Rene Dubos - Beast or Angel?

Beast or Angel?

Choosing to be Human

Ren Dubos

Originally published in 1974 by Charles Scribners Sons

Published 2011 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

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Copyright 1974 Ren Dubos.

The author acknowledges with thanks permission to quote as follows:

On page 77, the lines from The City by C. P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, from Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy, The Hogarth Press, and Four Greek Poets, Penguin Books, by permission of The Hogarth Press and Deborah Rogers Ltd.

On page 79, the title of the song How Ya Gonna Keep Em Down on the Farm After Theyve Seen Paree, by Walter Donaldson, Sam Lewis, and Joe Young, copyright renewed 1946 Warock Corporation & Mills Music, Inc., by permission of Warock Corporation.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2010026915

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dubos, Ren J. (Ren Jules), 1901-1982.

Beast or angel? : choosing to be human / Ren Dubos.

p. cm.

Originally pub.: New York : Scribner, 1974.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4128-1124-8 (alk. paper)

1. Social evolution. 2. Human evolution. I. Title.

GN320.D8213 2010

303.4--dc22

2010026915

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-1124-8 (pbk)

Nestez vous asceur de vostre vouloir? Le poinct principal y gist: tout le reste est fortuit et dependent des fatales dispositions du Ciel.

Are you not assured within yourself of what you have a mind to? The chief and main point of the whole matter lieth there: all the rest is merely casual, and totally dependeth upon the fatal disposition of the heavens.

Franois Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book 3, Chapter 5 (Translation from Great Books of The Western World edition)

Foreword:
Conveying French in English

This book was initially written in French, at the suggestion of Monsieur A. Blanchard, director of the Paris publishing firm Gallimard Denol. Except for letters to my family and a few speeches, I have never written in my native language since I left Europe in 1924 at the age of twenty-three. Several of my earlier books have been translated from English into French, but not by me, and I have not read the translations.

To my great surprise, writing in French proved almost effortless, and I have been told by Monsieur Blanchard that except for a few Anglicisms my text was acceptable without further editing. But a greater surprise came when I found it extremely difficult to translate my own French into English. Time and time again, in fact, I could not translate and had to convey my thoughts in other forms. If large sections of Beast or Angel? are substantially different from the French version, Choisir dEtre Humain, it is not because I wanted to update the information or add new thoughts, but because this was the only way I could convey in English what I had tried to express in French. I have naturally been puzzled by my difficulties as translator of myself and shall try here to analyze the cause.

I wrote Choisir dEtre Humain in a completely American environmentin mid-Manhattan and Aspen, Colorado. Yet as soon as I began writing in French, I recaptured the mood of my late teens and early twenties in Europe, expressing opinions spontaneously as I was wont to do with people of my age group, while walking home from the Collge Chaptal in Paris or from my office on the Pincio in Rome. In this youthful mood, I stated views about people, things, and events in a subjective manner, without much concern for precise documentation. I have the impression that remembrance of the past brought back to the surface the language of my youth which is usually buried under a layer of English. French words and turns of phrase that I had not used for half a century came to my pen without my being aware that they had passed through my mindto the extent that I hardly recognized them when I read what I had just written. They had emerged spontaneously to express the feelings and opinions that I had developed from the immense range of facts acquired over a lifetime of reading and observation.

I speak and write English with great ease, more accurately than French, but not as casually. The reason for this difference is probably that I learned English after the age of twenty, almost exclusively from books and in a scientific atmospherefirst as assistant editor at the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome, then as a graduate student in science at Rutgers University, and especially as a staff member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now The Rockefeller University) in New York. My usage of English has been shaped by the writing of some two hundred papers (let alone several books) on scientific problems and, since 1945, by my duties as editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine. My former chief, Dr. Oswald Avery, drilled into me the ideal of carefully stating factual knowledge and objective observations, with as little use of I as possible and with no expression of personal feelings.

One of my difficulties in translating Choisir dEtre Humain into Beast or Angel? was to convert the subjective responses corresponding to my European youth into statements compatible with the disciplined English of my adult professional life. In addition to these difficulties of a personal nature, there were others of cultural origin. Expressions and images that were suitable in a French context were meaningless or misleading for an American reader.

In the French text I mentioned that the names of astronauts are as poorly remembered as are the names of the acadmiciens. This refers to a parlor game in France in which people are asked to remember the names of the forty so-called immortals, the members of the Acadmie Franaise, most of whom turn out not to be known even in highly educated circles. This French in joke is incomprehensible to Americans.

Another cultural difference appears on and my life in Rome had confirmed me in the view that the better part of wisdom is an amused tolerance of human ways. This does not mean that one should accept the world as it is, only that the wise man is aware of the mutability of things and of the fact that truth has many faces. As Figaro says in Pierre de Beaumarchaiss Le Barbier de Sville, Je me hte de rire de tout, de peur den pleurer [I hasten to laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep]. The short and familiar French expression, prendre la vie avec le sourire, thus required a complicated explanation in the English version.

Most disturbing, however, was the discovery that some of the French phrases which had given me the greatest satisfaction proved to be ambiguous and obscure when I tried to translate them. One, mentioned in the Introduction (, which suffers from a similar ambiguity concerning the role of free will in the selection of the circumstances that condition human development.