ABSTRACT
The French translation of the Discourses was made shortly afterwards by another Huguenot, Pierre-Auguste Samson, and published in The Hague in 1702. Bernard mentioned this translation in the March 1702 issue of Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres, referring his readers to his earlier review for a detailed presentation of the work itself. However, another famous Huguenot journal, the Histoire des Ouvrages des Scavans, published a review of Sidney's work in its issue of February. The author of this text Henri Basnage de Beauval, who doubled as editor and single contributor to the Histoire des Ouvrages des Scavans. The third review we shall be looking at was written by Pierre-Louis Ginguene for Decade philosophique, near the close of eighteenth century. Translation was not about producing a faithful, literal rendering of the original, warts and all, something Nicolas Beauzee described contemptuously as version, but about 'Frenchifying' it to such an extent that it looked like real thing: a genuinely French text.
