ABSTRACT
The author of these lines took part in the French translation of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments published in 1999.1 Translating the Theory into French during the very last years of the twentieth century conveyed to me the feeling of something like an unbearable lightness of translating. This bizarre expression is coined from the title of a famous novel by the Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera.2 In this book, the main character, Tomas, bestows a deep philosophical meaning to a common German saying, which comes to his mind as he has an important decision to take:
There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison.We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. … Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.3
