I unexpectedly spent my evening with an 18th Century philosopher

I didn’t expect to spend several hours last night finding different translations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 18th Century work Emile, or On Education. It rather amused me to do so as it’s yet another hidden part of the book publishing process I didn’t expect.

I have included what are known as epigraphs before my chapters - these are short quotes that are intended to be relevant to the upcoming content, you’ll find them in many books. There’s a lovely one I wanted to use by Rousseau - and given that he died well over 70 years ago, I thought there would be no copyright issues. If we use a quote from an author who died less than 70 years ago, we have to seek permission, which is very time consuming and can lead to dead ends. (If you use a quote in the body of the book it can be considered ‘fair use’ but an epigraph is different - but don’t quote me on this…)

It turns out that if you use a translated version and the author of said translation died less than 70 years ago, the same rule applies. The translation I used was therefore still in copyright. As luck would have it I found an 1892 version Emile, translated by William H. Payne’s, who died in 1907 - according to my research. I downloaded this version and painstakingly searched for the quote by comparing the two versions side by side and couldn’t find it! It turns out that language can be a matter of interpretation and his was quite different, meaning the quote didn’t make sense on its own for the purposes I had been using it.

The next step was to conduct my own translation - which my publisher said was also an option. Unfortunately, my French is, let’s say, not quite up to scratch, so I messaged several French contacts and asked them to translate the quote without giving them the context or other translation (thank you!). I compared that with the original and the end result was identical in meaning to the translated quote I had originally used, but different enough so that these words were not in copyright!

So there you have it, a book is not just the writing or research, but many other tasks around it. I’ll share more on the process in upcoming posts. If you have any questions, do get in touch.

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As a reader of this newsletter you’ll no doubt already know that Breadwinners is out in August 2025 and available to pre order now - if you are interested in reading it, please consider ordering it for less than a round in a pub, to please the algorithm and justify all these hours of research that went into it.