Bad Dreams and Secret Artists: Translating Freud into Literature

In 1911, in one of the many footnotes which he added to successive editions of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote: ‘It is impossible as a rule to translate a dream into a foreign language and this is equally true, I fancy, of a book such as the present one.’ (I don't suppose A.A. Brill, who was starting work on the first translation at the time, was aware of this comment.) Impossible or not, people seemed to want to do it. It may be that foreign dreams are more interesting than one's own; certainly Oscar Wilde had complained about English ones, back in 1891, saying that ‘the dreams of the great middle classes of this country, as recorded in Mr Myers's two bulky volumes on the subject, and in the Transactions of the Psychical Society, are the most depressing things I have ever read. There is not even a fine nightmare among them’.1 Or perhaps the new popularity of horror tales, archaeological fantasies and ghost stories found an echo in Freud's book. At all events, Freud was able, in 1911, to tell his English spokesman Ernest Jones that he had turned down three offers from Englishmen to translate Die Traumdeutung, because Brill was going to do it.2 Brill's translation was published in 1913. It was not a great translation (Brill wasn't a native English speaker) but it had to do until 1932, when a version heavily revised by several hands (including Jones's) was published, which went some way to replacing it. Not until 1953, and the publication of James Strachey's variorum translation for the Standard Edition, did the terminology and what was taken to be Freud's meaning find a settled English form, one that in the absence of a comparable German scholarly edition became internationally canonical.

Translation lies at the heart of psychoanalysis. Not only in the difficult and sometimes disputed area of technical terms—ego, id, superego, cathexis,