#43: Emma Craufurd and the Impenetrability of History

11 September 2023

I've had a version of this essay kicking around in my head for quite some time now. That version of the essay is, to be quite humble about it, a masterpiece of archival research, one of those triumphant excavations of a long-lost literary figure, pulling a life out of some forgotten margin and into a well-deserved limelight. The figure in question here is Emma Craufurd, the English-language translator of two of Simone Weil's best and most accessible (?) works: Waiting for God and Gravity and Grace.

I'm a bit embarrassed to say that I only stumbled on her name as I was assembling the bibliography for Rivermouth--her work was conducted largely in a time before translator's names appeared on covers, title pages, anywhere but the copyright page, and her name had slipped past my many, many reads of Waiting for God. But then, suddenly, mid-round of factchecking, there she was: a name, a person who, some 70 years prior, had shared with me both a profession and, I had to assume, a love for Weil's stark prose and starker reasoning.

Upon putting her name into Google, I discovered her translation of Gravity and Grace, of Perrin and Thibon's co-written biography, Simone Weil: As We Knew Her, a handful of works by the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, and some novels originally written in Japanese that she confusingly translated from the French.

And nothing else.

And I mean nothing else. Not one of the 5,500 scholarly essays and articles compiled in the Simone Weil Bibliography, not translator's notes and reflections published by her. She is a name in a footnote, nowhere have I seen a précis of her life or where she lived and when she lived or died even. Not even the Find-A-Grave results so common to the Google searches of minor historical figures or genealogical research. Just a blank space on the Internet, in the research and scholarship where a whole entire person had somehow disappeared. 

This isn't uncommon, although likely vanishingly so, but it's possible to pass through the world with relatively little evidence, slip through history having just left the slightest of thumbprints in the margins. On reflection, it seems almost funny that the translator of Weil's singular phrase and motive, "decreation," would, herself, have so thoroughly been decreated herself, a woman-shaped hole that allowed the English-speaking world to recieve Weil's thoughts all the more brightly and directly. A woman-shaped hole where a mind and languages and decisions and scholarship had been. 

In later research, I've managed to track down a few tidbits, take a few of the flying leaps that this kind of research kind of requires you to make. Weil was originally published in English in the UK, by a predecessor of today's Routledge. We might guess, then, that her translator is herself British, and sure enough, an Emma Katherine Craufurd shows up on ancestry.com--born in Hertfordshire in 1891, and dying in Northamptonshire in 1967, dates that align with my Emma Craufurd's period of activity. I would pay the $40/month fee to access the records that ancestry.com includes, but from what I can see behind the paywall, all the documents collated under her name are birth and death records, not the confirmation of a mind at work. Her name appears in a thousand places online, scattered across footnotes and citations--this is confirmation of her mind at work, but there is no way to gather her together with her biography, so this essay, too, comes to you from the shadow-space of the translator.

I shouldn't be surprised by this--I've read Kate Briggs, after all, I know about the marginality, the assumed frivolity and disposability of the translator, of the lady-translator, of the lady translator in the mid-century. Layers upon layers of disposability. And yet, Ive spent hours at this point, searching up and down archives online, squinting at digitally reproduced text, feeling my eyes fuzz out at the strange spelling of her name. I want to know, so badly, and almost can't believe I don't think I'll be able to. 

Part of this longing comes from the uncannily strong sense that there's a story there. Behind the translations, behind the translator, behind her disappearance. Perhaps it's too much Masterpiece Theater leading me to believe that post-war England is full of secrets and sadness, or perhaps it's just the kind of hunch that has led me into a number of other rabbit holes and dead ends. The 1950s, when Craufurd's translations were published, were a time when Weil's family and collaborators and colleagues were alive, working hard to publish their friend's works, to share her with the world. They were organizing her notebooks into publishable writings, pulling letters and essays from drawers and ironing them out to be sent into the world. There must have been contact established between the Weil's and Emma Craufurd, a recommendation of an unlikely translator or an impassioned plea from Emma herself, having idly come across Weil's work and gotten that hunger I know so well: the fire to be the one to do this text justice, the surety that she was the only one who possibly could. 

And this is where the other part of the wanting to know comes in. I feel such a kinship with Emma Craufurd, feel like she and I must have understood each other in some way or another across the years and languages. I've felt my own brain electrocuted by her renditions of Weil, have propped myself up on Weil when my hope or my energy was flagging, marvelled at her strange turns. I also know what it's like to translate, to feel yourself dragged into the contours of a mind other than your own, can only imagine the feeling of plunging into a freezing sea or a hot bath that dipping into Weil's language must have been. 

In the version of this essay I wanted to write, I've found the document I'm so sure must exist, a journal or an essay where, in careful script, she's documented these scaldings, the choices she made as she tried to bring Simone into her own language, the way the world looks just a bit different because of touching whatever live wire lives at the heart of Weil's notebooks.

And there's a possibility that I just don't know where I'm looking. That I obviously just need to call up some archive or another at Oxford or Cambridge or somewhere and a box will be hauled up from deep storage, and lie there, waiting for me to get on a plane to touch it myself, and then, there, communion. That there's some hidden fanatic who, like me, noticed the name on the copyright page at long last and dove into a rabbit hole with better luck than I've had. I'm not a historian, after all, although I'm not exactly a novice either so, while anything is possible, I don't know that these are likely scenarios. 

In my time thinking and researching Emma, I've also obviously done a lot of imagining of her, the ways she works, the things that light her up about the books she translates, the fastidious arrangement of desk and home and study, but in the end its just that--imaginings, peering into a resolutely darkened window only to see a drawn curtain and my own reflection in the glass. I'm not, after all, Emma, her and her mind are as closed to me as they were before I learned her name, imagined her existence. 

I'll keep peering into the window, though, even if all I end up doing is wiping the condensation of my own breath off the glass because I can't escape the though that there's something there, bright and rare and precious, just out of my view.