Paul Jérémie Bitaubé

Paul Jérémie Bitaubé is Pasteur calvinist, writer, born with Koenigsberg in 1732 of a family of French refugees, died in 1808.

It is mainly known for its translations of Iliade and of the Odyssey of Homère. Its reputation was large, at the end of the 18th century, in France and Germany.

Biography

Born in Prussia parents of French origin, Bitaubé had been intended by them for priesthood, in a time when several gentlemen of the same colony had embraced this state. Bitaubé preached like the others ( literary Prussia , T. 1st, p. 261 and 262); but its taste dominating carried it to the Littérature, and, as of 1760, it published, in Berlin, a test of a new translation of Homère, written in French.

Though born and high in Prussia, it was always due to honor to write in the language of Voltaire, and one could almost say Frederic Large the. For a long time already, he was member of the royal academy of Berlin; but it was bored in this city, and came to spend the whole years to Paris, without the permission of the king. It had the French heart. He is spoken about these strange absences, which displeased to the king, in the Vie of Frederic II (Strasbourg, 1787, in-12, T. IV, p. 71). The large Frederic liked to have under the hand the members of his royal academy, like his soldiers. There was thus, for Bitaubé, danger to be unobtrusive number of the academicians of Berlin, and to lose the prerogatives attached for this reason. The Margrave of Anspach, of which he had been the adviser resident at the court of Berlin, got to him the means and the permission to reside at Paris, without ceasing being member of the academy of Berlin.

Incorporated to the Academy of the inscriptions and the humanities little time after the publication of the Odyssey, Bitaubé applied all its care to give a new edition of its complete translation of Homère. However, the Revolution arrived; the war was declared in Prussia, and Bitaubé, remained in France, was private of its pensions, which were returned to him only with peace. Bitaubé was, it should be said, become completely French, by its long stay in France, its sympathies to the French literature, and by the friendships which it had contracted in Paris with the majority of the writers of time, and particularly with Ducis.

When, in year IV, the Institut was established, Bitaubé was named one of the first members, and returned account by it, in year VI, as president, with the two councils of work of this famous body. Bitaubé had married in Prussia, at the twenty-eight years age (1758), with a woman of the French colony, which died three weeks before him, in 1808.

Bitaubé, which knew German perfectly, wanted to never write but in French. In its youth, it had been encouraged there for a famous example: Frederic never wrote anything either in any other language. We repeat it, Bitaubé seems to us placed in the public opinion below the row which belongs to him, and which it deserved to occupy by its honourable character and its useful work.

Works and translations

; Works

Two prose poems , 1763
Examination of the profession of faith of the Savoyard vicar , 1763
Joseph, prose poem , which will be published in 1767
Of the influence of the humanities on the philosophy , 1769
Éloge of Crow , which contributed to the Académie of Rouen in 1768, 1775
Guillaume de Nassau , famous the Batavians in 1797, 1787
Vie of Frederic II , 1787

; Translations

Translation of Iliade of Homère, first edition in 1764, taken again and corrected in 1785
Translation of the Odyssey of Homère, first edition in 1785.
Translation of Hermann and Dorothée of Goethe in French in 1795

External bonds

Translation of L ''' Iliade '' by Bitaubé
Translation of L ''' Odyssey '' by Bitaubé

Partial source

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