Jesuit Studies, 24. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xx + 549. Hb, $224.00.

This fresh, relevant, and fine new translation will make a substantial contribution to scholarship on Charlevoix by making his Journal easily accessible to Anglophone readers. This is not to say that this is the first such translation of the Journal; English translations have been available for hundreds of years, with British editions published by R. and J. Dodsley in 1761 and R. Goadby in 1763, and more recently, Louise Phelps Kellogg’s reprint (with emendations) of the Dodsley edition published by Caxton Club in Chicago in 1923. However, this is the first new English edition in centuries, and it is by far the best, restoring missing portions of the original text, correcting mistranslated passages, and providing thoughtful and exceedingly helpful annotations.

Of course, Micah True has closely examined the original French edition of the Journal published in several volumes with Charlevoix’s Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle-France by P-F. Giffard of Paris in 1744, but he has also made excellent use of the two-volume critical edition of the Journal edited by P. Berthiaume and published in Montreal in 1994. Berthiaume’s work, a masterful critical edition that identifies and explicates the source material used by Charlevoix, demonstrates convincingly that Charlevoix’s Journal is not the actual epistolary series it appears to be, but is rather a cleverly composed pastiche of travel diary, anthropological inquiry, meticulous descriptions of culture and nature, as well as a tour-de-force of historiography and history. True does not challenge Berthiaume’s analysis, but he is in thoughtful conversation with it throughout this work.

Extant English translations of the Journal are both dated and faulty. True offers readers a smoother and more accurate translation, informed by recent scholarship, and his annotations evidence a real feel for the historical period. True conveys Charlevoix’s erudition and breadth of knowledge not just through his translation, but through the clear and thorough annotations. For example, True opted to provide brief biographical details of the many historical figures mentioned by Charlevoix in his “Preliminary Essay on the Origin of the Americans,” as well as throughout the thirty-four letters that follow. These annotations make this eighteenth-century text immediately accessible to a general reader, while directing more serious students to the sources and issues undergirding and complicating the text.

The letters themselves (again, the epistolary format is likely a literary device), include and reflect upon Charlevoix’s experiences as he traveled for two and a half years, from June 1720 (Letter 1, from the port of Rochefort) to January 1723 (Letter 36, describing the journey from Cap-Haïtien to Plymouth and then across the English Channel to Le Havre). The letters are incredibly rich in content. While the journey was difficult, and Charlevoix suffered illness, misfortune, and delay, in each letter Charlevoix vividly describes the features of the land and waterways as well as the appearances and practices of the people he meets at each stopping point, with equal attention paid to French “Creole” and Native.

The translation is filled with this lively prose. True notes in his thirty-four-page introduction that readers who heretofore only had access to English translations of the Journal will now know Charlevoix to be a better literary stylist than those previous translations have represented. While True was clearly praising Charlevoix’s prose here, he deserves much credit for conveying Charlevoix’s style so well.

True has chosen not to translate certain terms, like “sauvage” and “jongleur.” He explains these choices in his informative introduction, noting that because some terms, particularly the former, suffer in translation because they carry connotations in English that are not as clearly present in the original French. True has concluded that they are thus better left to reflect their original usage and context. While this reviewer initially harbored some doubts about the author’s choice to preserve other outdated terms (especially colonial-era French names of First Nations groups), after thorough immersion in the manuscript it became clear that True made the correct decision to preserve Charlevoix’s nomenclature. This choice enables readers to perceive more readily the historical, cultural, and religious foundations for Charlevoix’s misconstruals and misinterpretations, and to more clearly comprehend the state of knowledge of the Americas at the time of the composition of the text.

True offers us a valuable opportunity to see through the eyes of Charlevoix, to engage with his perceptions and interpretations of North America, and to travel with him from Quebec on the St. Lawrence River, through the Great Lakes, and on his arduous yet fascinating journey down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and then on to Cap-Haitien, and back to France. In short, it throws open long-obscured windows on New France for Anglophone readers.

This may be the greatest impact of this annotated translation: it will earn a wide readership. It will surely be added to countless undergraduate syllabi and reading lists. Many university professors will send undergraduate students directly to this text for an introduction to Charlevoix, and this translation is eminently suitable for excerpting for inclusion in undergraduate-level primary source collections. This book will be a necessary purchase for academic libraries with holdings in Jesuit Studies, Atlantic world studies, early Canadiana, and North American history, including First Nations/Native American history.

doi:10.1163/22141332-00704008-09