Merci d’avoir entre ce texte, avec les accents et tout! En reconaissance, une correction — une “note” s’impose a la premiere paragraphe, no pas une pote — et une traduction en anglais ci-dissous.

-k

Preface to the New Edition

Why should a preface even exist? Apology? Explanation? Commentary? Indication of weakness or of bad faith – if it is written by the author – praise of one’s amiability, perhaps, if the work of another. I never understood the use of prefaces, and I have little appetite to write one. A note, nonetheless, is called for here.

The first French edition of my book was translated from the American version which I never considered to be complete. I was in the United States at the time and it didn’t seem possible to bring out my book in its integral version. The possibility of publishing the latter was offered to me when I met my French Editor in Paris.

Here then is the unexpurgated version. Is that to say that the American version was subject to arbitrary alterations? Certainly not. It was rather a constraint which I imposed upon myself and which I would like to be able to name: a censorship by anticipation. This same constraint exists in the mind of many American writers who are conscious of the preferences of the audience about whome they are writing, and who know quite well the idea of that audience that is held by those who serve it.

It is hard for us to present to each the unvarnished truth, especially when it concerns the essential conflict that exists between the principles of our style of life and the exigencies of the human condition. This conflict lies in all the hearts in our country, and torments many of us. We turn away from this terrifying truth with what I would term a kind of communal bad faith. This is what led me to express myself with reticence in the course of my initial work. But after having reflected on it, I felt obliged to try to arrive at the causes of this moral crisis that so afflicts the youth whom I describe in this book.

P.M.