The two English translations of “Le Phénomène humain” compared

Thursday, April 24, 2025

Like thousands of others in the 1950s and 60s I was enthralled by “The Phenomenon of Man” by the Jesuit palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin. It had been translated from the original French by Bernard Wall. But then in1999 came a new translation, by Sarah Appleton-Weber (A-W), which claimed to correct “fundamental errors” in the previous effort.

Now I have a soft spot for Wall’s version, which had made me a Teilhard man for life, so I decided, admittedly late in the day, to see if assorted professors and other worthies were indeed right to hail the A-W translation as meticulous in its accuracy and faithfulness to the original French.

A-W certainly wins Round 1. Teilhard’s title was Le Phénomène humain. Wall translated that as The Phenomenon of Man, but A-W corrects it to The Human Phenomenon. However in her Introduction she says, “Teilhard’s subject is not the ‘phenomenon of man’ as one among other species, but the ever-evolving human phenomenon as it is developing around us at this very moment”. I can’t for the life of me see why “the phenomenon of man” doesn’t embrace “the ever-evolving human phenomenon”. And although Teilhard sometimes refers to his book as Le Phénomène humain, he also refers to it as L’Homme – Man. What’s more “The Phenomenon of Man” is a punchier title – “The Human Phenomenon” sounds aimed at academics, and Teilhard wanted plenty of ordinary mortals to read his book.

A-W also rightly ticks Wall off for omitting the opening of one chapter – “Demeter! Mother Earth! A fruit? What kind of fruit? Is it seeking to be born on the tree of life?” Yet Wall would have been aware that Teilhard claims in his Preface that his book is “solely and exclusively a scientific study”. What kind of solely scientific study would have a section with such an opening? Perhaps Wall was wise to omit the invocation.

Let’s have a closer look at A-W’s work. For the opening sentence of the Prologue she has: “These pages represent an effort to see and to show what the human being becomes, what the human being requires, if placed wholly and completely in the context of appearance”. Now here’s what Teilhard wrote: “Ces pages représentent un effort pour voir, et faire voir ce que devient et exige l’Homme, si on le place, tout entier et jusqu’au bout, dans le cadre des apparences.” A-W doesn’t like Teilhard’s non-inclusive language, so “Homme” becomes “human being” instead of “man”, and she so arranges her translation that “le” (he) disappears altogether. In other words she gives us what she would like Teilhard to have written, not what he actually wrote. Accuracy is sacrificed to political correctness. And she keeps that up all the way through the book. Wall here is more faithful to Teilhard: “… what happens to man… when he is placed…” He is similarly accurate in this respect elsewhere in the book.

And how about this for a ludicrous mistranslation? Where Wall has, correctly, “O man of the twentieth century”, A-W gives us, “But then, human of the twenty-first century…”

And another point: A-W says “Teilhard does not use metaphor but analogy founded in nature”. So how about these? “A rocket that rises following the arrow of time…” “we climbed the slopes of the elementary multiple…” “and then we find a new ‘tunnel…’” “a massing of sequins…” “seize the tiller of the world” “it was the floor of time that started to shift (and the ceiling as a result!)”. There’s lots more. I hesitate to suggest that the poet A-W can’t recognise a metaphor when she meets one.

Wall is in fact a better writer than A-W; he wouldn’t have come up with “characteristics… that obligatorily reappear…”. Or: “Nothing could ever burst to light in the world as final one day through the different thresholds…”, where Wall has “In the world, nothing could ever burst forth as final across the different thresholds…” Again, A-W’s “That such a psychic mutation precisely must have accompanied the discovery…” is clumsy compared to Wall’s “Now that precisely such a psychic mutation must have accompanied the discovery…” Or A-W’s “the processes life has imagined to advance..” where Wall has “the processes discovered by life for its advance…”

As a matter of taste I prefer Wall’s “without” and “within” of things to A-W’s “outside” and “inside”, e.g. A-W’s “Are there thus several ways for a being to have an inside?” sounds a bit too anatomical as a reference to the psyche within a being.

A couple of A-W typos while I’m at it: waters “team” with miniscule beings… And “leaving some dark prision…”

But the one thing I can’t forgive Sarah Appleton-Weber is the way she wrecks the final sentence in Teilhard’s book. She writes, “In one way or another, even in the eyes of a mere biologist, it is still true that nothing resembles the way of the Cross as much as the human epic.” When I first read that I thought, okay, it’s probably more faithful than Wall’s translation, which I remembered well. But it isn’t. It’s a horror. Teilhard writes, “D’une manière ou de l’autre, il reste que, même au regard du simple biologiste, rien ne ressemble autant que l’épopée humaine à un chemin de la Croix.” As a Catholic scientist he wanted the last words in his beloved book to be the Cross. Wall got it right of course: “In one manner or the other it still remains true that, even in the view of a mere biologist, the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross”. And there’s one final piece of A-W mistranslation: she writes, “nothing resembles the way of the Cross as much as the human epic”. But Teilhard didn’t claim the human epic is the supreme example of the way of the Cross; he said the human epic resembles A way of the Cross.

In other words, if you have to choose between Wall’s “The Phenomenon of Man” and Appleton-Weber’s “The Human Phenomenon”, go for Wall.

Paul Bentley