted in a follow-up essay).

There is no question that it is hard to pin down Montaigne, as he shifts quite a bit.  At times, he comes across as an early Mencken.  In Chapter 50, he writes "I do not think we [humans] can ever be despised as much as we deserve. ... There is, in my opinion, not so much misery in us as emptiness, not so much malice as folly."  However, he very much enjoyed reading the great thinkers of the past, and he also commented favorably upon (good) writers who cared more about their virtual offspring (books) than their flesh and blood children (On the affection of fathers for their children).  One thing that is pretty constant in his worldview is that he took an extremely dim view of women and their role in society.  They were always jealous of each other (and suspicious of their husbands) and basically incapable of higher thinking.  This frequently makes for tough going, and it is always a relief when he stops writing about women and returns to his favorite subject, himself.

In my first pass through the Essays, it looks like I will end up reading slightly over half of them.  They are interesting enough that I expect I will get through them all, though I don't feel that Montaigne has changed my life or anything like that.  While I'm glad I got a sampling of the Florio translation and then read an extended essay on how Shakespeare was directly influenced by this version, Florio is definitely not for me.  It basically comes down to Frame (Everyman) or Screech (Penguin) -- or of course the free Cotton translation on Project Gutenberg, though that is pretty outdated.  Following up on a tip from an Amazon reviewer, I wanted to see if the original academic press version of Frame's translation had the footnotes to allow the reader to know which Latin (or Greek) verse was being translated.  I tracked down a copy at Robarts and found that, not only does Frame omit this information, even in the original edition, but he usually just puts in a translation of the verse and doesn't leave in the Latin (and then just notes "Virgil").  That's pretty extreme, and frankly very shoddy for what had been an academic press edition.  I can tell this would really bug me after only a very short time, so I think there is no reasonable alternative for me but the Screech version.  Curiously, Frame produced a bilingual edition of a handful of Essays and other writings, and this version does have the proper citations!  But this is more of a curiosity than anything.  I can barely read French and certainly not 400+ year old, antique French.  I guess the only question is whether I order Screech now and put it in storage or wait until I've gotten through a few other books, such as Musil for starters.  I think I know myself well enough to know the answer to that one...