Abstract
Dear Editor
Thank you for your request to write this piece. 1 Prior to 2008, Spanish-speaking psychiatrists only had access to some of Henri Ey’s key works, namely: Estudios sobre los delirios published in Spanish by Paz Montalvo in 1950; the translation of Manuel de Psychiatrie (1960) by Toray-Masson in 1965; the first edition of La Conscience (1963) translated by Gredos in 1967; and Défense et illustration de la psychiatrie (1978) published by Huemul in Buenos Aires in 1979. Among these, the Manuel, translated as Tratado de Psiquiatría was, in a large part of Latin America, the basic text for training generations of psychiatrists and psychologists.
When I started my training in psychiatry in 1961, motivated by the central, key distinction drawn by Henri Ey between acute and chronic mental pathology, I became progressively interested in the rest of his work. Encouraged by Dr Ofelia Bachini who had met Ey when working as a ‘stagiaire’ at the Asile de Bonneval (a psychiatric hospital which is now named after Ey), I translated some articles for our staff members at Hospital Psiquiátrico Vilardebó (Montevideo). This was the informal beginning of the translation process.
After the years of dictatorship in Uruguay (1973–84), and when I was teaching in the department of psychiatry, in 1986 I organized a seminar for a group of physician residents on the topic ‘Acute psychoses: historical development of its concept’. The central text was the third volume of Études Psychiatriques (1st edn, 1954). This was when the idea arose to translate the Études for younger colleagues, who wanted to read the work but found it very difficult in the original French.
The first step in this project was taken by a Brazilian member of the group who had parts of the third volume translated into Portuguese, and then he translated them into Spanish. As this valiant attempt at ‘double translation’ led to a very questionable text, I felt the need to correct it. In my view, this partial translation of the Études was the germ of the later work, which I was unable to carry out at the time because of my clinical and teaching commitments. With the group of physician residents who had begun to read Ey’s work with so much determination, we created the Centro de Estudios e Investigación en Psiquiatría Henri Ey (CEIP, 1988). The research projects and the sustained teaching carried out by the Centre required new translations of Ey’s works. In the 1970s the need was felt to revive the impoverished approach to psychopathology; implied in this recovery was a rigorous translation of the Études Psychiatriques, a task I undertook systematically for several years. It involved recording and transcribing over 100 dictation tapes, and the text was later processed and corrected multiple times. But although this work was the major pillar of the eventual publication of the Estudios Psiquiátricos, this outcome depended on the construction of another pillar.
This second pillar was the result of a chain of events. In 1995 I met Dr Jean Garrabé, then the Head of Institut Marcel Rivière in Paris, who put me in touch with Mme Renée, Henri Ey’s widow. She invited me to Perpignan, where I met Dr Robert Palem who kindly offered me the opportunity of working in Ey’s library and archives. (Thanks to his tireless efforts over five years, these materials are now available in the Archives Municipales de Perpignan.) While I was working in Ey’s library I decided to translate and publish in Spanish the works of Henri Ey, having been surprised to see similar translations – in Japanese!
In 1988, when a new edition of Estudios sobre los delirios was published by the Fundación Archivos de Neurobiología (Spain), I proposed the need to publish the Études Psychiatriques in Spanish, but this suggestion was not taken up.
In the 1990s the Association pour la Fondation Henri Ey (APLFHEY) was created in Perpignan, enjoying the support of different colleagues and groups in France and abroad. Later, another group was formed: the Centre de Recherches et d’Éditions Henri Ey (Crehey), headed by Dr Patrice Belzeaux. This Centre, with the approval of Louis Ey who inherited the copyrights, has produced new editions of various works, including the Études Psychiatriques (2006, publishing the three volumes of the original edition in two volumes). Having collaborated in the revision of some of the chapters of this book, I was invited to participate at the presentation of the new edition which took place at a congress of the Asociación de Psiquiatras Argentinos (APSA, 2007) in Mar del Plata, Argentina.
That was when the second pillar was constructed: I met Dr Juan C. Stagnaro, whose publishing house Polemos in Buenos Aires had been issuing several fundamental works of psychiatry in the ‘Colección Clásicos de la Psiquiatría’. This collection was part of a cultural project that was made possible through the good offices of Amílcar Obregón, the dynamic manager of Laboratorio Gador (Argentina). When J.C. Stagnaro learned of the existence of my Spanish translation of the Études he decided to publish it, with the agreement of Crehey and the support of the Centre National du Livre de France, and especially the contribution from Laboratorio Gador.
From that moment on, I worked on a daily schedule for 15 months – demanding but very satisfying work. It was challenging, firstly because of the intrinsic difficulty of the subject matter, and secondly because of Ey’s style: he wrote in long phrases that were frequently divided and subdivided by parentheses and subordinate clauses. But it was also satisfying because the effort involved in translating led to a better, more precise understanding of the text. To achieve a more objective approach to Ey’s texts, it was necessary to revise those that had already been translated. An international group of correctors was created, including colleagues proposed by P. Belzeaux (J. Garrabé, E.Th. Mahieu, J. Clusa, M. Uribe, M. Reca, J.C. Stagnaro, R. Menendez, A. Willington, P. Bendetowicz, D. Wintrebert and colleagues from Montevideo). The generous efforts of all these colleagues and the opportunity to use e-mail created a continuous to-and-fro of translation proposals and corrections, carried out under the supervision of J. Garrabé and E.Th. Mahieu. The work was finished within the agreed deadline, and finally the two volumes of Estudios Psiquiátricos were published in Spanish in 2008 (by Polemos in Buenos Aires).
After this work was completed, Dr Stagnaro and I talked about the need to publish a Spanish version of Henri Ey’s encyclopaedic Traité des Hallucinations (1973, 2 volumes). This translation also has its story. After returning from the Colloque international ‘Henri Ey: psychiatre du XXIe siècle’, held in Perpignan in 1997, I devoted part of my working time to translating several chapters of the Traité. This effort was strongly stimulated when we held seminars in 1998 and 1999 with a group of staff residents who wanted to study this work of Ey’s in depth.
As with the Estudios, I recorded about 100 tapes with what remained to be translated; as before, these were transcribed, processed and corrected many times. For this book the correction of my original translation was carried out by E.Th. Mahieu (Paris), and his work was so parallel to mine that he became the co-translator of this work. I also had the help of J. Garrabé, J.C. Stagnaro and colleagues in Montevideo. Once the translation was completed, with the support again of Laboratorio Gador and the Centre National du Livre, the Tratado de las Alucinaciones was published in Spanish in 2009 (by Polemos in Buenos Aires).
With the aim of making available the three most important publications in Spanish, I completed the translation of the 2nd edition of La Conscience (1968), in which Henri Ey takes a critical stance toward the development of psychoanalysis, French structuralism and neurobiology. This translation was published by Polemos in 2013.
Since the launch of these publications I have received many comments about their translation, but I have no objective means of knowing what impact they have had and will have on psychiatrists. I know it is not easy nowadays for colleagues, overwhelmed by their daily workload, often in suboptimal conditions, to find the necessary time to read such major works.
What I can affirm is that translating these two works was extremely instructive, and contributed a great deal to my reflections on psychiatry. I am convinced of the contemporary need for a psychopathology like that developed in the works of H. Ey. Every so often I review published works and find a number of translation errors, confirming the saying that ‘an author knows when his work is finished, while a translator knows that his work never is’.
In spite of the passage of time since their initial publication, these books are fully up-to-date, so I maintain the two hopes that led me to translate them. First, I hope that they will not just take up space on bookshelves but be read, and second, that those who read them will appreciate the significance of the works of Henri Ey for creating a richer, more wide-ranging psychiatric thought than exists at present.