Letter from Ernest Jones to Sigmund Freud, December 5, 1927

International Psycho-Analytical Association

5 December 1927
London

Dear Professor,

Your two wishes, that Strachey should do the translation himself and that it be done quickly, have a certain incompatibility. His intolerance of work, about which you doubtless know more than I do, has not been improved by his having eight patients a day. Recently he ungraciously objected to being put on the James Glover Memorial Sub-Committee, because it would involve giving up part of an evening every two or three months and it is hardly possible to get out of him a book review or any other contribution. Woolf accepted the book for the Hogarth Press on condition that it appeared quickly, and both you and I have the same wish. Knowing nothing of Strachey's interview with you last September, I saw him together with Mrs. Riviere about your new book but they were equally disinclined to undertake the work. After half-an-hour's pressure all I got from him was a promise that he would try dictating the translation of one chapter as an experiment to see if it would be less laborious that way. Just after that, it happened that Robson Scott, who has been three years in analysis with me for an obsessional neurosis (and who is therefore scrupulously meticulous) showed me some translation work he had done from the German. His work is purely literary and he is in some ways more gifted than Strachey in felicitous expression. So I asked Strachey if he would like some help from him. Greatly relieved he begged that Robson Scott should do the translation on the condition that he revised it, which I shall of course also do myself. You may be sure, therefore, that it will be both skilfully and accurately done and I hope that you will not press your condition, for getting translation work done in England is difficult enough in any case.

I hope you will find some points of interest in a reprint I am sending you by this post.

With kindest regards,

Yours always,

Ernest Jones.