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.
[…]
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.
[…]
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.
Notes from a Room 