A few years before her death at the age of thirty-four from tuberculosis, exacerbated by self-starvation undertaken in solidarity with those living in her native Nazi-occupied France, Simone Weil mused about how vanishing might bring her closer to the divine: “If only I knew how to disappear there would be a perfect union between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear.” She called this work of disappearance “decreation,” a neologism meaning something that isn’t quite destruction, but perhaps instead a kind of withdrawal from the self to make space for God. Yet Weil was only partially successful: so many years later, we’re able to read her words and find them in anthologies compiled after her death by those who loved her. However unintentionally, Weil has nevertheless left us a body of work, an incomplete disappearance. 

I’ve long been fascinated by Weil, and my reading of her led me to stumble upon another, more complete decreation. I am a professional translator, and so one day, out of idle curiosity, I searched the name of Emma Craufurd, the translator into English of two of Weil’s most accessible and well-known works, Waiting for God and Gravity and Grace. Craufurd’s surname is distinctive enough in spelling to be worth a Google search, and yet, when you try, the only results that come up are her translation credits. 

There are the Weil books, yes, but also Joseph Marie Perrin and Gustave Thibon’s coauthored biography, Simone Weil As We Knew Her, then a handful of works by the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, and some novels originally written in Japanese that Craufurd curiously 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 international Simone Weil Bibliography has Craufurd’s byline, no translator’s notes appear alongside her works related to Weil, not even a link to the Find-a-Grave sites so common to genealogical research. 

Slight traces can be half-guessed, half-gathered to compile a crude biography. Weil was initially published in the United Kingdom, so we can guess that her translator may well have been British. Craufurd was active as a translator from about 1951 to 1964, working mainly on religiously inflected texts from the French. From these facts—her likely nationality, her profession, her unusually spelled last name—we can narrow down the search through online archives to identify a woman I am nearly certain she is: Emma Katherine Craufurd. She was the youngest daughter of a family associated with a minor Scottish baronetcy (her father was not a baronet, her brother was). Her terse biography in Burke’s Peerage, the British authority on aristocratic genealogy, reads: “Emma Katherine; b 23 October 1891; d unm 3 April 1967 after a motor accident.” “Unm” here, of course, stands for unmarried. 

I have not found a way to link this Emma Katherine Craufurd with the Emma Craufurd named in a thousand footnotes, no way to link the life lived with the mind at work, so my writing about her inhabits the shadow-space of translation, riddled with my own assumptions and desires. I want to know her so badly I almost can’t believe there’s barely a trace left to know. 

In many ways, Craufurd’s marginalization isn’t surprising. Translators are, even today, fighting to get their names on the covers of books they have essentially re-authored. There’s something feminized, something at once secretarial and backwards-and-in-heels about the profession that makes it easy to shunt aside. Factor in the misogyny of the time period, the rush to press, perhaps even a lack of desire for public acclaim and lo: a blank space in the record. But even into this blank, I want to try to read motivation.

In her book This Little Art, Kate Briggs argues in defense of the lady translator. A lady translator is, in her words, irrespective of gender, “those translators apparently at liberty to pick their projects, to follow their inclinations…those translators who are materially enabled to spend their time writing literary translations.” She leans, purposefully, into the accusations of amateurism, of dilettantism, of hubris that have dogged these “lady translators,” tracing out the stories of Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, Thomas Mann’s much-maligned translator, and of Dorothy Bussy, André Gide’s lovestruck one. In the life of Emma Craufurd, I think I see another. 

A vague connection to nobility and brothers at Oxford bespeak at the very least a genteel upbringing. “Unm” and the strong thematic ties between the books she translated give us a hint of the kind of economic independence Briggs uses to define her lady translators, one rooted in an ability to overcome the financial uncertainty of translation to make way for something deeper, more art than commerce. A lady translator is free to fall in love, to enter into a complex relationship with a text that has, for some reason or another, gotten snagged on her mind as a burr does on a sweater—and as anyone who has read Weil knows, her work is practically designed to be burr-like. 

I first encountered Weil in graduate school, where I found her at once contradictory and infuriating and wonderful, full of the same kind of slant-logic that characterizes poetry. I, too, was in despair at the state of the world. I, too, stood at the threshold of the Church and tried to feel something. I, too, wanted to give myself a mission, a project that felt like it could fill my whole life, but also to start somewhere as small as a translation exercise. I wanted to take her sentences and break them apart, to find her absolute certainty for myself as if it were a matter of deciphering a grammar. 

Briggs argues for “translation as a laborious way of making the work present to yourself, of finding it again yourself, for yourself.” This is the same hunger I had for Weil, the promise I felt lurking at the bottom of her sentences. How could her translator have felt any differently? 

The kind of present-absence that Weil describes—her desire to look out upon a landscape without the sound of her own heartbeat interrupting, her vision of herself as a screen between God and the world—these are not unfamiliar metaphors to a translator. Weil herself alluded to it in a letter to Gustave Thibon, the eventual compiler of Gravity and Grace: “When we translate a text written in some foreign language, we do not seek to add anything to it; on the contrary, we are scrupulously careful not to add anything to it.” And yet, as anyone who has ever tried to translate faithfully knows, however hard you try to leave yourself behind, there you are, some kind of essential you-ness smudged on the words you tried so faithfully to recreate for someone else. (Someone else? Or, as Briggs argues, just yourself disguised as the other?) The same relationship that Weil outlines—what the poet Anne Carson called the “erotic triangle…involving God, herself and the whole of creation”—is also present between the translator, the author, and their audience, charged as it is with desire, jealousy, ego, hubris, and a desire to do it all justice, to be worthy of the honor. 

But what justice? In 1952, the same year Craufurd’s Gravity and Grace was published, another edition was released by a different publisher, this one translated by Arthur Wills, favored by Weil’s mother as the English-language translator for her daughter’s work. When I compared my recent copies of the two editions, they were word-for-word identical. Even with the most straightforward text in the world, even for sentences that as Thibon said “had no padding interposed between the life and the word,” this should not have been possible. So which was it? Was Craufurd’s work overwritten by Wills’s or did Wills get credit for a translation that was not his own? Were my own copies somehow misprinted? Did I misunderstand?

It’s almost funny that the translator of Weil’s singular phrase and motive, “decreation,” would have been so thoroughly decreated herself that even her translations are only dubiously hers. And yet, I can’t help but take it personally. It feels like an outrage, to have only a woman-shaped hole where once there was a mind and scholarship and an accumulation of small and large decisions, resulting in this text we have today. I want to know more, to read into the scant lines of biography to know the truth. 

Part of this longing comes from the uncannily strong sense that there’s a story there. The 1950s, when Craufurd’s translations were published, were a time when Weil’s family and collaborators were working hard to publish her works, to share her startling mind with the world. They were organizing her notebooks into publishable writings, pulling letters and essays from drawers and ironing them out. They almost certainly had to have established contact with Emma Craufurd, perhaps through a recommendation of an unlikely translator or an impassioned plea from Emma herself, who could have encountered Weil’s work and gotten that hunger I know so well: the fire to be the one who does this text justice, the certainty that she was the only one who possibly could. Waiting for God was Craufurd’s first translation, after all. 

And this is where the other part of wanting to know comes in. I feel such a kinship with Craufurd, like she and I would understand each other even across the years and languages. I’m seized by my own over-identification with a text that isn’t my own, a desire to make not just the text but the translator present to myself, to find her again myself, for myself. How can it be any other way, when I’ve felt my own brain electrified by her renditions of Weil, propped myself up using her Weil whenever my hope or my energy was flagging, marveled at Craufurd and Weil’s strange, lovely turns of phrase? I also know what it’s like to translate, to feel myself dragged into the contours of a mind other than my own. I can only imagine the plunge into a freezing sea or the soak in a hot bath that dipping into Weil’s language must have been. 

There’s a document I keep almost wishing into existence: a journal or an essay where, in careful script, Emma Craufurd has documented these scaldings, the choices she made as she tried to bring Simone into her own language, the way the whole world now looks just a bit different because of this contact. 

In my time thinking about and researching Emma, I’ve also obviously imagined her often, the ways she worked, the things that called her into the books she translated, the fastidious arrangement of desk and home and study, but in the end it’s just that—imaginings. I find myself peering resolutely into a darkened window, straining to see something other than a drawn curtain and my own reflection in the glass.

This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.