Valery LARBAUD (1881-1957). Autograph manuscript, Instruments de travail. I. Les balances; 6 pages and a quarter, on 4 small in-4 leaves (22 x 17 cm), interleaved with leaves with printed text pasted opposite the manuscript, all mounted on tabs in a volume bound in half ivory vellum, title-piece on spine. Very fine text on translation, intended for the book Sous l'invocation de Saint Jérôme (1946). Working manuscript on sheets of lined paper, in black ink, with numerous erasures and corrections, and variants, for this chapter which will be entitled in the edition Les balances du traducteur (The Translator's Scales). Translators are "word weighers"... "Each of us has near us, on our table or desk, a set of invisible balances with silver pans, gold beams, platinum shafts and diamond needles, capable of marking differences of fractions of a milligram. Next to them, the dictionaries and grammars, visible to them and constantly in use, are only crude instruments, mere warehouses of materials in order [...] But the essential thing is the scales in which we weigh them, for the whole work of translation is a weighing of words. In one of the pans we place one after the other all the words of the Author, and in the other we try out in turn an indeterminate number of words belonging to the language into which we are translating this Author, and we wait until the two pans are level". These are not the words of the Dictionary, but those of an Author, "impregnated and charged with his spirit, almost imperceptibly but very profoundly modified, as regards their raw meaning, by his intentions and the steps of his thought"... This word is "alive [...] quiverings, iridescences run through it [...] these signs of life go so far as to rhythmically modify its weight. We need to grasp this rhythm so that its counterweight is animated by a similar life and vital rhythm. [...] In this way, our profession as translators is an intimate and constant trade with Life"...