ABSTRACT
Joan Riviere was Freud’s favourite translator. When he wanted her to translate ‘The Ego and the Id’ – one of his most important papers – he wrote to her three times to ask. The chapter shows the issues which arose in translating Freud for the English-speaking world. One of these was Ernest Jones’s and James Strachey’s wish to make Freud sound as technical as possible. To do this they invented a quasi-scientific vocabulary. Joan was more concerned to replicate the rhythms of Freud’s language and his complex way of expressing himself. Examples are given of Joan’s and James’s translations of extracts from Freud. James persuaded Leonard and Virginia Woolf to publish the whole of Freud’s works. James completed this partly by re-translating Joan’s work, which is now lost.
