Acquisition Through Translation: Towards a Definition of Renaissance Translation (Medieval Translator) (Medieval Translator, 18) (English, German and Italian Edition) 9782503589541, 2503589545

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The Medieval TranslaTor Traduire au Moyen Âge

The Medieval Translator Traduire au Moyen Âge Volume 18 General Editors Catherine Batt Roger Ellis René Tixier

Acquisition through Translation Towards a Definition of Renaissance Translation Edited by Alessandra Petrina and Federica Masiero

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© 2020, Brepols Publishers n. v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN 978-2-503-58954-1 E-ISBN 978-2-503-58955-8 DOI 10.1484/M.TMT-EB.5.120271 ISSN 1293-8750 E-ISSN 2566-0292 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper. D/2020/0095/200

Table of Content Notes about the contributors 7 Abbreviations13 Acknowledgements15 Introduction. The definition of cultural identity through translation17 Alessandra Petrina 1. Biblical and classical literature in translation33 Turning the Song of Songs into English poetry: Gervase Markham’s Poem of Poems. Or Sions Muse35 Camilla Caporicci ‘I write sins, not tragedies’: manuscript translations of Aristotle’s hamartia in late sixteenth-century Italy Bryan Brazeau Iphigenia in English: reading Euripides with Jane Lumley Carla Suthren Plutarch in sixteenth-century France and England: an insight into The Life of Coriolanus as translated by Amyot and North Angelica Vedelago

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Lodovico Dolce’s Italian translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the canonization of the Orlando furioso115 Marta Balzi Stesso corpo in ‘cangiate forme’: traduzione fedele e ottava rima nelle Metamorfosi di Fabio Marretti (1570) Francesco Roncen

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The revolution of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Golding’s translation: the case of Thomas Lodge Ilaria Pernici

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Virgil in Czech: seventeenth-century translations and Pastýřské rozmlouvání o narození Páně by Václav Jan Rosa Petr Valenta

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2.  Horizontal translation and the definition of literature193 Dall’Agrigento del III sec. a.C. alla Londra di Jonathan Swift Valentina Gallo

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Tra traduzione, tradizione e identità: il Libro dell’Aquila211 Giulio Vaccaro Übersetzen für die Muttersprache. Übersetzung und Fremdwortpurismus in der barocken Sprachreflexion am Beispiel der Verdeutschung des Novellino (1624) Lucia Assenzi

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Translation strategies in the Sermon Collection Besjede (1616) written by the Franciscan Matija Divković Andrea Radošević and Marijana Horvat

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The first English translation of Tomaso Garzoni’s Ospidale de’ Pazzi Incurabili: the cultural context and the representation of ‘idiocy’ Alice Equestri

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3.  Heritage and archives at the close of the early modern period287 Das Sprachlehrbuch Janua linguarum reserata von J. A. Comenius (1592–1670) und seine ersten deutschsprachigen Übersetzungen Dominika Bopp Il contributo dell’editore Georg Müller di Francoforte e del traduttore Johann Makle alla ricezione della letteratura italiana in Germania nel XVII secolo Roberto De Pol Übersetzungstexte aus der ehemaligen Bibliotheca Zalusciana (1747–95) als Indikator einer transnationalen Literatur im frühneuzeitlichen Polen Anna Just General Bibliography

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345 363

Index375

Notes about the Contributors Lucia Assenzi is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Institut für Germanistik at the University of Innsbruck. She completed her PhD in German Philology at the Universities of Padua and Heidelberg with a dissertation titled ‘Fruchtbringende Verdeutschung’; the dissertation has been published in 2020 by De Gruyter. Her main research interests are Italian-German contrastive linguistics, Early New High German morphology and syntax, and the history of German metalinguistic reflection. She is currently work­ing on new projects concerning the syntax of reported speech in Early New High German and Older New High German (c. 1600–1800). Marta Balzi is the Raleigh Radford Awardee at the British School at Rome ( January-March 2020). She completed with distinction her Master’s degree in Modern Philology at the University of Padua (2015) and she is now a doctoral student at the University of Bristol. Her PhD project, ‘Transforming Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Vernacular Translations and Print Culture in the Italian Renaissance’ addresses the production and reception of three sixteenth-century Italian translations of the poem. Marta is the organizer of the international conference ‘Ovid Across Europe: Vernacular Translations of the Metamorphoses in the Middle Ages & Renaissance’ (Bristol, September 2017). She is the editor of the volume Ovid in the Vernacular (Medium Aevum monographs, forthcoming). Dominika Bopp studied German philology and philosophy at the Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg until 2014. During her studies, she worked as a student assistant at the Institute for German Language in Mannheim. After graduation, she began a dissertation project with the working title ‘Janua linguarum reserata by J. A. Comenius’. Since 2015 she has been an academic assistant at the German Department of Heidelberg University. There she participated in the projects ‘Catalog: German newspapers in Eastern Europe’, and ‘Encyclopedia of Getto Lodz/Litzmannstadt’. Currently she works in the project ‘Sebald Heyden’s Formulae Puerilium Colloquiorum. On the history of an early modern conversation book’. Bryan Brazeau is Senior Teaching Fellow in Liberal Arts at the University of Warwick. He previously held a postdoctoral research fellowship on the ERC-funded ‘Aristotle in the Italian Vernacular’ project at Warwick,

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working on the vernacular reception of Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric and the intersections of this reception with Counter-Reformation religious culture. He received his Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University in 2015 with a dissertation that examined the figure of the hero in sixteenthcentury Italian Christian epic. He is the editor of The Reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in the Italian Renaissance: New Directions in Criticism (Bloomsbury, 2020), and his articles have appeared in Renaissance and Reformation, MLN, The Italianist, California Italian Studies, and History of European Ideas. He is currently developing a monograph on the philosophy, poetry, and literary theory of Torquato Tasso. Camilla Caporicci obtained a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Perugia, and was awarded a two-year Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Padova, where she is working on a project dealing with the use of the Song of Songs in Renaissance poetry, funded through the MSCA Seal of Excellence @ UniPD. She is the author of The Dark Lady. La rivoluzione Shakespeariana nei Sonetti alla Dama Bruna (Aguaplano, 2013) and of the Introduction and Notes to the new Bompiani edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2019); she is the editor of Sicut Lilium inter Spinas: Literature and Religion in the Renaissance (Utz Verlag, 2018), and co-editor of The Art of Picturing in Early Modern English Literature (Routledge, 2020). She has published widely on Shakespeare’s work and Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry. Roberto De Pol, formerly Professor of German Literature at the University of Genoa, specializes in medieval literature (Nibelungenlied, Parzival, Neidhartspiele), the historical novel (G. M. Ebers and the Professorenroman, Cesare Borgia in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German novels), the literature of the supernatural (E. T. A. Hoffmann) and the political question in German Baroque drama and Schiller. Recently he has been researching the German First War novel and the first German translations of Italian authors (Boccaccio, Boccalini, Machiavelli, Ferrante Pallavicino, and others). Alice Equestri is a Research Associate of the University of Sussex, where she held a two-year position as a Marie Curie researcher until the end of 2019. She previously held fellowships of Early Modern English Literature at the Universities of Venice and Padua, where she received her PhD in 2014. Her first book, The Fools of Shakespeare’s Romances, was awarded the AIA

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PhD Dissertation Prize 2015 and was published by Carocci in 2016. She has published, among others, in Renaissance Studies, Notes and Queries and Cahiers Élisabéthains and has participated as speaker in national and international conferences in Italy and Europe. Her research interests include folly in Early Modern English Literature, Shakespeare, Robert Armin, translations of Italian novellas. Valentina Gallo is associate professor of Italian Literature at the University of Padua. She has studied the theatrical literature of the sixteenth (Tasso, Trissino, Giraldi), seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Cesarotti, Goldoni, Alfieri), the epistolary genre, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, the relations between literature and diplomacy in the eighteenth century, and Christina of Sweden. Marijana Horvat, PhD, is the scientific adviser (tenured) and leader of the Department of Croatian Language History and Historical Lexicography in the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, Zagreb, Croatia. Her primary research interests focus on Croatian language history. She’s also involved in Croatian standard language research, as well as teaching at the University of Zagreb. She is the project leader or associate in a number of scientific projects. As author or co-author she published many articles and book chapters and a few books. She got the National Science Award – Annual Science Award (Croatian Parliament, 2013) for her scientific work. Anna Just is an assistant professor in the Department of German Linguistics, Institute of German Studies, University of Warsaw. Her area of interest covers the history of the German language, the diachronic grammar of the German language, historical linguistics, German palaeography and codicology. She has written about ephemera, letters of duchesses and dukes of the Duchy of Legnica, old German-language grammar books of Polish, German military vocabulary in the late medieval and early modern periods, and German-language manuscripts from the former Załuski Library. Federica Masiero graduated from the University of Padua in 1997 with a thesis on the reprint of September Testament in Adam Petri’s printing office (1522–23). In 2004 she received her doctorate at the Free University of Berlin with a dissertation on the critical edition of the main works by Bartholomäus Ringwaldt (1530/1531–99). From 2001 to 2006 she worked as a part time Professor of German Language at the University of Calabria. From 2007 to 2020 she was a Senior Lecturer of German

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Language at the University of Padua. She is now Associate Professor in the same university. Ilaria Pernici completed her PhD in Comparative Literature, History, Arts and Languages of Ancient and Modern Europe at the University of Perugia, where she is also cultore della materia. Her doctoral research focused on Thomas Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis, and she worked on the first Italian translation of this epyllion. She is particularly interested in the mythological aspects and the classical as well as Italian sources of the poem, in its connections with both Ovid and Golding’s Metamorphoses, and in its rele­ vance for the development of the Elizabethan epyllion, especially its most important heir, William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Alessandra Petrina is Professor of English Literature at the Università di Padova. Her research focuses primarily on late-medieval and early modern intellectual history, and on Anglo-Italian cultural relations. She has published, among others, The Kingis Quair (1997), Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-century England (2004), and Machiavelli in the British Isles (2009). In 2013 she edited Volume 15 of The Medieval Translator (In principio fuit interpres). She has recently published an edition of the early modern English translations of Petrarch’s Triumphi (MHRA, 2020), and is working on early modern marginalia. Andrea Radošević is a Research Associate in the Department of Medieval Literature in the Old Church Slavonic Institute in Zagreb. In 2013, she defended her PhD on the Croatian translation of Johannes Herolt’s Latin collection Sermones Discipuli. Her research focuses on medieval sermons, short narratives, Croatian vernacular literature, translation and orality studies. She is associated to the Research Centre of Excellence for Croatian Glagolitism. She has published articles in Croatian, English and German on medieval sermons, devotional texts and passion narratives, focusing on translations from Latin into Croatian. Francesco Roncen holds a PhD from the University of Padua; his thesis examines Italian narrative poetry from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. During his master’s degree in Padua he focused on the Italian contemporary verse novel (1959–2014). He has also recently studied Andrea Zanzotto’s poetry, the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the Italian Renaissance and some prosodic issues concerning

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the use of endecasillabo sciolto in eighteenth-century Italian theatre and in Giovanni Pascoli’s Poemi conviviali. Carla Suthren is a College Teaching Officer at Wolfson College, Cambridge. Prior to this she was a research associate on the EHRC-funded project Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England led by Dr Subha Mukherji, also based in Cambridge. She completed her PhD, entitled ‘Shakespeare and the Renaissance Reception of Euripides’, at the University of York in 2018. Her general interests are Renaissance literature and classical reception, and she has recently published an article on printed commonplace marks in sixteenth-century texts. Giulio Vaccaro (Rome, 1980) is a researcher of Italian Philology at the National Research Council (Rome). He has directed the projects DiVo – Dizionario dei Volgarizzamenti. Il lessico di traduzione dal latino nell’italiano delle origini: bibliografia filologica, corpus bilingue lemmatizzato, dizionario storico settoriale at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, funded by the Ministry of Education, University and Research; Manoscritti italiani in Polonia: ricerca, catalogazione, studio, funded by National Research Council and Polska Akademi Nauk. His main research fields are vernacular translations of classical and medieval texts in Early Italian (Albertano of Brescia, Seneca, Vegetius); codicology and palaeography for the reconstruction of textual history; history of lexicography (especially the Accademia della Crusca); dialectal Roman authors (Sindici, Tacconi, Zanazzo). Petr Valenta studied classical philology and archaeology at the Institute of Greek and Latin Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University Prague, focusing mainly on classical Latin poetry. Already during his studies, he participated in research projects in the field of literature studies and archaeology. From 2016 to 2019 he worked at the Czech Language Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences researching translation of Greek and Latin texts into Old and Middle Czech. He has also participated in many archaeological excavations, both in his country and abroad. During his work at the Czech Language Institute, he has slowly completely changed his scientific interest, and since 2019 he has been working as a curator of the African collection and editor-in-chief of Annals of the Náprstek Museum in the Náprstek Museum of Asian, African and American Cultures, National Museum.

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Angelica Vedelago holds a PhD from the University of Padua, and a Master of Studies in Greek and Latin Languages and Literatures from the University of Oxford (Lincoln College). Her main area of research is classical reception in the early modern period, in particular the reception of Greek tragedy in early modern English drama. She is the author of an essay on the reception of Aeschylus in the Restoration and one on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, as well as on ‘Ben Jonson’s and Thomas May’s “Political Ladies”: Forms of Female Political Agency’. She has co-edited the proceedings of the 2017 IASEMS Graduate Conference.

Abbreviations ASD B.Amb BML BNCF BRF CWE DJAK 4 OF

Erasmi Opera Omnia, ed. by J. H. Waszink et al. (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1969-). Biblioteca Ambrosiana Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana Collected Works of Erasmus, ed.  by James McConica et  al. (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1969-). Dílo Jana Amose Komenského. Johannis Amos Comenii opera omnia. 4, ed.  by Jan Amos Komenský and Milan Kopecký (Prague: Academia, 1983). Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. by Santorre Debenedetti and Cesare Segre (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1960).

Acknowledgements This volume was first conceived in 2017, after we concluded the Acquisition through Translation conference, held at the University of Padua in May of that year. The editors of the volume would like to thank, first of all, all the participants in the conference: both speakers and audience engaged in three days of lively and fruitful discussion, and many of the chapters in this book are the direct result of what was presented there, while other contributions were produced later. We would also like to thank our contributors for their patience and goodwill, and the anonymous readers who provided invaluable feedback for each contribution. Heartfelt thanks to the Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari, who hosted the event, and to the University of Padua, who gave us the necessary funding for our project. In the preparation of this volume, we have been helped by the Medieval Translator editorial board, with their customary and self-effacing kindness and scholarship. Throughout the conference, our colleague and friend Mario Melchionda was an attentive listener and interlocutor; with characteristic generosity, he also helped us in the initial stage of our book. Mario passed away in the spring of 2019, and the editors would like to dedicate this book to his memory.

Introduction: The definition of cultural identity through translation Alessandra Petrina

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s the idea of the nation was rising and beginning to be established in early modern consciousness across Europe, the intellectual community also awoke to the parallel awareness of the construction of a national library of the mind: acquiring new books for this library meant employing translation to give classical sources or contemporary vernacular texts a new citizenship. This book sets out to identify instances in early modern European culture in which translation becomes a means to enrich the national literary heritage. The very image of translation recurs in early modern writing, as we can see in the following example: All mankinde is of one Author, and is one volume; when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke, but translated into a better language; and every Chapter must be so translated; God emploies severall translators; some peeces are translated by Age, some by sicknesse, some by warre, some by justice; but Gods hand is in every translation; and his hand shall binde up all our scattered leaves againe, for that Librarie where every booke shall lie open to one another.1

This passage is taken from John Donne’s Devotion XVII, whose opening lines had presented the reader with the famous image of the bell, tolling for every man; here, the book and its author are conflated into one image, and then anatomized into chapters and pages. Donne loves playing with his images, transforming them into organic units: in this case, he seems to be offering his articulate metaphor as a meditation on the opening verse of the Gospel of John, ‘In principio erat verbum’. The image of God as the Word is transmuted into God creating the Word, and then into man himself, the climax of 1  John Donne, Devotion XVII. See John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. by Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), p. 86. I would like to thank Giuliana Iannaccaro for showing me the relevance of this passage.

Acquisition through Translation: Towards a Definition of Renaissance Translation, ed. by Alessandra Petrina et Federica Masiero, TMT 18 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 17–32 © DOI 10.1484/M.TMT-EB.5.120916

FHG

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Alessandra Petrina

God’s creation. Donne might be recalling the Geneva Bible, whose version of the Gospel of John opens with a brief preliminary paragraph inserted by the translator: ‘That Worde begotten of God before all worldes, and which was euer with the Father, is made man’.2 Within this context, the image of translation, introduced by Donne, makes for a particularly enticing metaphor: translation stands for death, but also contains the promise of a heavenly reward. The poet might also be playing with one of the primary Middle English meanings of translate, which refers to the assumption of the body of the saint to heaven without physical death, as we may read, for instance, in the early-fourteenth-century poem Cursor Mundi, in a passage describing the prophet Elijah being lifted up from the earth and ascending to heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2.3–9): ‘Helias was in þat siquare [i.e. at that time], Translated in a golden chiare’.3 Translation is, by definition, a transmutation to a better state. Donne uses the flexibility of this image to express his wonder both at God’s work and at the proliferation of books and translations on this earth. In the articulation of his metaphor the poet is helped by the rich ambiguity of the term. Rainer Guldin reminds us that translation and metaphor not only share a common etymology, but can create mirroring models, and throughout Western culture have enriched each other through juxtaposition.4 John Donne’s play with words is based on an analogy that has been theorized since the time of Aristotle. In fact, as noted by Eugene Vance, ‘Translatio  […] was not only the Latin term for “metaphor”, but was the generic term for all figures of thought as well. Translatio was opposed to the equally generic notion of proprietas’;5 in early modern Europe the concept of translation is an object of discussion in the attempt to find not only a definition, but a prescriptive taxonomy. The very words used to refer to translation and its related activities were the result of the translation of Greek and Latin terms, with the effect that early modern terminology may be confusing. If

The Newe Testament of Ovr Lorde Iesvs Christ / translated ovt of Greeke by Theod. Beza, and Englished by L. T. (London: Christopher Barker, 1578), sig. O2r. 3  Cursor Mundi. The Cursur of the World. A  Northumbrian Poem of the XIV th Century, in Four Versions, ed. by Richard Morris et al. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1874–93), vol. ii, p. 598, line 9162. 4  Rainer Guldin, Translation as Metaphor (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 5  Eugene Vance, ‘Chaucer, Spenser, and the Ideology of Translation’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature  / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 8  (1981), 217–38 (p. 228). 2 

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the terms translatio and transferre, and their vernacular cognates, denote different meanings, beyond the passage of a text from one language to another, early modern translation theory also makes use of the terms interpretatio and traductio; the terminological confusion is also a sign of organic richness.6 The term is applied to concepts such as translatio studii and translatio imperii, and thus may be used to indicate the passage of Greek culture into Latin, and then into the medieval West. This phenomenon is also extremely relevant, as the reception of the classics becomes a constituent part of the shaping of modern literatures: as has been observed, in the process of vernacular translation ‘manipulative domestication played a dominant strategic role’.7 It may be inferred that in early modern Europe the developing vernacular literatures make use of translation to find their own identity and definition: in this sense we can read Umberto Eco’s famous dictum that ‘the language of Europe is translation’.8 As we move towards the sixteenth century, this idea becomes heavily influenced by a number of key texts on translation theory: Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta (c.  1426), or, almost a century later, Erasmus’ De Copia (1512), mark the passage from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, awakening a heightened consciousness of the phenomenon on the part of intellectuals and writers. The long controversy on the vernacular translation of the Bible, while carrying profound implications in religious and political terms, offers also the opportunity to focus the discussion on translation on the relationship between sense and language, a discussion which found an authoritative counterpart in classical writers. As Cicero notes in De optimo genere oratorum, speaking of his admiration for Attic orators, and offering a fascinating distinction between interpres and orator: Sed cum in eo magnus error esset, quale esset id dicendi genus, putavi mihi suscipiendum laborem utilem studiosis, mihi quidem ipsi non necessarium.

6  For debates on translation in the Middle Ages I refer the reader to Rita Copeland, ‘The Fortunes of “non verbum pro verbo”: or why Jerome is not a Ciceronian’, in The Medieval Translator. The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed.  by Roger Ellis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), 15–35; Gianfranco Folena, Volgarizzare e tradurre (Turin: Einaudi, 1991). The whole Medieval Translator series is a testimony to the diversity and richness of the medieval debate on translation. 7  John Denton, Translation and Manipulation in Renaissance England (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2016), p. 7. 8  Umberto Eco, ‘The Language of Europe is Translation’. Lecture given at the conference of ATLAS Assises de la traduction littéraire in Arles, 14 November 1993.

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Alessandra Petrina Converti enim ex Atticis duorum eloquentissimorum nobilissimas orationes inter seque contrarias, Aeschinis at Demosthenis; nec converti ut interpres, sed ut orator, sententiis isdem et earum formis tamquam figuris, verbis ad nostrum consuetudinem aptis. In quibus non verbum pro verbo necesse habui reddere, sed genus omne verborum vimque servavi. Non enim ea me adnumerare lectori putavi oportere, sed tamquam appendere.9

Thus, the discussion on the relation between meaning and style could move from the religious to the literary. In some cases, this meant expressing qualms as to the ability of the target language to carry the weight of the original: in John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essais, we read: It is easie to translate such aucthors, where nothing but the matter is to be represented; but hard & dangerous, to vndertake such as have added much to the grace and elegancie of the language, namely to reduce them into a weaker and poorer tongue.10

In other cases, such reflections led the translator to draw general statements on the role of the translator that could take a prescriptive value as concerns both style and purpose, as we may read in this passage from Jacques Amyot’s epistle to the reader, prefacing his translation of Plutarch’s Lives, and offering a further elaboration of Horace’s famous dictum, ‘ut pictura poësis’: Ie prie les lecteurs de vouloir considerer, que l’office d’vn propre traducteur ne gist pas seulement à rendre fidelement la sentence de son autheur, mais aussi à representer aucunement & à adombrer la forme du style & maniere de parler d’iceluy, s’il ne veut commettre l’erreur que feroit le peintre, qui ayant pris à pourtraire vn homme au vif, le peindroit long, là où il seroit court, & gros, là où il seroit gresle, encore qu’il seist naïfuement bien resembler de visage. Car 9  ‘But since there was a complete misapprehension as to the nature of their style of oratory, I thought it my duty to undertake a task which will be useful to students, though not necessary for myself. That is to say I translated the most famous orations of the two most eloquent Attic orators, Aeschines and Demosthenes, orations which they delivered against each other. And I did not translate them as an interpreter, but as an orator, keeping the same ideas and the forms, or as one might say, the “figures” of thought, but in language which conforms to our usage. And in so doing, I did not hold it necessary to render word for word, but I preserved the general style and force of the language. For I did not think I ought to count them out to the reader like coins, but to pay them by weight, as it were’. De optimo genere oratorum, IV.12.v. The edition used for text and translation is Cicero. De inventione. De optimo genere oratorum. Topica, ed.  by H.  M. Hubbell (London: Heinemann, 1949), pp.  364–65. I  wish to thank Helen Smith for pointing out this passage to me. 10  John Florio, The essayes Or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne (London: Edward Blount, 1603), chapter 12, sig. Y6v.

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encore puis-ie bien asseurer, quelque dur ou rude que soit le langage, que ma traduction sera beaucoup plus aisee aus François, que l’original Grec.11

The growing activity of translations therefore entails also a more articulate reflection on modern vernaculars, and lexicographers such as Florio could use their linguistic ability to contribute to the enrichment of the target language. At the same time, contemporary history entered the debate on translation. Among the new events that help shape early modern Europe, we may include the establishment of printing in western Europe; the new role attributed to the vernaculars, partly as a response to the Reformation; and the emergence of the concept of nation, associated with linguistic identity. Printing and the Reformation interacted: the first event made the role of books central to the second; Protestant writers saluted it as a sign of divine power in Protestant countries, as John Foxe’s words attest: what man soeuer was the instrument, without all doubt God himselfe was the ordayner and disposer thereof, no otherwise, then he was of the gifte of tongues, and that for a singuler purpose. And well may this gift of printing be resembled to the gift of tongues: for like as God then spake with many tongues, and yet all that would not turne the Jewes, so now, when the holy ghost speaketh to the adversaries in innumerable sorts of bookes, yet they will not be conuerted: not turne to the Gospell.12

Jacques Amyot, Les Vies des Hommes Illustres, Grecs & Romains (Paris: Michel de Vascosan, 1565), sig. A7r. In his translation of Amyot’s work, Thomas North included also this letter, and here is his translation of this passage: ‘I beseech the readers to consider, that the office of a fit translater, consisteth not onely in the faithfull expressing of his authors meaning, but also in a certain resembling and shadowing out of the forme of his style and the manner of his speaking: vnlesse he will commit the errour of some painters, who hauing taken vpon them to draw a man liuely, do paint him long where he should be short, and grosse where he should be slender, and yet set out the resemblance of his countenance naturally. For how harsh and rude soeuer my speech be, yet am I sure that my translation will be much easier to my countriemen, than the Greeke copie is’. Thomas North, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1579), sig. 7r. The relationship between Amyot, North, and the Plutarchan original is discussed by Angelica Vedelago in the present volume. On this particular passage, see also Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson, ‘“Abroad in Mens Hands”: The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France’, in The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660, ed. by Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–21 (pp. 1–3). 12  Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happenyng in the Church with an vniuersall history of the same (London: Iohn Daye, 1583), p. 707. See also Alessandra Petrina, ‘Damnatio Memoriae and Surreptitious Printing: Niccolò Machiavelli in the British 11 

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This concomitance of factors encouraged the development of the status of translation: the appearance of the first printed grammars and dictionaries moved to the background one of the primary aims of translation, that is, its being used as a tool for language learning, while another role was progressively enhanced: translation became an activity contributing to the formation of national consciousness. This is particularly true of marginal situations like that of England and Scotland, but also, as can be seen in the present volume, in Croatia or the Czech area. This shift in perspective implements a profound shift in the literary canon, insofar as the principle of authority no longer resided solely with the classical inheritance. Rather, pace Jacob Burckhardt, we may state that ‘Renaissance’ Europe paid a renewed attention to foreign vernacular texts while confirming a centuries-long dedication to classical Greek and Latin; medieval authors, Petrarch in primis, take up a new role as modern auctoritates, with their Latin production gradually giving way to vernacular works, while in other cases the medieval auctoritas acquires new prestige thanks to new translations – as in the case of, for instance, Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. Vernacular languages thus gradually become vehicles of literary, political, and cultural authority, echoing George Puttenham’s invocation, in his Art of English Poesy: ‘why should not poesy be a vulgar art with us as well as with the Greeks and Latins’?13 The claim for recognition harks back to Jacques Amyot’s (and Thomas North’s) claim that a translation, however imperfect, may be easier to read and thus more profitable to the contemporary reading public. The ‘gift of tongues’ evoked by Foxe, God’s offer to mankind so that it may atone for the sin of the Tower of Babel, finds its modern counterpart in the dissemination of knowledge through the twin mediums of printing and translation; writing in 1387, John Trevisa had already made this equation extremely clear, finding in the interpreter (the person who speaks different tongues) one of the solutions: Siththe that Babel was ybuld, men spekith diverse tonges so that diverse men beth straunge to other and knoweth nought of her speche. Speche is not iknowe but if hit be lerned. […] But God of his mercy and grace hath ordeyned double remedie. Oon is that somme men lerneth and knowith

Isles’, in Enforcing and Eluding Censorship. British and Anglo-Italian Perspectives, ed.  by Giuliana Iannaccaro and Giovanni Iamartino (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 17–30. 13  George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 95.

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many diverse speches; and so bitwix straunge men, of the whiche neither understondeth others speche, siche a man may be mene and telle either what other wole mene. That other remedye is that oon langage is ylerned and iused and iknowe in meny naciouns and londes; and so Latyn is ylerned, yknowe, and yused.14

Passages such as this show, on the one hand, that the preoccupation of late medieval translators was shared by their early modern counterparts; on the other, that while a medieval translator could still think of Latin as an established language of intercultural communication (though it must be noted that Trevisa writes this in a Prologue to a translation from Latin into English), early modern writers were also faced not only with the progressive rediscovery of Greek texts, but with growing libraries in various vernaculars, including works that were rapidly taking the status of classics. Latin was no longer sufficient – translation was becoming a natural medium. Thus in 1603, prefacing his translation of Montaigne’s Essais, John Florio could write: Shall I apologize translation? Why but some holde (as for their free-hold) that such conversion is the subversion of Universities. God holde with them, and withholde them from impeach or empaire. It were an ill turne, the turning of Bookes should be the overturning of Libraries. Yea but my olde fellow Nolano tolde me, and taught publikely, that from translation all Science had it’s of-spring.15

Evoking his meeting with Giordano Bruno, ‘il Nolano’ whom he had met in London, and attributing this saying to the controversial philosopher, Florio was in fact voicing a shared conviction, that had given rise to a new enthusiasm for translation in early modern Europe, and a reaction against the reactionary culture of the universities: the idea that knowledge (or ‘Science’, as Florio would have it) could and should be acquired through linguistic interaction, that the intellectual wealth of one community could be augmented through cultural exchange. Such complexity is, of course, not limited to the early modern period. Antoine Berman, in his discussion of German Romantic writers, has shown

John Trevisa, ‘Dialogue Between the Lord and the Clerk on Translation’, in The Idea of the Vernacular. An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory 1280–1520, ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), pp. 131–32. 15  Florio, sig. A5r. 14 

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that translation plays a role that is ‘not merely one of transmission. On the contrary, this role is tendentially constitutive of all literature, all philosophy, and all human science’.16 But we posit that in the early modern period writers and theorists developed reflections focussing on the role of translation and its ability to make the text performable, organic, flexible, ready to have new meaning bestowed on it and to be adapted to a changing environment. At the same time, they used translation as an indispensable tool for the creation of a reading public. Whether or not it is of a literary text, translation in the early modern period connotes national culture and can thus be read as Übersetzungskultur. This latter term, borrowed by Armin Frank’s seminal article on the subject,17 defines translation as no longer simply an act of homage to a revered original, but as a conscious transposition within a new context: the nation of the mind is enriched by the new text, which becomes part of national cultural heritage. Learning does not have a fixed beginning, but is part of an ongoing process. Nations build their identity through language and political power, seeking also a cultural foundation, a myth of origin that could be supported by an intellectual library; and the creation of the myth is substantially helped by a transmission of texts which quickly becomes a form of cultural appropriation. Such appropriation allows the act of translation to develop along the lines of domestication and manipulation, so that a number of scholars believe that we should talk not so much of translation but of transcreation, a concept which is given an interesting definition by G. Gopinathan: ‘the practice can be defined as an aesthetic re-interpretation of the original work suited to a new target-language audience. The re-interpretation is done with a certain social purpose and is performed with suit­ able interpolations, explanations, expansions, summaries and innovations in style and techniques’.18 Derrick McClure and a number of other scholars have used the term with reference to early modern writing,19 and it offers a very useful sub-category of the more general concept of translation. It is on Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign. Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, transl. by S.  Heyvaert, original title L’épreuve de l’étranger (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 183. 17  Armin P. Frank, ‘“Translation as System” and Übersetzungskultur: On Histories and Systems in the Study of Literary Translation’, New Comparison, 8 (1989), 85–98. 18  G. Gopinathan, ‘Translation, Transcreation and Culture: Theories of Translation in Indian Languages’, in Translating Others. Volume 1, ed.  by Theo Hermans (London: Routledge, 2006), 236–46 (p. 237). 19  J.  Derrick McClure, ‘Translation and Transcreation in the Castalian Period’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 26 (1991), 185–98. 16 

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the exploration of this subcategory that this volume has focused, taking into consideration instances of translation across various European languages and cultures. Starting from these theoretical premises, the present volume approaches its task by means of a number of case studies. The risk implicit in such a methodology is, as the Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli would write in the nineteenth century, ‘cavare una regola dal caso e una grammatica dall’uso’, drawing a rule from chance, and a grammar from usage.20 It should always be remembered that any analysis based on these premises is descriptive rather than prescriptive; with this caveat, however, the instances discussed here throw light on a very complex and variegated situation. The opening section of the book offers a number of studies focusing on translations from Biblical or classical texts. Camilla Caporicci takes into consideration one of the most translated and imitated among Biblical books, the Song of Songs, which lent itself over the centuries both to paraphrase and to creative retelling, in religious and secular contexts. Caporicci explores the ambiguity of a love poem that seems to have required allegorical interpretation ever since it was written, and proposes a reading of an early modern English rewriting, Gervase Markham’s The Poem of Poems, or Sions Muse (1596), as an instance of the early modern creative acquisition of canonical texts. In his work, Markham used not only the translation but an articulate paratext in order to explore a multifaceted text. If Caporicci’s analysis looks at one pivotal text and the many uses it was put to, Bryan Brazeau, in the chapter that follows, considers a single notion, hamartia, as it is presented in Aristotle’s Poetics, and discusses how commentaries as well as translations discussed the term, reading it not only in light of Aristotle’s original contextualization, but also against the background of contemporary cultural attitudes. This reading of the Poetics takes place with the help of Aristotle’s canon, but its interpretation also entails ‘a new poetic lexicon both in Latin and in the vernacular’, reaffirming the contribution translations bring to contemporary vocabulary. The Renaissance rediscovery of the Greek literary inheritance is also explored in two further contributions. Carla Suthren considers what is probably the first translation of any Greek tragedy into English, that is, Jane Lumley’s version of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, composed after 1553. In this case, translation does not entail a re-discussion of moral or religious

Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, I  Sonetti, ed.  by Pietro Gibellini, Lucio Felici and Edoardo Ripari, 4 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 2018), vol. i, p. 10.

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terminology and attitudes, as in the previous two essays; it is rather a form of discovery of a long-forgotten language and culture. As Suthren points out, we can read Lumley’s work as part of the humanist rediscovery of the classical inheritance, and from this perspective we can also understand the translator’s use of an intermediary version, Erasmus’ Latin translation. Suthren’s analysis of the English text also allows us to appreciate Lumley’s critical approach to the original, including her highlighting of some of Euripides’ stylistic traits, such as simplicity and conciseness. The intermediary translation works both as a linguistic tool, helping the translator to reach out to the original Greek, and a guarantee of Lumley’s stylistic choices. This latter topic is also the focus of Angelica Vedelago’s contribution, an analysis of Thomas North’s English version of Plutarch’s Life of Coriolanus (1579) via Jacques Amyot’s French translation. Vedelago chooses the tool of close comparative reading of the three versions, thus reassessing the extent of North’s debt to Amyot and his relation to contemporary English phraseology. The result is an interesting reversal of Frances Otto Matthiessen’s famous gauging of North’s work: rather than North’s borrowing of habits of English speech, we should consider his active use of them within a translation strategy suggested by Amyot – North’s adoption of Amyot’s prefatory epistle to the readers, cited above, is a further confirmation of this attitude. As Vedelago notes, the French writer’s translation methods are turned into productive matrices; this means that we need to re-think the conventional division of early modern translation into vertical and horizontal, in which vertical stands for translation from Greek and Latin classics (by definition canonical and venerable) and horizontal for translation from vernacular texts, by definition contemporary. This distinction does not allow one to understand fully the status of writers such as Giovanni Boccaccio, whose inheritance is both Latin and vernacular, and who, although closer in time than the classical authors, is often elevated, by virtue of his belonging to the group of the tre corone of Italian literature, to the status of canonical writer; nor does it allow one to gauge the role of intermediary translations, whether in Latin or in a vernacular. The insistence on vertical translation as a chosen modality may imply an absolute faith in a progressive view of history; the underlining of the role of intermediary translation which we see in both these contributions indicates that we should rather think in terms of a translation network, working both chronologically and geographically. The volume then presents three contributions that look at translations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the first two, by Marta Balzi and Francesco Roncen, analyse Italian versions of the Metamorphoses, while Ilaria Pernici takes

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us back to the English literary world. The two versions analysed by Balzi and Roncen were undertaken, respectively, by Lodovico Dolce in 1553 and Fabio Marretti in 1570. They are not too distant in time, but spring from radically different intellectual attitudes. Dolce, working with the printer Gabriele Giolito in Venice, aimed at proposing a poetic version, whose formal and prosodic aspects might remind readers of a very successful Italian poem that had been published in numerous editions in the first half of the sixteenth century, that is, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Dolce’s version is not only a translation but an ambitious publishing project, as Balzi highlights by drawing our attention to the structure as well as the layout of the Giolito edition, which included woodcuts with illustrations and decorated initials. By underlining analogies with Ariosto’s poem, Balzi shows Dolce’s (and Giolito’s) project of legitimization of Italian epic writing. On the other hand, Francesco Roncen discusses Marretti’s version by means of a close textual comparison, and a stylistic and formal analysis: an approach which suits a translation far more attentive to the letter of the original than Dolce’s version, and which shows a completely different attitude on the translator’s part. Marretti’s aim is to respect not only the meaning but the framework and even the words of Ovid’s original; although today his translation is often dismissed as stylistically poor and fundamentally unsuccessful, it does throw light on the role of the translator in early modern Italy. Roncen’s reading of Marretti’s prefatory epistle to the readers allows him to clarify also the reasons behind Marretti’s choice of the ottava rima, the stanza famously adopted by Ariosto. The scholar’s comparative analysis takes into account also two contemporary translations, undertaken by the already discussed Ludovico Dolce and by Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara, and the comparison forcefully evokes the sixteenth-century debate that set on opposite sides erudite and poetic translation. While still discussing translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the chapter written by Ilaria Pernici moves to a different part of Europe, and to a radical change in attitude. In early modern England, Ovid’s poem was famously translated by Arthur Golding, who presented readers with a complete and faithful version of the original that did away with any Christianizing mediation. Golding’s version acquired exceptional value as an intermediary text for a number of poets and playwrights who focussed on one specific myth for a free re-creation of the story. Among them was Thomas Lodge, who reworked an episode from the Metamorphoses in order to compose the first example of Elizabethan epyllion, Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589). In this he established a precedent for Christopher Marlowe’s and William Shakespeare’s later attempts at the genre. Pernici accompanies us

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in this progress from Ovid to Golding to Lodge; her analysis focuses on the establishment, thanks to translation and adaptation, not only of new poetic topoi but of a new genre. This section is concluded by Petr Valenta’s study of seventeenth-century Czech translations of Virgil’s Eclogues. After the chapter dedicated to the Italian and English reception of the classics, Valenta’s work gives us a glimpse of another cultural climate, in which translations appear to be more limited in number, more tentative in approach, and mostly written in prose; only early in the seventeenth century do we see poetic translations. By focussing on Jan Amos Komenský’s O poezi české (1620) and Jan Václav Rosa’s Discursus Lipirona (1651) and Pastýřské rozmlouvání o narození Páně (1670), which consist of, or include versions of, different passages of the Eclogues, Valenta opens up for us a vista of literary activity that moves in yet another direction from the instances hitherto analysed. The translations are often inserted in the context of grammatical and metrical theory, and occasionally made their appearance in handbooks of Czech grammar, as models of good writing. This attitude towards the role of translation harks back to sixteenth-century practices in England and France, in which translation is one of the essential tools of language learning: here, however, it is tuned to the evolution of the target language rather than to the understanding of the source. Thus translation enhances the value of the target language by authorizing it through the infusion of the classical inheritance. The second section of the volume takes into consideration what is conventionally called horizontal translation – or rather, translation from nonclassical texts – and does so in the opening contributions by implicitly highlighting the risks inherent in such a definition. We begin with Valentina Gallo’s study of a celebrated literary forgery, the epistolary attributed to Phalaris, who ruled in Agrigento in the fifth century bc. The epistolary awoke special interest in the early modern period, circulating and being translated across Europe between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, but it had enjoyed a much longer life; by the time Jonathan Swift alluded to it in his Battle of the Books (1704) it had existed for roughly two millennia. Yet its contents, especially its discussion on kingship and the characteristics of the ideal monarch, had met with great interest over the centuries and generated a complex process of textual transmission through translation and adaptation. Such an instance is exemplary of our unease with the conventional vertical/horizontal dichotomy, since the reception and manipulation of the letters allegedly written by Phalaris speak to us of a re-functionalization of the classical inheritance that activates a process of cultural and ideological

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appropriation. As Gallo notes in her contribution, it is especially appropriate that this forgery was recognized as such only at the end of the seventeenth century, when the complex relationship established by early modern culture with the European classical inheritance was finally drawing to a close. In the fourteenth century, as Phalaris’ epistolary began his journey through translation and adaptation, another type of texts began to emerge: vernacular anthologies, collections of texts that included contemporary originals in the vernacular and translations from the classics. It is the case of the so-called Libro dell’Aquila, here studied by Giulio Vaccaro, a collection including excerpts from Dante’s Divina Commedia and Convivio as well as translations from Ovid’s Heroides and Virgil’s Aeneid, together with a number of other texts. Here, too, there is no distinction between vertical and horizontal translation: the late medieval sylloge is inclusive and curious; it makes use of classical as well as contemporary texts to construct a variegated historical narration that subsumes all its material without proposing chronological or canonical distinctions. Vaccaro reconstructs the early history and dissemination of this text up to the second half of the sixteenth century, showing how the translation process in this anthology may constitute one of many stages in the transition from classical to early modern, in its offering a range of instances from the classical to the medieval text. The volume continues by exploring more conventionally recognizable instances of horizontal translation through three case studies, respectively dedicated to literary, religious, and scientific texts. Lucia Assenzi uses the instance of the thirteenth-century Tuscan collection of novellas known as Novellino, which was translated into German in 1624; although the actual translator cannot be identified, we know that the translation was undertaken as part of the activities of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, the first linguistic association in Germany, founded in Weimar in 1617. As highlighted by Assenzi, this translation (which used as its basis the 1572, augmented edition of the Italian text) offers an excellent case study to see how this activity is connected with the treatment of loanwords and foreign words present in the original. In this case, what we see is an effort to reproduce in the translation activity the ideals of language purity that the Gesellschaft strove to defend. While it explores an original whose complex textual history makes for fascinating linguistic stratification, the translation becomes a testing ground to gauge the purity of the target language and its degree of tolerance for loanwords. Translation in this instance enforces a reflection on the target language, a reflection made possible by the cultural environment in which the translation is born.

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If the theoretical elaboration of translation is possible, indeed encouraged, in an academic environment, the following case shows us translation undertaken in a widely different cultural atmosphere. Andrea Radošević and Marijana Horvat analyse an instance of translation strategy as applied to religious discourse: the case in point is the activity of the Franciscan friar Matija Divković, who lived in Bosnia between the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. Divković’s collection of sermons, Besjede svrhu evanđel’ja nedjeljnijeh priko svega godišta, published in Venice in 1616, drew on a number of late medieval Latin books of sermons and reworked passages from these collections in order to offer a range of texts that could be understood and used in Divković’s own community, in seventeenth-century Bosna Argentina. Radošević and Horvat show the close link between readership expectation and translation practices, underlining how Divković’s strategies served the didactic purpose of the sermons: clarity and intelligibility are the translator’s main goal, and such choices automatically enhanced the memorization of key statements. At the same time, this analysis allows us to see how Divković’s final outcome is the building of a literary language through translation and adaptation, the former being applied to the Latin sermons that serve as source texts, the latter being implemented thanks to the acquisition of words and phrases from different Croatian areas and older Croatian literary traditions. Religious vernacular literature is thus shown as the ideal ground for a meeting of different cultures and languages. The last example of this section brings us to Anglo-Italian exchanges and to early modern English translations of Italian texts. This particular area has received special attention over the last few decades, and a number of major English writers, Shakespeare in primis, have been examined through the lenses of the reception of Italian culture in England. The present contribution, however, asks us to shift our focus by considering not only less studied texts, but also a less studied language, that of the scientific pamphlet. Alice Equestri analyses the first English translation of Tomaso Garzoni’s Ospidale De’ Pazzi Incurabili, a pamphlet composed in 1586 and dealing with the issues of intellectual disability. In Italy and elsewhere in Europe, the pamphlet was a surprising bestseller, presenting a taxonomy of mental disease which does not simply serve an allegorical or symbolic function, as in more celebrated works such as Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, but reveals, on the part of the writer, a sincerely clinical interest in the pathologies connected to mental disability. In the English translation, published in 1600 by Edward Blount, Equestri detects at the same time a fundamental faithfulness to the original text and a critical approach by means of the paratext. In her analysis, Equestri shows

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how the paratext might reveal both the translator’s aims and his strategies; in this, she aligns with much recent work on Renaissance paratexts and their use in translations, at the same time using this theoretical background to shed light on early modern interest for the topic of intellectual disability, underlining how translation could be a powerful tool for the progress of science. Her investigation highlights how the translation suits the medical, social, and legal biases of the destination culture and how the use of specific English words codifies views of foolishness inherited from foreign models. In all three instances, translation from contemporary or late-medieval vernaculars appears to have offered the resulting text a degree of freedom that has allowed for manipulation and modification: the translator’s strategy is clearly focussed on the target text and above all on the target audience. This also means that very often translation goes beyond the conventional one-to-one relationship between source and target text(s): translation may often become a sylloge, an anthology of different texts, the result of the adaptation and fusion of various sources, as has been shown through this and the previous section. In light of this, it seemed fitting to conclude this volume by offering a section dedicated to the reception of the cultural heritage thanks to the activity of printers and to the creation of archives. The new vernacular intellectual libraries need different forms of taxonomy and cataloguing: the development of printing activities across Europe also entails a re-set of the literary canon, and among the first texts to be taken into consideration there are didactic works and language textbooks. Thus Dominika Bopp draws our attention to Janua Linguarum Reserata (1631), one of the most important works of Johann Amos Comenius, Czech philosopher and educationalist. First published in Latin, the work was soon translated, adapted, simplified, and even presented in multilingual editions, becoming a crossroads of translations: the full title of the original work, Janua linguarum reserata sive seminarium linguarum et scientiarum omnium, is indicative of its allembracing nature, which prompted the writer to give his work an encyclopaedic structure that lent itself easily to this type of manipulation. Bopp focuses on the three earliest German translations, offering these versions as instances of different strategies which entail different semantic and grammatical choices. She also highlights the didactic purpose of the work, intended for the learning not only of Latin, but of the student’s own mother tongue as well as of other languages. Translation and language learning are once more associated in this case. As we move towards the end of the volume, we also move forward in time, considering later instances of translation activity. Roberto De Pol looks

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at the interaction between a translator and his publisher: between 1660 and 1663, in Frankfurt, the publisher Georg Müller, who dedicated much of his activity to translation, printed three translations of Italian texts undertaken by the scholar Johann Makle. Such activity, against the background of Müller’s wider editorial project, allows De Pol to consider whether there was a consistent agenda on the part of the publisher or the translator, and whether the presence of the German Lutheran public influenced or even determined these translation choices. Through De Pol’s investigation we see some of the modalities of the reception of Italian literature in late seventeenth-century Germany. The concluding chapter, by Anna Just, allows us to look yet further, and to consider instances of translation into German in eighteenth-century Warsaw. In this case the discussion focuses on a library, the Bibliotheca Zalusciana (the largest Polish public library of its time), whose manuscript collection, for what is extant today, shows a high interest in translations from a number of vernacular languages into German; as Just shows, one can see the library as a repository of transnational literature. The library thus becomes the focus of translation activity, and fittingly exemplifies one of the images that are central to our volume: the acquisition, on the part of vernacular cultures in early modern Europe, of what we could call a national library of the mind, triggering a process of assimilation and manipulation that becomes central to the definition of the nation’s cultural identity: a fitting conclusion, highlighting the overall concern of this book.

1. Biblical and classical literature in translation

Turning the Song of Songs into English poetry: Gervase Markham’s Poem of Poems. Or Sions Muse Camilla Caporicci

1. Renaissance verse versions of the Song of Songs During the Renaissance, the biblical Song of Songs was much translated, paraphrased and commented upon,1 and this was in no small part due to its ambivalent and controversial nature as simultaneously a scriptural book and a sensual love poem. The openly amorous and even erotic character of the text’s littera, in which no explicit reference to God appears, made the act of interpretation an absolute necessity. In fact, the text represented a problem and a challenge for interpreters from the very beginning of the biblical exegetical tradition: so much so that even the book’s inclusion in the Canon of the Sacred Scripture had been a matter of discussion. The controversy over the canonicity of the Song of Songs – as recorded in the Mishnah – was won by those who defended the book’s sacredness, Rabbi Akiva in primis, who famously affirmed that ‘all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies’.2 But on what ground did Akiva defend the book? It was only through an allegorical filter that he could interpret and celebrate the text, while he had harsh words for those who treated it as love poetry: ‘Whoever sings the Song of Songs with a tremulous voice in a banquet hall and (so) treats it as a sort of ditty has no share in the world to come’.3 This opinion was the foundation for a rejection of the literal reading of the text that was destined to persist for centuries. Like the early Jewish interpretations, which mostly read the Song of Songs as a redemptive history 1  On the Renaissance tradition of commentaries, paraphrases and translations of the Song of Songs see Max Engammare, Qu’il me baise des baisiers de sa bouche. Le Cantique des Cantiques à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1993). 2  Mishnah, Yadayim 3.5. The Mishnah, trans. by Herbert Danby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 782. 3  Tosefta to Sanhedrin 12.10, quoted in Roland Edmund Murphy, The Song of Songs (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), p. 12.

Acquisition through Translation: Towards a Definition of Renaissance Translation, ed. by Alessandra Petrina et Federica Masiero, TMT 18 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 35–53 © DOI 10.1484/M.TMT-EB.5.120917

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of Israel, God’s chosen people and unique Bride,4 the Christian exegetical tradition, which has its greatest initiator in Origen of Alexandria, is characterised by the absolute dominance of allegory. In particular, Origen’s identification of the text’s main dramatis personae with Christ and/or the Word of God (the Bridegroom) and the Church and/or the individual soul (the Bride), constituted, along with the addition of the Marian reading, the basis of almost all successive interpretations of the biblical book.5 On the other hand, the appeal that the Song of Songs exercised by virtue of its poetic merit surely contributed to its popularity, while its markedly amorous vein made it one of the very few Christian alternatives to the classical tradition of love poetry. Because of this, the text had a considerable impact on the development of vernacular poetry, both religious and amorous. While religious writers employed it to enhance the poetic power of their verses through a language whose sensuality was justified by the canonical status of the source, the tradition of love poetry owes many of its most characteristic topoi to the Song of Songs. Both the necessity of an interpretation of the text and the appeal exercised by its poetic beauty were combined in the tradition of verse translations and paraphrases of the Song of Songs in vernacular languages, a tradition that bloomed in the Renaissance. Of course, most of these translations and paraphrases did not derive directly from the original Hebrew text.6 They were based instead either on the main Latin version of the Bible, Jerome’s Vulgata7 (which became canonic in the sixth century and asserted itself as the primary Both the Targum (a ‘translation’, or rather a free paraphrase, of the Hebrew text into Armenian) and the oldest Midrash (Rabbinical commentary) on the Song of Songs, the Midrash Rabbah (Shir HaShirim Rabbah), present the same historical-collective allegorical reading of the Song of Songs. The former has a marked historical dimension, reading the text with detailed reference to the history of Israel, God’s chosen people, from the Exodus to the Messiah. Similarly, the Midrash bears witness to the strength of the tradition that interpreted the biblical book with reference to Israel’s history: in it, we read that the Song of Songs is the book that has been revealed in praise of Israel, the unique Bride of JHWH. See Tremper Longman, ‘Introduction’, in Song of Songs, ed. by Tremper Longman (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 1–83 (pp. 22–24). 5  E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved. The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1990), chapter 2. 6  The issue of which text should be considered the Hebrew original has been at the centre of a very animated critical debate. Today, most scholars consider the Masoretic Hebrew text of the Song of Songs very well preserved and prefer to follow it in their translations, also because, they argue, all other ancient versions, including the Septuagint (LXX) Greek version, appear to be derived from it, either directly or indirectly. G. Barbiero, Cantico dei Cantici (Milan: Paoline, 2004), pp. 20-25. 7  The Vulgata follows primarily the Masoretic text. 4 

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reference text during the Middle Ages,8 until the Concilium Tridentinum acknowledged it as the one ‘authentic’ version of the Bible), or on one of the various vernacular versions of the Bible circulating at the time.9 The Renaissance witnessed a great wave of vernacular translations of the Bible; a phenomenon related to (though not exclusively dependent on) both the affirmation of national states and languages and the Reformation emphasis on the necessity of the believer’s direct access to the Sacred Scriptures. The flourishing of the tradition of verse translations of the Song of Songs is surely part of this wider process of vernacularization and popularization of the biblical text, but it also answers to a series of dynamics pertaining specifically to this scriptural book. The controversial and ambivalent nature of the Song of Songs, which called for an act of interpretation, appealed to both religious and secular writers, who saw in the translation of the text an opportunity to convey a variety of messages and to express different artistic and politico-religious intentions. In fact, most of the authors of these verse versions did not limit themselves to the biblical text translating into vernacular poetry but expounded and reworked it, reshaping it in accordance with their own aims. This phenomenon was only moderately present in Italy, partly due to the Catholic and particularly Tridentine hostility towards the vernacular and individual uses of the biblical text, but it is well represented in France, where many authors, including Rémy Belleau, Lancelot de Carle, Pierre de Courcelles, Pierre Poupo and JeanBaptiste Chassignet, wrote verse versions of the Song of Songs. It was even more prominent in England, where the general influence of the Song of Songs was particularly significant, permeating the language of sermons and politicoreligious controversies as well as that of literature and poetry.10

Francesco Santi, ‘Il Medioevo latino nella Bibbia’, in La Bibbia nella letteratura Italiana. Dal Medioevo al Rinascimento, ed. by Grazia Melli and Marialuigia Sipione (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2013), pp. 35-56 (p. 38). 9  Among these, the Bibbie Malerbi, Brucioli and Marmochino in Italian, the Bible Historiale (the most famous, though incomplete, medieval version, first published at the end of the fifteenth century) and the versions by Le Fèvre d’Etaples, Olivétan, de Leuze, Castellion and Benoist in French, and the Coverdale, Matthew, Taverner, Great, Geneva, Bishops’, DouayReims and King James Bibles in English had particular relevance. 10  On this influence, see Noam Flinker, The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature. Kisses of Their Mouths (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000); Elizabeth Clarke, Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). On the impact of the text on literary production in the Renaissance, see for instance Raymond J. Frontain, ‘“An Affectionate Shepheard sicke for love”: Barnfield’s Homoerotic Appropriation of The Song of Solomon’, in The Affectionate Shepheard. Celebrating Richard Barnfield, ed. by Ken Borris and George Klawitter (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University 8 

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The first influential text in the English tradition of verse versions of the Song of Songs is William Baldwin’s The canticles or balades of Salomon (1549), which translates the biblical book into seventy-one poems and probably represents the first verse collection printed in English. ‘At the heart of Baldwin’s project’, Noam Flinker argues, ‘lies a series of intertwined theological, literary and political issues that make up the major thrust of his view of the Canticle’.11 The allegorical reading that characterises Baldwin’s poetic reinterpretation of the Song of Songs is based on the traditional identification of the two lovers with God/Christ and the Church and on the related translation of the physical into metaphorical discourse. Moreover, it stresses many aspects of the Protestant ideology and doctrine at a time in which the newly established Anglican Church was in no way settled, offering a fairly explicit politico-religious declination of many biblical passages. Such a reading of the Song of Songs implies a translation that, in allegorizing its amorous language and images, necessarily distances itself from the book’s littera and incorporates into the translated text the exegetical interpretation, which becomes indistinguishable from the primary source. We may think, for instance, of Baldwin’s treatment of Song 1.7 – ‘Tell me of him whom my soule loveth where thou fedest the shepe, where thou makest the rest at y no one daye: for why shall I be lyke him, that goeth amonge aboute y flokes of thy companions’12 – which he rearticulates as a reference to the coeval situation of the true Church of Christ (the Protestant Church), challenged by ‘the Churche malignant’, the Roman Catholic Press, 2001), pp.  99-114; Theresa  M. Krier, ‘Generations of Blazons: Psychoanalysis and the Song of Songs in the Amoretti’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 40 (1998), 293327; Raymond J. Frontain, ‘Discovering the Way to New Elysium: Carew’s A Rapture, the Renaissance Erotic Pastoral, and the Biblical Song of Solomon’, PAPA, 21 (1995), 39-67; Ronald Jaeger, ‘A Biblical Allusion in Sonnet 154’, Notes and Queries, 19 (1972), 125; Israel Baroway, ‘The Imagery of Spenser and the Song of Songs’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 33 (1934), 23-45. See also my ‘Contemplating the Spouse: The Song of Songs in John Donne’s Sermons and Poetry’, in Sicut Lilium inter Spinas. Literature and Religion in the Renaissance, ed. by Camilla Caporicci (Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag, 2018), pp. 167-210; ‘The Song of Songs in Thomas Campion’s Work’, Notes and Queries, 65 (2018), 116-19; ‘A Reference to the Song of Songs in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis’, Notes and Queries 65 (2018), 50-51; ‘Black But Yet Fair: The Topos of the Black Beloved from Song of Songs in Shakespeare’s Work’, Shakespeare, 14 (2018), 360-73. 11  Flinker, p. 33. 12  In this case, I quote from the Great Bible, which was the English version Baldwin referred to in his version of the Song of Songs. The Byble in Englyse (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1540).

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Church, which gathers many flocks by claiming ‘that she the true Church is’. Or one might think of Song 7.1–7, one of the most sensual celebrations or blazons of the beloved’s beauty, which Baldwin elaborates as a praise of the Church’s qualities, allegorizing her physical attributes so that her stride becomes the ‘steps which stil increace / To shew my gospell euery where’; her navel, ‘the holy Byble boke, / Through whiche thy young do sucke the mylke of foode diuine’; her belly, ‘thy affeccions and thy thought / Full of Gods holy wurd’.13 Baldwin’s text exercised a significant influence on both religious and secular poetry and set an example for successive translations of the Song of Songs. However, not all verse versions produced in the following decades were animated by a primarily theological and politico-religious intention. Some poets appear to have undertaken the translation and versification of the book not out of a specifically religious impulse, but inspired instead by the poetic beauty and sensuality of the text, which made it an archetypal love poem. The Song of Songs could in fact be perceived as akin, to some extent, to the dominant poetic tradition of the time, the sonnet tradition. Paradoxical as this might seem, this affinity was rooted in the history of vernacular love poetry, which, from its origins to the great Petrarchan tradition, incorporated many elements proper to the biblical book. These include the syntactic topos of the ‘descending description’, a celebration of the beauty of the beloved’s body from top to bottom, or such topoi as those of the amorous wound (4.9); of the woman as a flower, especially a lily (2.1); of the beloved as the most beautiful among women (1.7), splendid as the moon and the sun (6.9), and of her white and red colours (5.10).14 It is then not strange if sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets reading the Song of Songs were reminded of the sonnet tradition, which enjoyed an unprecedented flowering in England, reaching its peak in the 1590s. At the same time, some of them would realize that the text could also be used, by virtue of its dense, corporeal sensuality, as an opposing and innovating force within the Petrarchan model. Because of this, various authors who were not primarily devoted to religious writing exercised their ability in the translation of the Song of Songs, exploring the poetic possibilities inherent in the tension between

William Baldwin, The canticles or balades of Salomon, phraselyke declared in Englysh metres, by William Baldwin (London: William Baldwin, 1549), chapter 7, ‘Christe to his Spouse IV’. 14  In the biblical text, these colours are attributed to the Bridegroom, but the topos was soon applied to the female beloved in the sonnet tradition. 13 

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the biblical book’s spiritual and amorous facets. Among these poets, including Michael Drayton and perhaps even Edmund Spenser,15 we find Gervase Markham. 2. Gervase Markham’s Poem of Poems. Or Sions Muse An extremely prolific and versatile writer, Gervase (or Jervis) Markham (1568–1637) owes his fame to a series of works primarily addressed to the country squire, which cover a variety of subjects including hunting, hawking, husbandry, gardening, housewifery, and especially horsemanship and the veterinary art. His literary production also includes plays, various translations from Italian and a conspicuous quantity of verse. It is significant that one of the very first literary works of an author with both a wide range of interests and a flair for profitable enterprises should be a verse version of the Song of Songs, entitled Poem of Poems. Or Sions Muse, contayning the diuine song of King Salomon, deuided into eight eclogues (1596). This is not only an ‘index of the popularity of the Song of Songs in the late Elizabethan period’,16 as Elizabeth Clarke argues, but is also exemplary of the transversal appeal exercised by the Song of Solomon on Renaissance authors. A close analysis of Markham’s work will disclose the multifaceted intentions underlying the writer’s version of this text – intentions that influenced the way in which he rearticulated and reshaped the biblical book. In particular, the tension between the allegorical and the literal, the spiritual and the amorous, which is inherent in every reinterpretation of the Song of Songs, is expressed in Markham’s Poem of Poems through an unbalanced alternation of the two modes of reading that reveals the essentially secular character of the author’s primary aim. This is also confirmed by the relationship that the author establishes between the biblical source and the coeval, fundamentally

Michael Drayton, who was to become one of the most talented Elizabethan sonneteers, opened his poetic career with a collection of verse versions of spiritual songs taken from the Bible, entitled The Harmonie of the Church (1591), which included The most excellent Song which was Salomons. As regards Edmund Spenser, we know that Samuel Woodford lamented the loss of Spenser’s version of the Song of Songs in the preface to his own A Paraphrase Upon the Canticles (1679). Though we cannot be certain of the actual existence of such a text, this hypothesis might find some support when one considers Spenser’s significant use of the Song of Songs in his poetic work, and particularly in Amoretti and Epithalamion. See Flinker, pp. 66–87; Krier; Baroway. 16  Clarke, p. 17. 15 

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Petrarchan, sonnet tradition, which was at its peak in the years around Markham’s composition of his version of the Song of Songs. Markham’s decision to produce a verse version of the Song of Songs that stressed the poetic and amorous aspects of the text, aligning it with the Elizabethan sonnet tradition, is first perceivable in the paratext, which was traditionally where the book’s allegorical meaning was most explicitly asserted. With this, I  do not mean that Markham avoids referring to the Song of Songs’ main allegorical interpretation. On the contrary, in the section entitled ‘The Argument of the whole Booke’ he clearly states that ‘in this Song, Salomon by most sweete and confortable allegories and parables, describeth the perfit loue of Iesus Christ, the true Salomon and King of peace, and the faithfull soule or his Church, which he hath sanctified and appointed to bee his spouse, holie, chast, and without reprehension’.17 At the same time, however, this preface, which reproduces without any original addition the standard argument that introduced almost all versions and paraphrases of the Song of Songs, is accompanied by other paratextual elements indicating the author’s intention to highlight the specifically poetic character and merit of his verse version. This begins with the frontispiece. The choice to translate the title of the biblical book with Poem of Poems. Or Sion’s Muse is extremely original, considering that the Latin designation Canticum Canticorum, as given in the Vulgata, had been rendered in the English Bibles in various ways, including Salomons Balettes (Coverdale Bible, 1535); Ballet of Ballettes of Salomon (Matthew Bible, 1537); The Ballet of Ballettes of Salomon (Great Bible, 1539); An Excellent Song which was Salomons (Geneva Bible, 1560); The Ballet of Ballettes of Solomon (Bishops’ Bible, 1568); while the main antecedents of Markham’s verse version presented such titles as The canticles or balades of Salomon (William Baldwin, 1549); A misticall deuise of the spirituall and godly loue betwene Christ the spouse, and the Church or Congregation ( Jud Smith, 1575); The Song of Songes, that is, The most excellent Song which was Solomons (Dudley Fenner, 1587); The Most Excellent Song which was Salomons (Michael Drayton, 1591). Markham’s title, and particularly his choice of the terms Poem and Muse, appears therefore as a clear sign of his will to have the text perceived as an essentially poetical work. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that he moves the reference to Solomon to Gervase Markham, Poem of Poems. Or Sions Muse, contayning the diuine song of King Salomon, deuided into eight eclogues (London: Mathew Lownes, 1596). All references will be taken from this edition.

17 

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the less visible subtitle – contayning the diuine song of King Salomon, deuided into eight eclogues – almost as if trying to minimize the translative nature of his enterprise. At the same time, the term eclogues refers once again to the field of poetry, particularly to the classical tradition (just like the term Muse) and to pastoral poetry. This choice, justified by the pastoral setting of the biblical book (it is not by chance that the Song of Songs has been linked to Greek bucolic poetry, and particularly to Theocritus’ Idylls),18 signals the poet’s predilection for the poetic and literal sense of the book over the allegorical one. It also highlights his intention to associate the text with the pastoral poetic tradition, brought to its highest level in England by Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1979) and Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1580s), both influenced by Francesco Sansovino’s 1571 edition of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia. These texts, particularly Sidney’s Arcadia, may in fact have worked as sources of inspiration for Markham’s poetic version of the Song of Songs. The eclogues of the Arcadia, which represents an important intermediary in the development of English Petrarchism, are characterized by the frequent employment of a markedly Petrarchan language. Sidney, the celebrated author of the first major English sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, hailed as the English Petrarch, integrates this language within the pastoral genre in a way not dissimilar from Markham’s treatment of his biblicalpastoral theme. Moreover, Sidney’s eclogues, some passages of which might even be perceived as reminiscent of the atmosphere of the Song of Songs, such as Lalus’s description of his beloved (‘though she be no bee, yet full of honey is: / A lily field, with plough of rose, which tilled is. / Mild as a lamb, more dainty than a cony is’),19 present unusual metric forms later adopted by

The idea of a connection between the Song of Songs and Hellenistic poetry, especially Theocritus’ Idylls, was first formulated by Renaissance humanists, particularly Hugo Grotius, and since then has been favoured by scholars including Heinrich Graetz, Schir ha-shirim oder Das salomonische Hoelied (Vienna: Braumüller, 1871); Walter W. Hide, ‘Greek Analogies to the Song of Songs’, in The Song of Songs. A Symposium, ed. by Wilfred Harvey Schoff (Philadelphia: Commercial Museum, 1924), pp.  31–42; William  G. Seiple, ‘Theocritean Parallels to the Song of Songs’, AJSL, 19 (1902), 108–15; Carl Gebhardt, Das Lied der Lieder (Berlin: Philo Verlag, 1931); and Giovanni Garbini, ‘La datazione del Cantico dei Cantici’, Rivista di Studi Orientali, 56 (1982), 39–46; ‘Poesia Alessandrina e Cantico dei Cantici’, in Alessandria e il mondo ellenistico-romano. Studi in onore di Achille Adriani, ed. by Nicola Bonacasa e Antonino Di Vita (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1983), pp. 25–29; ‘Calchi lessicali greci nel Cantico dei Cantici’, Rendiconti dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 39 (1984), 149–60. 19  Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, in Sir Philip Sidney. The Major Works, ed. by Katherine Duncan-Jones (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 45, ll. 29–31. 18 

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Markham. For example, the cinquain with the ababb rhyme scheme, used in Markham’s first eclogue, is also found in some of the eclogues contained in the first book of Sidney’s Arcadia as well as in his verse translation of the Psalms (particularly Psalm 4). The hypothesis of an influence of Sidney’s Arcadia on Markham’s version is strengthened by the fact that, some ten years later, Markham published a sequel to the Arcadia, entitled The English Arcadia (1607, with the second part published in 1613). This clearly reveals the author’s will to pay homage and imitate Sidney – an intention that will emerge again in his Poem of Poems, and which is surely a key to interpret some aspects of his elaboration of the source. In the frontispiece, the Italian motto following the title also has some relevance: ‘Bramo assai, poco spero, nulla chieggio’. This motto, a sort of signature for the author,20 is a quotation from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. But while in Tasso the sentence, referring to the lovesick Olindo, is in the third person – ‘Ei che modesto è sì com’essa è bella, / Brama assai, poco spera, e nulla chiede’21 – Markham turns it into a first-person expression. Read in the specific context of the Poem of Poems’ frontispiece, this becomes, through both the reference to the Italian literary tradition and the specific meaning of the sentence, a suggestion of affinity with both the romance genre (the generic link being perhaps suggested by the Arcadia) and, especially, the Petrarchan tradition. The frontispiece is followed by a dedication to Philip Sidney’s elevenyear-old daughter, Elizabeth, whom Markham, using a language that fuses religious and Petrarchan tones, addresses with such titles as ‘sacred Virgin’, ‘diuine Mistres’, ‘diuinest of all Virgine creatures’, ‘deare flower of deare virginnitie’. This dedication signals the poet’s intention to put his text under the aegis of Sidney’s name, thus suggesting, perhaps, a connection between his work and that of the ‘English Petrarch’, author of love sonnets, pastoral eclogues and biblical verse versions (particularly the Psalms). What is also remarkable in this dedication is the author’s repeated reference to his Muse, which, he says, he hopes Elizabeth will look upon graciously and sustain with her graces. This is an argument frequently found in the dedications of poetical works, with which Markham seems to stress implicitly his It appears in the frontispiece of some of Markham’s works, including A Discourse of Horsemanship (1593); The most honorable tragedie of Sir Richard Grinuile, Knight (1595); The English Husbandman (1613). 21  Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, ed.  by Anna Maria Carini (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), II.xvi, ll. 123–24. 20 

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own merit as well as that of his work, which he presents more as the fruit of personal poetical inspiration than as a translation. The source, so far minimized, is instead given importance in the poet’s address ‘To the Readers’, in which Markham affirms that, after trying in vain to imitate ‘the excellencies of our English Poets, whose wondred spirits haue made wonderfull the workes of prophane loue’ [p. 3],22 he turned to Divinity, ‘in which labouring my sunne-burnt conceits, I found […] Diuinitie gaue glorie to the best part of a Poets inuention […] I made loue to Salomons holy Song, and dissoluing my spirits in applause of that excellence, sought to attract it within the compasse of our most usuall stanzaes’ [pp. 4–5]. The theme of the superiority of divine over secular poetry is not an original one; however, the way in which Markham presents it suggests an affinity rather than a difference between his work and the sonnet tradition of love poetry. This affinity is evoked both by the author’s explicit reference to this tradition as the wellspring for his poetic writing, and by the peculiarly amorous image through which he presents his approach to the source – ‘I made loue to Salomons holy Song’ – which establishes a link between his enterprise and the love poetry of the sonneteers. Moreover, the image of the ‘sunne-burnt conceits’, while perhaps reminiscent of the sun-darkened beloved of Song 1.5 – ‘Regard ye me not because I am blacke: for the sunne hath looked vpon mee’ – is much more evidently an homage and a reference to Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, the first sonnet of which presents the poet’s difficulty in writing through the very similar image of the ‘sunburnt brain’.23 Finally, the presence of the sonnet tradition behind Markham’s work is also suggested by the sonnet dedicated to Elizabeth, which, attributed to an ‘E. W.’ (perhaps Sir Edward Wingfield),24 fuses the spiritual invitation to learn ‘espoused happines’ from the Song of Songs’ ‘celestiall bride’ with the form and celebrative language of Petrarchan poetry. As regards the source text, an analysis of Markham’s version, and particularly of his choice of some specific terms instead of others, indicates the Geneva Bible as his primary source (though I do not exclude the possibility of other, additional sources). In his version of Song 4.3 (to choose one example

I am assigning page numbers, starting from the first page of the dedication to Elizabeth Sidney. 23  Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, in Sir Philip Sidney. The Major Works, sonnet 1, l. 8. 24  Gustav Ungerer, ‘Shakespeare in Rutland’, Journal of the Rutland Record Society, 7 (1987), 242–48 (pp.  245–46); Robert Gittings, Shakespeare’s Rival (London: Heinemann, 1960), pp. 33, 117–18. 22 

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among many) Markham compares the beloved’s lips to ‘the sweete dyed scarlet thryd’ [p. 37], using an image that appears only in the Geneva Bible – ‘Thy lippes are like a threde of skarlet’. The other main biblical versions present a different translation of the Latin vitta coccinea: ‘a rose coloured rybende’ (Coverdale Bible); ‘a rose coloured rybonde’ (Mattew Bible); ‘a rose coloured rybonde’ (Great Bible); ‘a rose coloured ribande’ (Bishops’ Bible). As for the structure of the text, Markham’s version, as announced in the title, is divided into eight eclogues, corresponding to the scriptural book’s eight ‘chapters’, and the author signals the correspondence between his poem and the source by indicating at the text’s margins the number of the biblical verse he is converting into poetry. The metre chosen by the poet is iambic pentameter, one of the most common metres in English Renaissance poetry and the one used in the sonnet. The metric forms adopted throughout the text, including the aforementioned cinquain, suggest Markham’s will to join, with his eclogues, the late-Elizabethan movement of metric experimentation, of which both Sidney’s Arcadia and his Psalms represent major examples. At the same time, the presence of a rhyme scheme that, though varied, always presents two rhyming lines at the end of each stanza, may suggest some affinity with the sonnet form, with its final couplet. The titles and arguments of the eight eclogues, as well as the identification of the text’s speakers, develop a balance between the allegorical and the amorous interpretations of the book. The reference to the poetic tradition is implicit in the employment of the term eclogue, while the poet’s choice to use it in the Latin form – ‘Ecloga Prima’, ‘Ecloga Secunda’, and so on – might represent a reference to the Latin biblical text as well as to the classical tradition. On the other hand, the arguments of the eclogues present a characteristic intertwining of the exegetical and the amorous. In particular, the exegetical level is expressed primarily in the identification of the main speakers with Thaumastos and Ecclesia – an identification found throughout the entire text. These terms clearly refer to the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs, although one might argue that the remarkably original choice of the Greek term Thaumastos (‘wonderful thing’, ‘amazing’) to designate God/Christ may be interpreted as the outcome of the poet’s will to distance himself from the standard allegorical schema as well as to confer a mysterious touch to his character. Beside this identification, however, the arguments introduce the eclogues as essentially amorous in nature, avoiding any explicit reference to the ‘divine level’ of the text and stressing instead, through frequent indications of the couple’s (passionate) love, its affinity with love poetry. Suffice it to think of the argument of the third eclogue, in

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which the female beloved is described, in accordance with a pastoral kind of imagery, as a Nymph looking to be united to her dear a neuer to be chang’d conioyne the Nymph seekes of her deere And from the wildernese black walks, is brought to pathes most cleere. [p. 31]

As regards the specific way in which Markham turns the biblical text into poetry, we find once again a tension between an allegorical/spiritual interpretation of the book and a literal/amorous one. However, the latter aspect, articulated in such a way as to foster a dialogue with the Petrarchan sonnet tradition, appears dominant over the other. It is not surprising that Bishop Hall, in his satires printed in 1597, should condemn and ridicule Markham’s text thus: Hence, ye profane: mell not with holy things, That Sion muse from Palestina brings. […] Yea, and the prophet of the heav’nly lire, Great Salomon, sings in the English Quire; And is become a newfound sonetist, Singing his love, the Holy Spouse of Christ: Like as she were some light-skirts of the rest, In mightiest ink-hornismes he can thither wrest.25

The poet expands the biblical text considerably, a verse of which corresponds in his version, with rare exceptions, to between five and ten verses. This expansion is not unprecedented: Baldwin’s work, for instance, presents a similar ratio between the biblical text and the author’s poetic re-elaboration. However, while in Baldwin’s version (as well as in many other verse versions of the Song of Songs produced both before and after Markham’s) this expansion is characterized and, we may say, justified, by the poet’s intention to integrate the exegetical and allegorical explanation within the text, in the Poem of Poems we find no such thing. Only a few, indirect allusions to the ‘divine level’ of the book are found in Markham’s version, some of which I will analyze in the following paragraph. Instead, the poet elaborates the

Joseph Hall, Satires, in The Works of the Right Reverend Father in God, Joseph Hall, D. D., successively Bishop of Exeter and Norwich: Now First Collected. With Some of His Life and Sufferings Written by Himself, Volume X, Miscellaneous works, Virgidemiarum, Satires, ed. by Josiah Pratt (London: Whittingham, 1808), Book I, Satire VIII, p. 292, ll. 1–2 and 7–12. Markham’s text is clearly identifiable behind the mocking appellation of ‘Sion muse’. 25 

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biblical verses in such a way as to emphasize the properly lyrical and amorous aspect of the text. In so doing, he obtains a double effect. On the one hand, by avoiding superimposing the allegorical sense on the literal one, Markham produces a version of the Song of Songs that is closer to the original text’s littera, and probably to its primal aim.26 On the other hand, in re-elaborating the amorous language and images of the biblical book Markham tends to reshape them in accordance with the features of the coeval sonnet tradition, establishing thus a peculiar kind of interaction with the Petrarchan code. While some passages are articulated in such a way as to appear a perfect expression of the Petrarchan poetic paradigm, in others the marked sensuality of the Song of Songs emerges as an element of divergence from this code, allowing Markham (paradoxically enough) an eroticism that was traditionally denied to the authors of Petrarchan love sonnets. The religious and exegetical dimension of the text is (rarely) suggested through the addition of a series of expressions absent from the original source (meaning both the Latin and the English biblical versions). In a few passages, the reference to the traditional exegetical interpretation appears clearly. This is the case of Song 1.5 – ‘Regarde ye me not because I am blacke: for the sunne hathe loked vpon me’27 – which Markham translates by stressing the already present anthropomorphization of the sun but also by adding a reference to sin, and to the original sin in particular, which he implicitly associates with the beloved’s blackness: ‘on my cheeks doth paint,  / What sinne-inflicting nature doth alow  / Through the corruption of her broken vow’ [p. 15]. In so doing, Markham refers to the most common exegetical reading of the Shulamite’s darkness, which was traditionally interpreted as a sign of her guilt and of the original sin afflicting her. In particular, the Geneva Bible’s gloss for this passage – ‘The Church confesseth her spots & sinne […] the corruption of nature through sinne, and afflictions’ – presents some terms and concepts echoed in Markham’s

Today, scholars tend to believe that the allegorical reading of the Song of Songs is not original. Among these, some, though admitting to a certain dramatic character in the text, define the biblical book as belonging to the lyrical genre of love poetry, comparable with other oriental lyrical traditions, such as the Egyptian love poems, the Arabic waṣf, or the Greek paraklausithyron. Barbiero, pp. 17–32. 27  From now on, I will refer to the Geneva Bible (1560), since, as already explained, it is highly probable that Markham based his verse version on this text. The Bible and Holy Scriptvres Contayned in the Olde and Newe Testament. Translated according to the Ebrue and Greke and conferred With the best translations in diuers langages (Geneva: Rowland Hall, 1560). 26 

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version. Similarly, another reference to sin is added in Markham’s re-elaboration of Song 5.3 – ‘I haue washed my fete, how shal I defile them?’. Referring once again to the common interpretation of this passage, the cleaning of the feet is endowed with a metaphorical sense, the feet being ‘washt from spotting sinne’ [p. 44]. One last example of Markham’s sporadic references to the exegetical tradition is found in his version of Song 1.6 – ‘Shewe me, O  thou, whome my soule loueth, where thou feedest, where thou liest at noone: for why shulde I be as she that turneth aside to the flockes of thy companions?’; a passage that, in sixteenth-century England, was commonly read in a politico-religious key, as the need to identify and follow the true Church as opposed to the false ones.28 Markham does not make this interpretation explicit (as Baldwin, for instance, had done), but he suggests this perspective through his peculiar invocation to the beloved – ‘Vnuayle to me thy beeing’ – as well as his reference to the ‘diuine estate’ that is refused by those who ‘By theyr fond dreames thy grace in pryson locks’ [p. 16]. In other cases, the references to the divine and transcendental aspect of the book are so generic and at the same time so integrated within the amorous, and especially Petrarchan language of the poetic text that they can hardly be considered the outcome of a specific exegetical intention. In this sense, the frequent mention of the eternal character of the passion uniting the two lovers, or the repeated employment of the adjective sacred to designate both of them (though it recurs more times in association with the male lover), can surely evoke a divine dimension, but it is also in line with the idealization and divinization of the beloved proper to Petrarchan poetry. The same can be said of those passages in which the beloved is celebrated as a precious, marvellous and divine being: let us think, for instance, of the luminous character of the beloved as found in the version of Song 2.9 [p. 22], or the virginal, sacred chastity sometimes attributed to the woman: ‘O thou art fayre, fayre is my sacred Loue, / And thy chast eye is lyke the chastest Doue’ [p. 37]; ‘O Virgin, issue of a Princes bed’ [p. 56]; ‘Wholie I am my holy loues for euer, / Whose chast desier from me remoueth neuer’ [p. 59]; ‘What sacred Mayde, what holie Virgine Iem’ [p. 62]. Passages such as these fuse religious and Petrarchan language so that the potentially exegetical allusion merges and almost dissolves into the general lyricism of the text.

28 

Clarke, p. 34.

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By highlighting Markham’s tendency towards a reshaping of the text in a Petrarchan key, which implies to some extent an idealization and sublimation of the feminine ideal, I do not mean to imply that the author negates the sensuality of the biblical book. On the contrary, he sometimes not only acknowledges but even exalts it, establishing thus a tension between the Petrarchan ideal, based on the essentially Christian values of unattainable purity and chastity, and a different feminine model who asserts and experiences her own desire. In some passages, Markham appears to make the erotic character of some metaphorical images explicit, intensifying the counter-current potential inherent in the biblical text when considered in light of the coeval poetic paradigm. This is, for instance, the case for his version of Song 1.11–13, in which Markham does not only highlight the allusive sensuality of the odorous spikenard by establishing a direct connection between this smell and the woman’s fervent love – ‘by his sent my feruent loue disclose’ [p. 18] – but also adds an erotic connotation to the final verse, modifying and expanding the image of the camphire (a plant producing clusters of small white and yellow odoriferous flowers) that becomes a Cipresse clustred fruite […] At whose ritch bounds the Salt-seas humble suite Implores with kinde imbracing feruensie, Respect of loue, in his loues extasie. [p. 19]

Similarly, in other cases, he expands the biblical images by adding sensual details, as in his version of Song 7.11 (Come, my welbeloued, let vs go forthe into the field: let vs remaine in the villages), which he turns into an elaborate pastoral invitation, dominated by a frank and spontaneous natural sensuality: Come, come my Loue […] Let vs goe forth and frolike with the winde Sport with the ayre and wanton with the skies Let vs ore view the fields, loue let vs finde Whence all the meadowes beauties doe arise

or in the case of Song 2.6 (‘His left hand is vnder mine head, and his right hand doeth imbrace me’) which he articulates so that the beloved’s right hand emerges as the hand of an expert lover: with his right hand learnt how to inlace, And make his Loue by his inflodings glad, Hee makes mee ritch with kyndest kinde imbrace, Such as the lyke no true loue euer had. [p. 24]

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This emphasis on the erotic character of the text endows the poetic language of Markham’s version with a sensual quality that distances it from the chastest examples of Petrarchan idiom, while anticipating to some extent the mystical eroticism of the metaphysical tradition – a tradition characterized precisely by a deeply erotic, religious appropriation of the Petrarchan language. However, Markham’s tension towards a Petrarchization of the text appears stronger than his sporadic tendency to eroticize it, and more representative of the process of appropriation of the book at work in his reshaping of the source. The author’s adaptation of the text to the features of the coeval sonnet tradition is an operation that fully reveals the process of cultural acquisition taking place in the translation of a scriptural book into sixteenth-century poetry. This tension towards a Petrarchan reshaping of the original source is apparent throughout the entire text. On the one hand, on a stylistic and rhetorical level, the immediacy, conciseness and characteristic repetitiveness of the biblical language give way to the more elaborate style proper to sixteenth-century poetry. This is visible from the very beginning of the text. The famous, direct invocation ‘Let him kisse me with the kisses of his mouth’ (1.1) becomes, in Markham’s version, a much more Petrarchan ‘Imprint vpon my lips pure liuorie / The hony pleasure of thy mouthes deere kisse’ [p. 13]. We can also consider Markham’s preference for the principle of variatio over that of repetitio, particularly evident, for instance, in the way in which he chooses to translate such recurrent biblical formuale as ‘him that my soule loueth’, which he renders through many different expressions: ‘thou in whom my soules affections dwell’ [p. 16]; ‘him mine inamourd soules delight’ [p. 31]; ‘my soules Loue’ [p. 31]; ‘my soules long lacking blisse’ [p. 32]; ‘him whose Loue my soule obayes’ [p. 32]; ‘the onely one my soules Loue nurst’ [p. 33]; and so on. On the other hand, this stylistic change corresponds to a similar adaptation of the source’s imagery to the main topoi of coeval love poetry. Suffice it to think of the manner in which Markham renders the invocation of Song 1.3 (‘Drawe me’), to which he adds the motif of the beloved’s enticing eye: ‘Drawe me (my deare) entice me with thine eie’ [p. 14]; or of the related stress he applies to the biblical motif of the wound perpetrated by the woman’s eyes (Song 4.9), which he attributes to their ‘brighter flame’ [p. 41]. Or we can think of his elaboration of the sorrow generated by the beloved’s absence, which he expresses through the Petrarchan image of the fleeing heart, breaking from the breast; or of his adaptation of the famous verses of Song 8.6 (‘Set me as a seale on thine heart, and as a signet vpon thine arme’), which he rearticulates by incorporating the Petrarchan topos of the beloved’s image imprinted in the lover’s heart.

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Markham’s tendency towards a Petrarchization of the biblical source emerges even more evidently in the versification of those biblical passages that, being themselves at the origin of certain Petrarchan topoi, offered the most immediate trait d’union between the two traditions. This is particularly true of Markham’s poetic articulation of the literary blazons in the Song of Songs, in which the celebration of the beloved’s beauty is more than once expressed through the so-called descending description (as mentioned earlier, a crucial topos in Petrarchan poetry). In the biblical catalogues of the beloved’s physical attributes, each of which is praised through eulogistic comparisons, Markham finds the most fertile ground for an interpretation of the source in Petrarchan terms and, while maintaining the main structure of the praise, he incorporates within the text expressions proper to the sonnet tradition. This is visible in his version of Song 1.9 (‘Thy chekes are comelie with rowes of stones, and thy necke with chaines’) in which he adds the reference to the cheeks as ‘Iewels of my hart’ [p. 17] and, most significantly, the Petrarchan expression ‘thy necke where Beautie learnt his Art’ [p. 17]; and especially in his articulation of the text’s main blazons, found in Song 4.1–5, 6.4–6 and 7.1–9. In particular, we see the celebration of those physical attributes that were most commonly praised in the sonnet tradition reformulated in Markham’s version through recourse to a definite Petrarchan language and imagery. While the hair become a net trapping the poet’s heart [p. 51] and the teeth ‘Iuorie gardiants of thy blessed talke’ [p. 51], the beloved’ neck is celebrated as a ‘bright throne of Iuorie’ [p. 57] and her conquering eyes get a very Petrarchan ‘sun-darting splendours’ [p. 51]. Moreover, the biblical expression ‘thine eyes are like the doues’ (Song 4.1) acquires a symbolic value, becoming ‘thy bright eies, pure chastities sole haire, / Are like to doues vnstained constant grace’ [p.  37]. Similarly, the addition of the chromatic characterization of some physical traits answers the Petrarchan symbolic colour code. The beloved’s teeth are called ‘milke-white’ and her ‘statelie forehead’ is ‘silver’ [p.  52]; her hair becomes ‘gold-dispierced comely locks’ [p.  37] and ‘The sumptuous curtaine of thy golden tresse’ [p. 52]; the woman herself is described as of a pure, ‘spotlesse, neuer-stayning whyte’ [p. 40]. As for those body parts that, because of their eroticism, had been omitted from the so-called canone breve proper to Petrarchan poetry, Markham does not excise them from his version; without denying their sensual quality, he incorporates a series of spiritually-oriented and idealizing metaphors in their celebration, which mitigate their eroticism while bringing the beloved closer to the Petrarchan and Christian feminine ideal. Thus, the woman’s two breasts are compared not only, as in the original text, to two

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young roes (4.5 and 7.3), but also to ‘cabinets of knowledge, and pure zeale’ [p. 39] and to ‘chaste cabinets of power’ [p. 57]; her navel becomes a ‘holie hill of peace’ [p. 57]; the joints of her thighs, ‘by true blisse led’, are ‘like rich Iewels on a virgins face’ [p. 56]. The beloved of the Song of Songs loses thus, in Markham’s version, something of her open and frank sensuality, acquiring in its stead a touch of those qualities proper to the Petrarchan lady. 3. Conclusions Gervase Markham’s verse version of the Song of Songs is part of the significant wave of translations and adaptations of the Bible produced in early modern Europe, and particularly in England, which offered a novel kind of approach to the sacred text. This approach, at least partially influenced by the Protestant idea of direct access for the faithful to God’s word, fostered an unprecedented process of appropriation of the biblical text on the part of writers and poets, who felt entitled to interpret and reshape it in accordance with their own intentions, whether politico-religious or specifically artistic. This is especially true for such a controversial text as the Song of Songs, which, because of its ambivalent nature as love poem and allegorically interpreted book, had always been the subject of a particularly intense, elaborate and varied process of interpretation and reshaping. In this context, Markham’s Poem of Poems. Or Sions Muse, chosen by Francis Meres to represent English achievement in this literary area in his Palladis Tamia,29 is exemplary of the process of appropriation of the biblical book at work in Renaissance England. Both the paratext and the way in which the author renders the text of the Song of Songs are indicative of Markham’s tendency to reinterpret and present his work as the outcome of an essentially poetic inspiration, and to reshape it in accordance with some of the features proper to the coeval tradition of love poetry. The tension between the exegetical and religious level of the text, expressed mainly in the paratext and through rare, mostly indirect, references in the poem, and the poetic and amorous character of the Song of Songs, appears clearly in favour of the latter. Moreover, the language and imagery of the biblical book are articulated in such a way as to foster an alignment with the Petrarchan model dominant in sixteenth-century poetry, and the sonnet tradition in particular. At the

Francis Meres, Palladis tamia Wits treasury being the second part of Wits common wealth (London: Cuthbert Burbie, 1598), p. 285b.

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same time, the powerful sensuality of the Song of Songs, which the poet softens in some cases and highlights in others, endows the Petrarchan idiom with an erotic quality rarely found in the traditional love sonnet, anticipating to some extent the metaphysical poetic tradition – a tradition in which the biblical book would play an important role as a source of inspiration.30 In Markham’s hands, the Song of Songs becomes an essentially amorous poem in line with the literary and poetic culture of his time – an act of appropriation that characterised the approach to the text of many Renaissance writers.

The influence of the Song of Songs is clearly detectable in the poetic work of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan. See Caporicci, ‘Contemplating the Spouse’.

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‘I write sins, not tragedies’: manuscript translations of Aristotle’s hamartia in late sixteenth-century Italy* Bryan Brazeau

O

ne of the most criticized versions of Sophocles’ Oedipus in sixteenth-century Italy was Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara’s Edippo tragedia. Printed in both Venice and Padua in 1565, it was both the first printed vernacular edition of the Oedipus tale and the first to be performed in Italy (either in 1556 or 1560).1 Both Anguillara’s contemporaries – such as the fiercely critical Giason DeNores – and modern scholars have agreed in their condemnation of Anguillara’s additions of episodes to Sophocles’ text – such as the battle between Eteocles and Polynices, and the death of Jocasta – often claiming that these run counter to Aristotle’s precepts in the Poetics.2 Yet, few have noted the Christianizing tenor of the final chorus in Anguillara’s play: Quindi si puo veder, che ’l sommo Dio Non sol dispon, che i volontarii eccessi Condannin l’huomo al debito castigo: Ma quei peccati anchor, ch’alcun commette Per ignoranza, e contra il suo volere,

*  Research leading to this publication was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–13) / ERC Starting Grant 2013 – 335949 (‘Aristotle in the Italian Vernacular: Rethinking Renaissance and EarlyModern Intellectual History’). My thanks to David Lines and Simon Gilson for their helpful feedback on an early version of this paper. 1  Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara, Edippo tragedia (Padua: Lorenzo Pasquatto, 1565). For the reception of Anguillara’s tragedy, see Gianni Guastella, ‘Edipo Re nel teatro italiano del cinquecento’, Dionysus ex machina, 4  (2013), 258–66; and Richard Fabrizio, ‘The Two Oedipuses: Sophocles, Anguillara, and the Renaissance Treatment of Myth’, Modern Language Notes, 110 (1995), 178–91. 2  Fabrizio, p. 179. Acquisition through Translation: Towards a Definition of Renaissance Translation, ed. by Alessandra Petrina et Federica Masiero, TMT 18 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 55–71 © DOI 10.1484/M.TMT-EB.5.120918

FHG

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Bryan Brazeau Vuol, che condannin l’huomo a penitenza; E la debita pena ne riporti. Si che preghiam la maiestà divina, Ch’apra talmente a noi l’interno lume, Che non ne siano i nostri eccessi ascosi.3

Anguillara ends his play with a reference to the dangerous power of involuntary sins committed in ignorance; just as Oedipus was unaware of murdering his father and sleeping with his mother, so too, might the members of the audience be unaware of their own hidden sins.4 Other than providing the audience with a moralizing (mis)interpretation and a heavy-handed dose of Catholic guilt as the final curtain falls, Anguillara’s particular formulation of sins committed both in ignorance and against one’s will reflects a broader theoretical debate over how Aristotle’s notion of hamartia – the error that precipitates a character’s tragic downfall – might be translated and adapted for a sixteenth-century Christian audience. In the Poetics, Aristotle writes that the ideal tragic protagonist: is one who neither is superior [to us] in virtue and justice, nor undergoes a change to misfortune because of vice and wickedness, but because of some error [άμαρτία/hamartia], and who is one of those people with a great reputation and good fortune.5

3  Anguillara, pp. 62–63; ‘Thus we may see that great God not only commands that wilful excesses condemn man to his due punishment; but indeed also orders that those sins committed in ignorance, and against one’s own will should condemn man to penitence and require due penalty be paid. We thus pray to the divine majesty that he open our inner eye so that our faults may not be hidden from us’. Unless indicated, all translations are my own. 4  As Enrica Zanin has demonstrated, this theme of sinning unknowingly and with an innocent conscience is present from the very beginning of the play when the prophet Tiresias mentions that both Oedipus and Jocasta both have innocent minds, but nevertheless sin unknowingly. See Enrica Zanin, ‘Early Modern Oedipus: a Literary Approach to Christian Tragedy’, in The Locus of Tragedy, ed. by Arthur Cools (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 65–80 (pp. 69–71). 5  Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. by Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pp. 1453a7– 10. I  use Janko’s translation in this essay rather than the standard English translation by Ingram Bywater which is included in the revised Oxford translation of The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), ii, 2316–40. Janko’s translation is based on Rudolf Kassel’s 1965 critical edition while also incorporating material from two manuscripts of the Poetics that have been given greater prominence since Bywater’s translation and Kassel’s critical edition (MS B and a medieval translation of the text into Arabic). See Janko, ‘Introduction’, in Aristotle, Poetics, p. xxii. The most recent critical edition of Aristotle’s text, which replaces Kassel’s, is Aristotle Poetics. Editio Maior of the Greek

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Hamartia meant ‘missing the mark’ in Homeric Greek, but as Jan Bremer has noted, by the time of Plato and Aristotle it had acquired connotations of a moral error. This usage would remain throughout the Alexandrian period and would come to be used for ‘sin’ in the Gospels.6 Yet, Aristotle also uses hamartia in the Poetics to indicate ‘artistic mistakes committed by a poet or a playwright’, not moral errors worthy of condemnation or punishment. Such usage, as Bremer shows, set Aristotle’s text apart from that of contemporary orators, and from Plato himself who used hamartia primarily to indicate vicious actions worthy of moral condemnation.7 Even when Aristotle uses the term to indicate a character’s tragic error, hamartia is often linked with ignorance, rather than moral turpitude. As Michael Lurje has shown, however, moralizing interpretations of hamartia had a marked impact on the reception of Sophocles’ Oedipus throughout the early modern period, as thinkers sought for what constituted the protagonist’s guilt. Were Oedipus’s actions simple mistakes committed in ignorance, or did they reflect profound flaws in his character?8 Sixteenthcentury commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics that suggest the latter, explaining hamartia with reference to the Nicomachean Ethics, are often treated negatively by scholars who condemn what they see as misinterpretations of the Poetics prior to the work of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century classical philologists. I have argued against such teleological readings, which neglect inquiry around the interpretive creativity present in such commentaries, and, as this essay will further demonstrate, are troubled by evidence in commentaries and translations of the Poetics from the period.9 Text with Historical Introductions and Philological Commentaries, ed. by Leonardo Tarán and Dimitri Gutas (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 6  Jan Maarten Bremer, Hamartia. Tragic Error in the Poetics of Aristotle and in Greek Tragedy (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1969), pp. 1–63. For a clear and succinct discussion of Aristotle’s use of hamartia within the Poetics, see Stephen Haliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (London: Duckworth, 1986), pp. 215–26. On the use of hamartia in the Greek New Testament and its translation as peccatum in the Vulgate, see Ronald Paulson, Sin and Evil. Moral Values in Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 36. 7  Bremer, pp. 53–54. 8  Michael Lurje, Die Suche nach der Schuld. Sophokles’ Oedipus Rex, Aristoteles’ Poetik und das Tragödienverständnis der Neuzeit (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), pp. 28–65. 9  When discussing sixteenth-century interpretations of catharsis, Lurje condemns the moralizing interpretations of Bernardo Segni, Vincenzo Maggi, and others as scarcely founded and highly eclectic; Castelvetro is summarily dismissed as one to whom nothing was sacred. Lurje, pp. 19–21, 88–89. See also Bryan Brazeau, ‘My Own Worst Enemy: Translating Hamartia in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, Renaissance and Reformation, 41 (2018), 9–42.

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Sixteenth-century religious culture certainly had an impact on translations and commentaries of Aristotle’s Poetics in both Latin and the vernac­ ular, yet the effect was more nuanced than it may seem at first sight. This essay focuses on a particular case study in early modern vertical translation: the choice of how to translate a single word – hamartia – and what it reveals about how early modern Italian thinkers approached Aristotle’s Poetics and the difficulties in adapting it to contemporary audiences. Many published Latin and Italian commentaries, translations, and poetic treatises in the period rendered hamartia with peccatum/peccato rather than error/errore. Indeed, Anguillara refers to Oedipus’s tragic mistake as a peccato eleven times in his play. Yet, such choices on the part of translators do not appear to constitute a broader attempt to (mis)read the Poetics through a Christianizing lens, but rather seem to have been part of a broader program of cultural translation, domesticating Aristotle’s text for an early modern Catholic audience.10 Indeed, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, Lodovico Castelvetro was one of the few commentators to translate Aristotle’s concept of hamartia through a strongly religious lens.11 Other commentators, such as Francesco Robortello, Piero Vettori, and Alessandro Piccolomini seemed to interpret the Poetics through the lens of moral philosophy; however, while Piccolomini condemned Castelvetro’s religious interpretation, his commentary retained linguistic traces of such a reading, using terms as peccato, perdono, and scusa when discussing hamartia.12

Brazeau, pp. 9–42. Castelvetro’s vernacular commentary on the Poetics had a profound impact on contemporary theorists and would become the touchstone for French neoclassical dramatic theory. For a succinct summary of Castelvetro’s poetic theory see Bernard Weinberg, ‘Castelvetro’s Theory of Poetics’, in Critics and Criticism, ed. by Ronald S. Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 349–71. Castelvetro also plays a fundamental role in Tasso’s poetics. In a letter to Luca Scalabrino from 15 October, 1575, Tasso praises both Castelvetro and Piccolomini’s commentaries on the Poetics as far superior to their Latin predecessors. In a letter to Scipione Gonzaga from 16 September 1575, Tasso not only cites Castelvetro but adopts his opinion of the verisimilar, assuming that the reader should be an average contemporary of the author, and that verisimilitude depends primarily upon the beliefs of the audience. In yet another letter to Scipione Gonzaga, dated 3 April 1576, Tasso rejects Castelvetro’s claim that Aeneas’s wanderings are not part of the favola of the Aeneid, while nevertheless emphasizing that the author’s choice of episodes hinges on audience/reader expectations. See Torquato Tasso, Lettere Poetiche, ed. by Carla Molinari (Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo and Ugo Guanda, 1995), pp. 268, 200–03, 385–86. 12  See Brazeau, pp. 9–42. 10  11 

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These linguistic traces, when seen alongside Anguillara’s Christianized adaptation of Oedipus in 1565 and Castelvetro’s religious reading of hamartia in 1570 might seem to indicate an increase in Counter-Reformation readings of hamartia as sin during the latter decades of the sixteenth century. Yet, as this essay will show, there is a good deal of manuscript evidence to suggest otherwise; hamartia was not systematically appropriated by Christian moralizing interpretations. Indeed, in late sixteenth-century Latin and vernacular commentaries produced in both Padua and Florence – key centres of Aristotelian thought – several translators and commentators resisted using the term peccatum/peccato altogether, reverting to the use of error/ errore, while for others the term peccatum/peccato could be used to describe poetic flaws and compositional errors on the part of the author. The analysis below is arranged chronologically. It both begins and ends with commentaries produced by writers connected to intellectual circles in Padua (Ellebodius and Riccoboni), with the central section moving through an examination of vernacular manuscript commentaries produced in late-sixteenth-century Florence by Giorgio Bartoli, Filippo Sassetti and members of the Accademia degli Alterati. In 1572, only two years after the publication of Castelvetro’s commentary, a philologically rigorous definition of hamartia as error emerged from a manuscript produced by the Flemish scholar Nicasius Ellebodius (Nicaise van Ellebode): In Aristotelis librum de Poetica paraphrasis.13 While Ellebodius was in Bratislava from 1571 until his death in 1577, serving as one of the intellectuals in the circle of bishop Stephanus Radetius (Radéczy), he had studied medicine and philosophy at Padua from 1561–71 and remained well connected to Paduan literary circles, maintaining a correspondence with Gianvincenzo Pinelli and Antonio Riccoboni, among others.14 As

Milan, B.Amb, MS  R 123 sup., fols  68–110, MS  D 510 inf., fols  1–47. For more on Ellebodius and this manuscript in particular, see Bernard Weinberg, A  History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2  vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), i, pp. 519–23; Tarán and Gutas, pp. 57–58; Aristotelis de Arte Poetica Liber, ed. by Rudolf Kassel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), pp.  111–21. The dating of the manuscript is based on a letter that accompanied the manuscript which was sent from Pressburg (Bratislava) on 22 February 1572 and requested that the correspondent show the manuscript to Antonio Riccoboni and Paolo Manuzio. See Weinberg, History, i, p. 519. There are over 100 letters in the correspondence between Ellebodius and Pinelli, held in the Ambrosiana: MS D 196 inf. 1–112, MS R 126 sup. 101, MS S 106 sup. 3–5. 14  Natália Rusnáková, ‘The Correspondence of Nicasius Ellebodius Casletanus to Gianvincenzo Pinelli in the Course of Ellebodius’s Stay at Bratislava’, Bolletino di italianistica, 13 

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Bernard Weinberg and others have argued, his manuscript translation and commentary merits inclusion as part of the early modern Italian literary critical tradition.15 His manuscript commentary frequently refers to commentaries, editions, and translations of the Poetics produced in Italy, along with frequent references to a Greek manuscript of the Poetics owned by Pinelli and suggestions by Michael Sophanios of Chios, a classical scholar who also studied and taught in Padua.16 Despite the fact that Ellebodius did not have his library shipped from Padua until 1575, evidence from letters he sent to Pinelli confirms that he possessed Castelvetro’s commentary on the Poetics in Bratislava. In several letters to Pinelli from the summer of 1571, he mentions that he bought three copies of Castelvetro’s commentary on the Poetics in Vienna – one for himself and two for Pinelli – but was surprised at the prohibitive cost of posting the books to Pinelli from Bratislava.17 In this manuscript commentary, Ellebodius provides a Latin translation of the Poetics followed by a section of notes, where he makes several suggestions for improving the Greek text of the Poetics. When translating the hamartia passage (1453a7–10), Ellebodius is consistent in his use of erratum for hamartia: Relinquuntur igitur, eos esse deligendos, quos ex beatis calamitosos faciamus, qui neque praestanti virtute sint, neque ob vitium et improbitatem in res adversas detrudantur; sed ob erratum aliquod  […] Calamitatis porro causa non improbitas hominis, ut dictum est, sed aliquod magnum erratum esse debet.18

9 (2012), 131–44 (p. 132). The article includes transcriptions of a small selection of these letters. 15  Weinberg, History, i, p. 519; Tarán and Gutas, p. 58. 16  Weinberg, History, i, pp. 519–20. 17  In a letter from 5 June 1571, Ellebodius asks what he should do with the copies he purchased for Pinelli. In a letter from 20 June, he asks Pinelli to confirm whether or not he would like the copies to be sent. In another letter from 26 June, he explains that he has not sent the copies yet due to the very expensive cost of postage and asks Pinelli again whether or not he would like a copy. Finally, in a letter from 4 July, he mentions that he has sent one copy to Pinelli via the post, but will keep the other until someone arrives in Bratislava on his way to Padua, or until Pinelli asks for it to be sent. These letters are published in Rusnáková, pp. 136–38. 18  B.Amb, MS D 510 inf., fol. 13v. ‘Therefore, there remain those chosen men, who fall from happy states into calamities, who neither excel in virtue, nor are cast down into adverse circumstances on account of vice and wickedness, but on account of some error […] The cause of such misfortunes is not the wickedness of men, as has been said, but must rather be some great error’. Emphases mine.

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ἁμάρτημα  medium est quiddam inter ἀδίκημα et ἀτύχημα. Ita enim haec definit Aristoteles lib. 1. rhetor.:19 et auctor rhetor. ad Alexandrum.20 Sed haec pluribus, et planius explicat Aristoteles lib. 5. Moralium.21

Robortello’s commentary on this passage referred the reader to book 3 of the Nicomachean Ethics (on voluntary and involuntary actions) while Vettori referred his reader to a passage on harmony in Aristotle’s Problemata where hamartia is used to describe taking the worse among several courses of action.22 Ellebodius’s commentary, however, seems to have been one of the first to provide a careful philological examination of the term in the broader context of its usage within multiple Aristotelian works, and is unique in its reference to the pseudo-Aristotelian Rhetoric to Alexander. This particular example, moreover, further demonstrates how the Poetics were not only translated and received through the strong filter of a Horatian/rhetorical lens but were also interpreted as part of a broader Aristotelian canon.

‘Hamartema (ἁμάρτημα) is something between a wrong (ἀδίκημα) and a misfortune (ἀτύχημα). Indeed, Aristotle defines it as such in book 1 of the Rhetoric [1374b17]’. The original Aristotelian quotation is ‘ἔστι δ᾿ ἀτυχήματα μὲν ὅσα παράλογα καὶ μὴ ἀπὸ μοχθηρίας, ἁμαρτήματα δὲ ὅσα μὴ παράλογα καὶ μὴ ἀπὸ πονηρίας’ (Misfortunes are all such things as are unexpected and not vicious; errors are not unexpected, but are not vicious; wrong acts are such as might be expected and vicious, for acts committed through desire arise from vice). For the English translation of Aristotle see Art of Rhetoric, trans. by John Henry Freese (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926). 20  ‘[ἀδικίαν δὲ καὶ ἁμάρτημα καὶ ἀτυχίαν ὧδε ὅρισαι] τὸ μὲν ἐκ προνοίας κακόν τι ποιεῖν ἀδικίαν τίθει, καὶ φάθι δεῖν τιμωρίαν ἐπὶ τοῖς τοιούτοις τὴν μεγίστην λαμβάνειν· τὸ δὲ δι᾿ ἄγνοιαν βλαβερόν τι πράττειν ἁμαρτίαν εἶναι φατέον. τὸ δὲ μὴ δι᾿ ἑαυτόν, / ἀλλὰ δι᾿ ἑτέρους τινὰς ἢ διὰ τύχην μηδὲν ἐπιτελεῖν τῶν βουλευθέντων καλῶς ἀτυχίαν τίθει’ (and the author of the Rhetoric to Alexander [1427a31–36]: ‘[Distinguish injustice [ἀδικίαν], mistake [ἁμάρτημα], and misfortune [ἀτυχίαν] in the following way]: make “injustice” the doing of something wrong with forethought, and say that the greatest punishment must be applied to such things. One must say that “mistakenness” is the doing of some damage because of ignorance. Make “misfortune” the accomplishment of none of the things that were well planned, not because of oneself, but because of others or some chance’). English translation from Aristotle, Problems, Volume II: Books 20–38. Rhetoric to Alexander, trans. by David  C. Mirhady (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 21  ‘But Aristotle explains this at greater length and more simply in book 5 of the Ethics’. The passage referred to appears to be NE 1135b11–35. B.Amb MS D 510 inf., fol. 37r, n. 36. 22  Francesco Robortello, In librum Aristotelis de arte poetica explicationes (1548; repr., Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1968), p.  131; Piero Vettori, Petri Victorii commentarii, in primum librum Aristotelis de arte poetarum (Florence: Giunti, 1560), p. 124. 19 

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Ellebodius’s commentary was never published, nor does it appear to have been cited by any of the late sixteenth-century commentators and translators of the Poetics. Nevertheless, the Flemish scholar was not alone in his adoption of erratum instead of peccatum. In 1573, Giorgio Bartoli, a member of the Accademia Fiorentina, produced a manuscript translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, which demonstrates few traces of overt moralization.23 Bartoli renders the hamartia passage as follows: [R]esta adunque quello che è nel mezzo di questi, et è quel tale che ne in virtù eccellente et giustizia ne per cattività et tristizia trappassa in miseria, ma per qualche errore […] Bisogna adunque la bella favola […] trappassare non in felicità di miseria, ma al contrario di felicità in miseria, non per cattività, ma per grande errore.24

In both cases, Bartoli renders hamartia as errore, following the earlier 1549 vernacular translation by the Florentine Bernardo Segni.25 In a later section – 1460b10–20 – where Aristotle uses the word ἁμαρτία to describe both internal and incidental poetic faults, however, Bartoli consistently uses the word peccato. For Bartoli hamartia could be translated as errore when referring to the action responsible for the tragic plot, but as peccato when referring to the errors of poets. Thus, it seems that if hamartia entailed the transgression of any particular law for Bartoli, it was the Aristotelian poetic code rather than a particularly Christian moral code.26

Florence, BML, MS  Ashb 531. Weinberg, History, i, pp.  62–63, claimed that the manuscript was the work of Lorenzo Giacomini and had been transcribed by Bartoli, while more recent evidence brought forward by Anna Siekiera demonstrates the text to be the work of Bartoli himself. See Anna Siekiera, ‘Una traduzione della Poetica di Aristotele del 1573’, Rinascimento, 34 (1994), 365–76; and Siekiera, ‘La traduzione della Poetica di Giorgio Bartoli: il manoscritto inedito del 1573’, in Nel cantiere degli umanisti. Per Mariangela Regoliosi, ed. by Lucia Bertolini, Donatella Coppini and Clementina Marsico, 3  vols (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2013), III, pp. 1197–239. 24  ‘There remains, then, he who is between these two, and he is that man who neither excels in virtue and justice, nor falls into misery through wickedness and sadness, but on account of some error […] A good plot should […] not pass from misery into happiness, but rather from happiness into unhappiness, not on account of wickedness, but because of a great error’. Ashb 531, fols 16r–v. 25  Bernardo Segni, Rettorica e Poetica d’Aristotile tradotte di greco in lingua vulgare fiorentina (Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1549), pp. 306–07. 26  ‘Oltre a queste cose non la medesima rettitudine è de la Politica et de la Poetica, né d’altra arte et de la Poetica. Et de la Poetica è doppio il peccato, uno per se stessa et l’altro per accidente: perché se ha eletto di imitare impotenza di essa è peccato ma se l’eleggere non è rettamente,

23 

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A similar approach of eschewing the moral connotations of hamartia in favour of its poetic function was adopted by another Florentine man of letters, Filippo Sassetti, a prominent member of the Accademia degli Alterati, a private academy in Florence that was actively involved in late sixteenth century literary polemics.27 In his manuscript annotations to this passage in Piccolomini’s 1575 commentary on the Poetics (produced between 1575 and 1582), Sassetti underlines ‘per imprudentia et per qualche sconsiderato errore’, noting the Greek in the right margin (δι ἁμαρτίϑν).28 While Sassetti indicates that hamartia may be an important term, he does not comment on the nature of the tragic error, or on whether it was committed through imprudentia or ignorantia. Instead, further down the page, he notes the importance that tragic protagonists should come from illustrious families. Where Piccolomini’s commentary reads: Oltra che gli avvenimenti o felici o infelici che ci siano, nelle persone di bassa conditione, non son communemente avvertiti, nè conosciuti, nè tenuti in conto; et si stan sempre, com’anche le persone, oscuri.29

per accidente: Ma il cavallo ambe le destre movendo inanzi, o vero secondo qualunque arte il peccato, come secondo la medicina, o altra arte, o vero impossibili cose ha fatto, queste qualunque siano non per se stessa. Si che bisogna le riprensioni nel obbiezzioni da queste cose considerando solvere. Perché prima se fatte si sono le cose impossibili in essa arte, si è peccato, ma sta bene se conseguita il fine suo: perché il fine s’è detto come se in questo modo, o essa o altra parte fa più terribile. Essempio il perseguitamento d’Ettore. ma se il fine o più o meno esser poteva, et secondo l’arte di queste cose s’è peccato, non rettamente: perché bisogna (se possibil è) al tutto niente peccare. Ancora di quali è il peccato di quegli secondo l’arte o vero secondo altro accidente, perché meno è se egli non seppe che la cervia femina non ha corna, che se havesse scritto con mala imitazione’ (Ashb 531, fols 34r–v). 27  On the Alterati and their involvement in literary debates, see Henk Th.  Van Veen, ‘The Accademia degli Alterati and Civic Virtue’, in The Reach of the Republic of Letters. Literary and Learned Societies in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Arjan van Dixhoorn and Susie Speakman Sutch, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2008), II, pp. 285–308. On the academy’s relationship to music and performance, see Claude  V. Palisca, ‘The Alterati of Florence, Pioneers in the Theory of Dramatic Music’, in New Looks at Italian Opera. Essays in Honor of Donald J. Grout, ed. by William W. Austin (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1968), pp. 9–38. Déborah Blocker’s forthcoming monograph, Le Principe de plaisir. Savoirs, esthétique et politique dans la Florence des Médicis (XVIe–XVIIe siècles) (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2020), will be the first in-depth archival study on this academy. 28  Florence, BNCF, MS Postillati 15, p. 195. Regarding Sassetti’s annotations to Piccolomini in this manuscript, see Weinberg, History, i, pp. 553–60. 29  ‘Other than those events which are either happy or unhappy, they are not generally noticed, known, or seen to matter among those people of a lower station; and they remain obscure, much like those people’.

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Sassetti comments: Questa è la vera ragione perché devono essere illustri le persone imitate nella  Tragedia e forse più ancora per se così fatte, in più atto a muover la compassione.30

Sassetti’s reading of the hamartia passage then, focuses primarily on the role that hamartia played in the overall function of a tragedy, rather than any moral or religious implications concerning the nature of the error itself. Unfortunately, Sassetti’s own translation and commentary on the Poetics (1570–78) were left unfinished, only covering up to 1449a1–5.31 Nevertheless, his prefatory comments embrace a hedonistic definition of poetry’s function, focusing on the social and psychological effects of poetry upon the audience and how these might best be achieved.32 Indeed, the primary subject of the Poetics according to his prefatory comments is a technical set of precepts for poets to create effective poetry that moves the emotions of their audience. What emerges from Sassetti’s comments are not only the translation of hamartia as errore, but indeed a resistance to moralizing/religious readings of the Poetics, along with the endurance of a strong rhetorical interpretation of the treatise well into the 1570s, particularly observable in Sassetti’s emphasis on diletto.33 Another Florentine manuscript from the period helps shed light on how Sassetti and his fellow Alterati interpreted the hamartia passage. In 2008, Déborah Blocker discovered this hitherto unidentified manuscript transcription of Vettori’s Latin translation of the Poetics in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. She established that this manuscript circulated among the members of the Alterati between 1569 and 1617 and possibly beyond. This manuscript contains inline comments and annotations from at least two distinct hands, which Blocker has identified as those of Giovambattista

‘This is the true reason why persons imitated in tragedy should be illustrious, and perhaps made even more illustrious by themselves, as they are more apt in this way to engender compassion’. BNCF, MS Postillati 15, p. 195. 31  Florence, BRF, MS  1539, fols  81r–126v. For a succinct summary of this manuscript, see Weinberg, History, i, pp. 573–80. 32  ‘Per cagione di diletto leggiamo e vediamo le Tragedie e le Commedie parimente, non dimeno da queste siamo al riso invitati, e alla festa; e quelle a viva forza l’animo ci conturbano e ci contristano, e ci tirano le lagrime’ agl’occhi’ (BRF, MS 1539, fol. 81v). 33  On the importance of pleasure for the Accademia degli Alterati, both from the perspectives of the history of ideas and of social and political history, see chapters 4 and 5 of Blocker, Principe. 30 

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Strozzi and Filippo Sassetti.34 Blocker’s identification of the hands rests on paleographic comparison and on two allusions she has discovered to the manuscript. The first occurs in a 1617 printed counterpart of Vettori’s commentary (Florence, Giunti), where the dedicatory letter from Strozzi to his nephew alludes to the manuscript, suggesting that it served as a reference book among the Alterati, and encourages his nephew to use it to study the Poetics. Blocker finds a second set of allusions to the manuscript in two of Sassetti’s letters, where he mentions that he was living and studying with Strozzi in Pisa in 1573 when they began this manuscript commentary, while a later letter details an exchange he and Strozzi had concerning an annotation to be added to this commentary.35 The manuscript alternates between one folio of transcribed text from Vettori (r–v) and one folio of annotated commentary (also r–v). It also contains several interfoliated folios. Despite extensive commentary in certain sections, neither Sassetti nor Strozzi seem to take issue with the use of peccare to indicate poetic mistakes. At 1451a19–22, Aristotle comments that a unified plot must be built around a single action, rather than an individual; thus, those poets who compose a Heracleid or a Theseid are at fault (ἁμαρτάνειν). Vettori translates this verb as peccare and neither Sassetti nor Strozzi comment on the use of this term to describe a poetic error in their marginal comments.36 The annotations at the hamartia passage are consistent in their interpretation with Sassetti’s earlier marginalia and Bartoli’s translation of the Poetics, revealing a lack of concern with the moral implications of the error, focusing instead on its effect on the audience. There is a significant comment on the nature of the tragic protagonist in a hand that appears to belong to Sassetti:

BNCF, MS Magl. VII, 1199. I am incredibly grateful to Déborah Blocker for bringing this manuscript to my attention and for generously sharing her notes with me. 35  For further details and a contextualized analysis of this manuscript, see Déborah Blocker, ‘Dire l’‘art’ à Florence sous Cosme I de Médicis: une Poétique d’Aristote au service du Prince’, AISTHE, 2 (2008), 56–101; and Blocker, ‘Le lettré, ses pistole et l’académie: comment faire témoigner les lettres de Filippo Sassetti, accademico Alterato (Florence et Pise, 1570–1578)?’, Littératures classiques, 71 (2010), 31–66, as well as Blocker, Principe, ch. 3, and a chapter by Blocker devoted to the study of this manuscript: ‘Shedding Light on the Readings of Aristotle’s Poetics Developed within the Alterati of Florence (1569–c. 1630): From Manuscript Studies to the Social and Political History of Aesthetics’, in The Reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond. New Directions in Criticism, ed. by Bryan Brazeau (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 97-132. 36  BNCF, MS Magl. VII, 1199, fol. 27r. 34 

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Bryan Brazeau Par bene che Aristotele voglia un mediocre cattivo per che ei dice che uno grandemente cattivo non è atto. E quanto al buono e par pure che ei generi in noi misericordia e timore perché se io mi tengo buono da bene anch’io similmente temerò e se però non mi tengo et ho la conscienza aggravata tanto piu doverrei temere ma dichiarando le parole non ne formidolosum il R. leva il timore e ’l V. intendendo un huomo eccellente vuole che non generi in noi misericordia. Il S. partendosi dall’espositione degli altri dichiara cosi che il vedere patire un buono e cosa terribile e compassionevole, ma con tutto ciò ella non si debbe chiamar cosi havendo ella un altro nome più proprio. Conciosia cosa che ella è scelerata e nefanda, e che ella si debba chiamar con questo nome lo prova da questo perché vita rationale e non vegetativa o sensitiva, essendo nei [sic] huomini principalmente quella ragione e con questo fatto se bene si può chiamar terribile e compassionevole tutta volta egli e denominato da quel suo principale il quale ricopre e oscura ogni altra cosa.37

These comments respond to Robortello’s and Vettori’s statements that seeing a good man suffer unjustly should not generate fear or pity within the audience, a topic which was also of great interest to Castelvetro, who feared that seeing a saintly man suffer unjustly could cause the audience to doubt God’s justice.38 We may note, however, Sassetti’s insistence on the audience’s identification with the protagonist, and a lack of discussion on the moral aspects

‘It seems that Aristotle intends a person who is only somewhat bad, as he says that a person who is greatly evil is not appropriate. The same is true with regard to the good man, and it seems that he too will generate in us pity and fear because if I consider myself to be a good man, I  will similarly be afraid. If, however, I  do not consider myself to be good and have a troubled conscience, so much the more ought I to fear. Yet, with the words non ne formidolosum, R[obortello] removes fear and V[ettori], assuming the protagonist to be an excellent man, does not wish that he should generate pity within us. S[assetti?] beginning from the commentaries of the others declares that seeing a good man suffer is a terrible thing worthy of compassion, but it still should not be called in this way, as it has another more accurate name. That it is a wicked and heinous thing, and that it should be called by this name is proven by the fact that men are primarily imbued with a rational, rather than a vegetative or sensitive form of life; due to this fact, although one can term such events terrible and worthy of compassion, nevertheless such events are denoted by their principal [characteristic], which covers and obscures all other things’. BNCF, MS  Magl. VII, 1199, fols  38r–v. I  am basing the identification of Sassetti’s hand on the marginalia discussed above on Piccolomini’s commentary to the Poetics (BNCF, MS Postillati 15). 38  Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, ed.  by Werther Romani, 2 vols (Bari: Laterza, 1978), i, p. 362. On the relationship of Castelvetro’s commentary to earlier Cinquecento translations and commentaries on the Poetics, see Anna Siekiera, ‘La Poetica vulgarizzata e sposta per Lodovico Castelvetro e le traduzioni cinquecentesche del trattato di Aristotele’, in Lodovico Castelvetro. Letterati e grammatici nella crisi religiosa 37 

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of the error committed. Strozzi responds to Sassetti by citing Piccolomini: ‘Il P. dice quasi il medesimo mostrando che se bene il caso ha di terrore e compassione tutta volta che esser nefando ha più del odioso che abominevole’.39 A few lines below, Sassetti responds: ‘Questo fatto non ci farà temer perché noi non pensiamo esser simili a tristi, dalla qual similitudine suol nascere il timore’.40 A third hand then intervenes, citing Castelvetro: ‘Ma il Castelvetro vuole che se un reo havrà buon fine noi temiamo che a noi advenga questo che avvenne a popoli caduti in sua cattività’.41 This exchange demonstrates a common focus on the effects of a tragedy and on the importance of audience’s identification with a protagonist, hinting that such an identification depends on how the audience members define their moral status. There is no discussion of any difference between peccato and errore, despite familiarity with Castelvetro’s commentary. Indeed, the final word in this exchange begins in Strozzi’s hand before being taken up by a fourth annotator, who may be Lorenzo Giacomini, and who dismisses Piccolomini’s concern with the moral implications of voluntary or involuntary action: Il P. ripiglia qui gli espositi che muovino dubbio sopra il non esser mezzo tra ’l virtuoso e vitioso perché pone la virtù con certa latitudine [fourth annotator begins:] dandole centro e circonferenza la quale confina col vitio pero l’appressarsi più o meno a quella circonferenza fa in un certo modo mezzo e biasima chi vuole dar mezzo tra la virtù e ’l vitio col dire ch’uno che fa qualche errore non è virtuoso, e non è ancor vitioso, no’l facendo per elletione. Io per me direi che in si fatte cose non fosse da cercare dell’esatto con ancor nelle morali non sogliono le sottigliezze haver luogo, peró che vuole un di mezzo cioè tra il buono buono e ’l cattivo cattivo, o vogliam dire che verrà a esser medio tra ’l buono e ’l cattivo se noi gli daremo alcune virtù non senza qualche vitio l’un per l’altro facendo, e imponendo tale arrecando che non si può assolutamente chiamare virtuoso ne vitioso.42

del Cinquecento. Atti della XIII giornata Luigi Firpo. Torino, 21–22 settembre 2006, ed. by Massimo Firpo and Guido Mongini (Florence: Olschki, 2008), pp. 25–45. 39  ‘P[iccolomini] says nearly the same by showing that although the case may contain terror and pity, nevertheless, its being wicked is more hateful than abominable’. 40  ‘This fact will not make us afraid because we do not think ourselves similar to sad characters, from which likeness fear is usually born’. 41  ‘But Castelvetro notes that if a guilty [character] should come to a good end, then we would fear that what happens to fallen people in their wickedness should happen to us’. BNCF, MS Magl. VII, 1199, fol. 38v. 42  ‘P[iccolomini] here rebukes the commentators who raise doubts as to whether or not there is any middle ground between the virtuous and the vicious man, because he posits a certain

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Sassetti repeats Vettori’s use of the term errore and claims that one does not need to search for a precise definition of this error within the subtleties of moral philosophy, as Aristotle was clear enough in requiring a protagonist of middle station. While he is immediately engaging with Piccolomini, this comment also seems to respond to the comments of Robortello, Vettori, and others linking hamartia to discussions in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics on voluntary and involuntary actions. Sassetti’s dismissal of these fine-grained definitions of hamartia would seem not only to dismiss the link to moral philosophy that obtained in many commentaries on this passage, but also the Christian moralization of hamartia as irrelevant to the Poetics, providing further support for Sassetti’s focus on composing rhetorically effective poetry that could move the emotions of its audience. Ultimately, in this exchange, Alterati members demonstrate their awareness of Castelvetro’s commentary and its Christian reading of hamartia, along with Piccolomini’s reading of hamartia through the lens of Aristotelian moral philosophy, yet they dismiss both readings to focus instead on the effects that such an error has on the audience. This focus on rhetorically effective poetry and the concomitant dismissal of interpreting hamartia through a Christianizing lens, however, was not limited to the Florentine circle of the Alterati. In his 1587 Latin commentary on the Poetics, Antonio Riccoboni, a professor of rhetoric at Padua who had maintained a friendship with Ellebodius, consistently uses errore to render hamartia – correcting Vettori’s translation of peccatum magnum to error magnus.43 Like Piccolomini, Riccoboni takes direct aim at Castelvetro,

latitude to virtue [fourth annotator begins:] giving it a centre and circumference which shares a border with vice; therefore the extent to which one approaches this circumference creates, in a way, a middle ground, and [Piccolomini] blames those who would propose a middle ground between virtue and vice by saying that one who makes some errors is neither virtuous, nor is he vicious, as he does not do so wilfully. I would say that in such cases one ought not to search for exactitude, just as subtleties do not usually have a place in moral matters. Therefore, [Aristotle] wishes him to be in the middle between the very good and very bad, or rather we might say that he will come to be between the good and the bad if we give him some virtues along with some vices, giving him an equal number of each. Creating him in this way, we reach one who cannot be called absolutely virtuous nor vicious’. BNCF, MS Magl. VII, 1199, fol. 38v, emphasis mine. I am basing the identification of Strozzi’s and of Giacomini’s hand on Blocker’s suggestions. For details concerning these identifications, see Blocker, ‘From Manuscript Studies’. 43  Antonio Riccoboni, Poetica Aristotelis ab Antonio Riccobono latine conversa (Padua: Paolo Meieto, 1587), p. 16. On the importance of Riccoboni’s commentary for seventeenth-century thinkers, see Weinberg, History, ii, pp.  635–36. On Riccoboni’s biography, see Giancarlo

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blaming his commentary for making poetics appear to be one of the most confused, difficult, and obscure arts.44 While Riccoboni also seems to shy away from a translation of hamartia as peccatum with reference to the qual­ ities of an ideal tragic protagonist, he does use the noun peccatum in his commentary: Tertium est, ut neque virtute praestet, et iustitia, neque propter vitium, et pravitatem mutetur in adversam fortunam (id enim miserabile non esset) sed propter errorem aliquem, ut Oedipus, et Thyestes. […]  Sextum, ut non in prosperam fortunam ex adversa, sed contra ex prospera in adversam mutetur, non propter improbitatem, sed propter errorem magnum, aut talis personae, qualis dictum est, quae sit mediocris probitatis, et improbitatis, aut melioris potius, quam deterioris, ut magis in persona meliore, quam peiore ex sententia Aristotelis peccandum [sic] esse videatur.45

Much like Bartoli, Riccoboni also alternates between error and peccatum later in his commentary, when discussing the link between hamartia and voluntary action. Yet, he makes a crucial distinction that was not made by other commentators between different registers of understanding hamartia: Quamquam enim philosophica ratione scelus non est, nisi cum voluntatis in peccando adest consensus, tamen scelus quoque est, si non verum, at saltem apparens, et ex communi quadam opinione, quam maxime spectat poeta, cum aliquos maximum, et gravissimum malum, non modo consulto, sed etiam per errorem committitur; cuiusmodi fuit factu Iocaste, et Oedipodis, qui cum imprudenter errassent, se tamen tamquam scelestos, et flagitiosos punivisse finguntur.46

Mazzacurati, La crisi retorica umanistica nel Cinquecento (Naples: Libreria Scientifica, 1961), pp. 53–63. 44  Riccoboni, fol. ivr. 45  ‘The third [quality] is that he neither excel in virtue and justice, nor that he fall into bad fortune on account of vice and wickedness (for this would not be pitiable) but on account of some error, as Oedipus and Thyestes […] Sixth, that he not fall into good fortune from misfortune, but rather that he fall from good fortune into misfortune, not on account of wickedness, but on account of a great error, either such a character as was said, between goodness and wickedness, or rather of the better than the worse [kind], because according to Aristotle, a sin may be observed to a greater degree in a better than a worse character’. Riccoboni, p. 64. 46  ‘Yet, according to philosophical reasoning it is not a wicked act except when it approaches the agreement of the will in sinning, nevertheless, it is still a wicked act, if not truly so yet in all events appearing to be so, and according to that common opinion which a poet considers above all things, since the greatest and most serious evil is committed against men not only by design,

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Here, Riccoboni distinguishes between what appears to be a wicked act, and what is truly wicked. Truly wicked acts, he notes, only occur when the will is an active participant in the wicked deed, which he characterizes with the verb peccare. Riccoboni’s analysis seems to echo the discussions of voluntary and involuntary action present in the commentaries of Robortello, Piccolomini, and others.47 Riccoboni’s addition to the discussion, however, is in his distinction between what is truly wicked and what appears to be wicked. Echoing Sassetti’s dismissal of moral philosophical deliberations with reference to hamartia, Riccoboni underlines that while philosophers may emphasize the importance of the will, poets must observe common opinion; despite the fact that a particular act committed through imprudence may not be deemed wicked by moral philosophy due to the involuntary nature of the agent, nevertheless, if the audience deems it evil according to common opinion, the poet may punish the tragic protagonists just as if they were truly wicked. Riccoboni thus solves the complex poetic problem of how characters of a middle station between good and evil can be subject to immense punishment for an act that was not entirely voluntary. To conclude, by distinguishing between the perception of this act from a moral-philosophical point of view and from the perspective of how best to compose effective poetry, Riccoboni brings together several of the different themes that emerged in sixteenth-century discussions of hamartia: the relationship of this error to moral philosophical discussions on voluntary and involuntary actions, the relationship between poetics and moral philosophy, and the problem of justly punishing a good protagonist who commits an action through imprudence or ignorance. Indeed, the difference between imprudence and ignorance with reference to tragic error, which was an issue present in commentaries from Robortello onward, is not mentioned by Riccoboni, presumably because such a distinction would belong to the realm of moral philosophy rather than common opinion which concerns poets above all else. The linguistic distinction between peccato/peccatum and error/errore traced throughout this essay, moreover, would also be dissolved by Riccoboni’s analysis since the error must simply appear wicked to the audience, who may not be thinking about the finer distinctions between moral error and the Christian conception of sin: a solution remarkably similar to the one but also through error; in this way was fashioned [the error] of Iocasta and of Oedipus, who although they erred imprudently, were nevertheless feigned to have punished themselves just as if they were wicked and shameful persons’. Riccoboni, p. 71. 47  See Brazeau, pp. 9–42.

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at which the members of the Alterati arrived. Although it may be difficult to articulate a precise distinction between Christian and aesthetically-oriented interpretations of hamartia – except in certain extreme cases, such as those of Castelvetro and Anguillara – it does seems that the latter interpretive tradition frequently employed peccatum/peccato as well, but did not necessarily intend to impose a religious framework on Aristotle’s text. More broadly, this case study appears to suggest that vertical translation not only implicates the target language, but may reveal something about the cultural and intellectual contexts of translators and their readers. While earlyand mid-sixteenth-century Latin and vernacular translators and commentators often translated hamartia as peccatum/peccato, by the final decades of the century, many appear to have adopted error/errore, ignoring, if not explicitly rejecting the Christianizing interpretations of Anguillara and Castelvetro precisely in the years when the activities of the Counter-Reformation were rapidly expanding. The reasons for such a widespread adoption of error/ errore may lie in a certain resistance to religiously-inflected interpretations of philosophy, or more simply in the proliferation of Bernardo Segni’s 1549 vernacular translation of the Poetics, which translates hamartia as error. If this is the case, it would suggest that even Latin commentators in the late sixteenth century may have been working with a vernacular translation of the Poetics alongside Latin translations and commentaries. Ultimately, these texts demonstrate how translators and commentators in the period were not only grappling with how to interpret the Poetics via other works in the Aristotelian canon, but also struggling to articulate and agree upon a new poetic lexicon both in Latin and in the vernacular.

Iphigenia in English: reading Euripides with Jane Lumley Carla Suthren

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emarkably, the earliest known translation of any Greek tragedy into English was written by a woman. The woman was Lady Jane  Lumley, the classically-educated daughter of the Earl of Arundel, and the play she chose to translate was Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis. Her work, entitled The Tragedie of Euripides called Iphigeneia translated out of Greake into Englisshe, survives in a single authorial manuscript copy (now British Library, MS  Royal 15.A.ix), and was virtually unknown until the twentieth century.1 Ever since its publication in 1909 it has posed something of a conundrum to critics. When was it written? Why was it written? Was it really ‘translated out of Greake’? Is it any good? Earlier critics explained what they perceived as a lack of literary merit by considering it a piece of juvenilia, an unsophisticated and in places inaccurate exercise, heavily reliant on Erasmus’ Latin translation of Euripides. More recent critics have responded by moving the date forward and stressing the likelihood that it was intended (and well-suited) for performance.2 This new focus has been effective in highlighting the qualities of Lumley’s work rather than its purported shortcomings, but there has been less interest in investigating how Lumley’s text

Jane Lumley, Iphigenia at Aulis, Translated by Lady Lumley, ed. by H. H. Child (Chiswick: Malone Society, 1909). 2  For the earlier school of thought, see David H. Greene, ‘Lady Lumley and Greek Tragedy’, The Classical Journal, 36 (1941), 536–47, and Frank  D. Crane, ‘Euripides, Erasmus, and Lady Lumley’, The Classical Journal, 39 (1944), 223–28. Recent re-evaluations notably include  Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, ‘Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia at Aulis: Multum in Parvo, or, Less Is More’, in Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama. Criticism, History, and Performance, 1594–1998, ed.  by S.  P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (London: Routledge, 1998), pp.  129–41; Marta Staznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Marion WynneDavies, ‘The Good Lady Lumley’s Desire: Iphigeneia and the Nonsuch Banqueting House’, in Heroines of the Golden Stage, ed. by Rina Walthaus and Marguérite Corporaal (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2008), pp. 111–28. 1 

Acquisition through Translation: Towards a Definition of Renaissance Translation, ed. by Alessandra Petrina et Federica Masiero, TMT 18 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 73–92 © DOI 10.1484/M.TMT-EB.5.120919

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interacts with the wider context of humanist receptions of Euripides in the first half of the sixteenth century. This chapter begins by examining Lumley’s work in the context of her humanist education, arguing that it should be taken not as a prescribed exercise in translation, but as an independent pursuit of scholarly interests. It offers a more detailed investigation of the provenance history of Lumley’s textual sources than has yet been attempted, tracing her encounter with Euripides through the material texts she used. As well as Erasmus’ Latin translation, Lumley had access to a Greek edition of Euripides’ play, and I present new evidence that she was reading and responding to the Greek alongside Erasmus’ Latin. Her use of Erasmus has historically been seen as a failing, but in fact it establishes her work as actively engaging with wider contemporary receptions of Euripides. The ways in which Lumley translated and interpreted Euripides were significantly shaped by Erasmus’ theory and practice. In fact, I  suggest, the simplicity and concision – so denigrated by earlier critics – which characterize Lumley’s work may represent a response to the qualities she perceived, with Erasmus’ encouragement, in Euripides’ Greek. 1. Taking translation out of the school-room Discussions of early modern women’s translation inevitably invoke John Florio’s claim in the dedicatory preface to his translations of Montaigne (1603), that ‘all translations are reputed femalls, delivered at second hand’.3 This is, of course, a modesty topos; nonetheless, it has been used to explain the high proportion of translations in extant women’s writing from the period. In this analogy, translation is secondary or inferior to original composition just as women are secondary or inferior to men: according to Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘this low opinion of translating perhaps accounts for why women were allowed to translate at all’.4 When it comes to Lumley’s translation of Iphigenia in Aulis, the assumption amongst earlier critics that it was an ‘exercise […] of childhood’ served both to explain how she was, in Lamb’s phrase, allowed to translate at all, and to categorise her efforts as juvenilia, a second-rate 3  John Florio, trans., The essayes or morall, politike and millitarie discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne (London: Edward Blount, 1603), sig. A2r. 4  Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes Toward Learned Women in the Renaissance’, in Silent but for the Word. Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. by Margaret Hannay (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985), pp. 107– 25 (p. 116).

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attempt at second-hand delivery.5 In addition, her use of Erasmus apparently places her work still further from the gold standard of the Euripidean original, as Frank Crane’s phrasing makes clear: ‘[Lumley’s] Euripides is purely and simply a translation of Erasmus, and a poor one at that’.6 However, as Jaime Goodrich has pointed out, there is a danger in taking Florio’s remark to express an ‘anticipation of postromantic views of original authorship and translation’; in the following preface addressed to the reader, Florio ‘insists upon the importance of translation as a means of transmitting knowledge and cultural power’ (‘from translation all Science had it’s off-spring’, he writes).7 In a reversal of the original image, translation is figured as a fertile producer rather than a second-hand delivery. Danielle Clarke’s reformulation of the conceptual relationship between translation and women takes this into account: she observes that ‘the cultural function of both translation and women is to reproduce and transmit cultural and economic capital’.8 Critics often refer to the ‘paradox’ of a humanist education for women, ‘whose intended deployment in the public sphere was categorically unrealizable’.9 It is the investment of economic and cultural capital represented by Lumley’s ‘conspicuously useless’ education that engendered the first translation of any Greek tragedy into English.10 From Arundel’s perspective, as Diane Purkiss has put it, ‘[t]o have a daughter able to read Greek was figuratively to stand near the throne’.11 Jane Lumley (née Fitzalan) and her sister Mary were deliberately educated along the same lines as their cousin, Lady Jane Grey, and the future queen Elizabeth. Mary Fitzalan and Elizabeth both produced translations of collected sententiae, and Lumley and Elizabeth both translated Isocrates. Ascham reports that he had Elizabeth translate Isocrates and Demosthenes from Greek into

Lumley, p. vi. Crane, p. 228. 7  Jaime Goodrich, Faithful Translators. Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), pp. 5; 4. Florio, sig. A5r. 8  Danielle Clarke, ‘Translation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. by Laura Knoppers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 167–80 (p. 172). 9  Staznicky, p. 23. 10  To use Diane Purkiss’ phrase, in the introduction to her edition of Three Tragedies by Renaissance Women (London: Penguin, 1998), p.  xv. I  am not convinced that this is how Lumley would have perceived her own education, however. 11  Purkiss, p. xv. 5  6 

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Latin and back every morning ‘for the space of a yeare or two’.12 Lumley presented her own translations of Isocrates to her father, Lord Arundel, as New Year’s gifts.13 Marta Staznicky has pointed out that Jane’s brother and future husband were educated at court with Edward, ‘establishing a direct link’ to the Erasmian curriculum practiced there which may well have shaped the girls’ education at home.14 Lumley’s Isocrates translations showcase the fruits of this education to please the father who clearly took such an interest in it. In exactly the kind of exercise advocated by Ascham, she demonstrates her linguistic proficiency by translating from Greek prose into Latin prose, staying close to the original.15 Five of Lumley’s Isocrates translations appear in a manuscript volume that has been described by H. H. Child as a commonplace or rough copy book.16 They are directly followed by The Tragedie of Euripides called Iphigeneia. This is an enterprise, however, that is quite different in nature to what has come before. Rather than translating from Greek into Latin, she produces an English text which, as Staznicky has demonstrated, ‘displays little attempt to conform to an academic model’ according to ‘the theory and techniques of humanist translation’.17 She translates from verse to prose, exercising considerable freedom in places, and cutting the text substantially in the process; again, not the characteristics of a school-room exercise in translation. While early critics placed the date of composition as early as 1550 (when Lumley was only about thirteen), the earliest that she could have begun her translation is 1553, since this is when the texts she used for it were acquired by Lord Arundel (as discussed below). Marion Wynne-Davies has persuasively argued for an even later date, based on the fact that Lumley was writing on paper with an official watermark that she is only likely to have had access to after Arundel’s acquisition of Nonsuch Palace in 1556.18 She further suggests that a date of 1557 makes sense in the context of the other material contained in

Roger Ascham, Roger Ascham. English Works, ed. by William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 246. 13  Identified as New Year’s Gifts for the years 1552–57 by Wynne-Davies, p. 119. 14  Staznicky, p. 23. 15  Jaime Goodrich, ‘Returning to Lumley’s Schoolroom: Euripides, Isocrates, and the Paradox of Women’s Learning’, Renaissance and Reformation, 35 (2012), 97–117. 16  Lumley, p. vi. 17  Staznicky, p. 33. 18  Wynne-Davies, p. 121. 12 

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the commonplace book.19 Lumley, then, was at least sixteen, and perhaps as old as twenty at the time of composition, suggesting that Iphigeneia was less a school-room exercise and more an independent pursuit of scholarly interests. Once again, Elizabeth I might offer a parallel: she reportedly ‘translated one of the Tragedies of Euripides from the original Greek for her own Amusement’, although unfortunately it does not survive.20 Tanya Pollard considers this translation the work of the ‘young’ Elizabeth, which ‘probably dated from the late 1540s when she studied Greek with Roger Ascham’.21 However, Elizabeth continued to produce classical translations into adulthood, and in fact a large proportion of those extant are from the 1580s and 1590s.22 The idea that she translated Euripides ‘for her own Amusement’ suggests rather that it was not a school-room exercise set by Ascham, but an independent endeavour comparable to Lumley’s. Elizabeth’s humanist education, of course, was deployed in the public sphere; whether this might have affected her approach to Greek tragedy is, sadly, unknowable. If Lumley’s Iphigeneia was not a prescribed translation exercise, then, what was it? Recent criticism has highlighted the dramatic qualities of the manuscript, suggesting the likelihood that it was written for performance. It has even been proposed that Iphigeneia was performed in front of Elizabeth herself when she visited Nonsuch in 1559. She was certainly treated to ‘a play of the chyderyn of Powlles’; the same company is also known to have performed a tragedy called Iphigenia (now lost) at court in 1571.23 It is tempting to speculate that this could have been Lumley’s Iphigeneia, adopted into their repertoire, or revived a decade later.24 Attractive as this It is preceded by the Isocrates orations (1–4 and 8), and followed by a couple of Latin sententiae and an excerpted description of the medical properties of the ‘eaglestone’ for pregnant women; Wynne-Davies relates this to the fact that in 1557 her younger sister Mary was pregnant, and following delivery died in late August that year (Wynne-Davies, p. 120). 20  William Rufus Chetwood, A General History of the Stage (London: Owen, 1749), pp. 15– 16, on the authority of Sir Robert Naunton (1563–1635), who chronicled Elizabeth’s reign. 21  Tanya Pollard, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 45. 22  See Elizabeth  I, Elizabeth  I: Translations, 1544–1589, ed.  by Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 7–8. 23  Henry Machyn, The Diary of Henry Machyn, ed.  by John Gough Nichols (London: Camden Society, 1848), p. 206. ‘Effiginia A Tragedye showen on the Innosentes daie at nighte by the Children of powles’, Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, ed. by Albert Feuillerat (Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1908), p. 145. 24  The possible connection was pointed out by E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), ii, p. 14. Alison Findlay suggests that a 1571 revival might 19 

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theory is, the text itself does not seem to fit such a lavish occasion. In 1559, Arundel had some hopes of winning Elizabeth’s hand, and was spending a fortune on the entertainments in order to impress her.25 Far from capitalizing on any opportunities afforded for opulent display, Lumley eschews spectacle, presenting a streamlined and condensed version of the play. Her approach is thrown into sharp relief when contrasted to the only other extant early modern English translation of Euripides, the Jocasta of George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmershe, written for a performance at Gray’s Inn in 1566. In Jocasta, an adaptation of Phoenician Women via Ludovico Dolce’s Italian Giocasta (1549), Gascoigne and Kinwelmershe create as many opportunities for spectacle as possible. They add lavish dumb shows with musical accompaniments between acts, and an extravagant number of non-speaking parts – at one point George Pigman calculates that the stage holds Eteocles, Polynices, Jocasta, and twenty-nine attendants.26 Lumley’s Iphigeneia keeps to seven characters and the Chorus, and the role of the latter is very much reduced. The contrast between these two approaches to Euripides can be seen in the words of two old servants protesting their loyalty in the first scenes. Gascoigne, who penned this scene, has: Then if my life or spending of my bloude May be employed to doe your highnesse good, Commaunde (O queene) command this carcasse here In spite of death to satisfie thy will, So, though I die, yet shall my willing ghost Contentedly forsake this withered corps, For joy to thinke I never shewde my selfe Ingratefull once to suche a worthy Queene. (1.1.25–32)27

Lumley’s servant, more prosaically, says,

have been prompted by the involvement of John Lumley, Jane’s husband, in a Catholic plot to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. Sebastian Westcott, the master of the Children of Paul’s and a fellow recusant, may have staged the play ‘as a reminder to Elizabeth of the Arundel family’s loyalty’. Alison Findlay, Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 75. 25  Leo Gooch, A Complete Pattern of Nobility. John, Lord Lumley (c. 1537–1609) (Sunderland: University of Sunderland Press, 2009), p. 21. 26  George Gascoigne, George Gascoigne. A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. by G. W. Pigman III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 511. 27  Quoted from Gascoigne. The servant does not appear in Euripides, but is Dolce’s insertion.

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What is the matter, O kinge, what is the matter? If you will shewe it me, you shall tell it to a trustie man and a faithefull: for thou knoweste me to be one that Tindareus thy wives father sente with hir as parte of hir dowrie, because he thoughte me to be a messenger mete for suche a spouse. (39–43)28

Compared to Gascoigne’s grandiloquence, Lumley has a touching simplicity. Her prose is not artless – in fact here she utilizes two of Gascoigne’s techniques, using repetition with almost identical phrasing (where ‘Command, O  queene, command’ has a pompous ring, ‘What is the matter, O  king, what is the matter?’ has a simple sincerity to it), and alliteration (shaping the almost lyrical rise and fall of the final cadence, ‘messenger mete for such a spouse’). Where Gascoigne’s policy in translation is amplification, Lumley’s is reduction. Cutting the choral odes and substantially pruning many of the longer speeches has the effect of increasing the pace and distilling the play to its essential structure, getting rid of any extraneous or confusing material.29 Though Iphigeneia may not have received a full-scale performance in front of Elizabeth, Staznicky has convincingly argued that it seems to have been written with something like a staged reading in mind. Lumley’s dramatis personae lists ‘The Spekers’ in the tragedy, emphasizing the aural dimension, and Staznicky shows that Lumley (unlike her Greek or Latin sources) visually highlights distinctions between speakers in a variety of ways.30 She also demonstrates that Lumley keeps an eye on the logic of the staging: in Euripides, Clytemnestra and Achilles exit to make room for the third choral ode, and Clytemnestra then re-enters after it to talk to Agamemnon. Since Lumley has cut the ode, she invents some dialogue between Clytemnestra and Achilles which would be entirely unnecessary unless she was thinking about the characters as physical presences.31 Whether her text was ever actually performed in any sense or not, then, Lumley’s manuscript clearly conveys her sense of Iphigeneia as a play. Lumley’s family circle clearly had an interest in theatricals: in a letter from her brother Henry and husband John to Thomas Cawarden from 1554

Lumley’s Iphigeneia is quoted from Purkiss unless otherwise stated. Earlier criticism assumed that she simply cut the bits that were too difficult for her to translate, while recent critics have focused on the dramatic qualities introduced by her changes. A production directed by Sophie Hodgson-Wright in Sunderland in 1997 certainly demonstrated that the text is performable. 30  For example, she separates speech prefixes from the indented main text with a slash (/), and leaves a slight gap whenever the speaker changes. Staznicky, p. 44. 31  Staznicky, p. 41. 28  29 

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a performance of some kind is being prepared, possibly as part of the celebrations for Mary’s marriage to Thomas Howard.32 Gweno Williams has pointed out that Nonsuch featured a range of potential performance spaces, including the purpose-built banqueting house where Elizabeth watched the Children of Paul’s.33 Imagining a staged reading in an informal family setting makes the best sense of the formal and stylistic features of the text as we have it. Lumley’s translation strategy is notably ‘domesticating’; her prose is plain and lucid, as we saw in the comparison to Jocasta, and she omits unnecessary mythological or geographical detail. Her cast of characters is notably adapted to suit the context of a sixteenth-century household: her Senex is not a slave but Agamemnon’s ‘servante’, and where Euripides’ Chorus consists of young women of Calchis, Lumley simply has ‘a companie of women’.34 Lumley’s sensitivity to the dramatic qualities of Iphigenia in Aulis aligns her with contemporary humanist activities. It was the model for two plays on the biblical subject of Jephthah (another father who sacrifices his daughter) in the 1540s, one in Latin by George Buchanan, and one in Greek by John Christopherson. Buchanan’s play was written for performance by his pupils at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, and Christopherson’s version may have been staged in Cambridge around 1554.35 Since both John Lumley and Jane’s brother Henry matriculated at Cambridge in 1549, at a time when academic performances were on the rise, Hodgson-Wright suggests a link to this scholarly context, which ‘could have alerted her to the theatrical possibilities of her own text’.36 Nor is this the only way in which Lumley’s text can be situated within the wider context of sixteenth-century receptions of Euripides. Lumley’s humanist education, in combination with the interests of her family circle, predisposed her to approach Euripides in certain ways. In addition, her reading was shaped by the nature of the specific texts she was using.

See Wynne-Davies, p. 113. There was also ‘the Privy Chamber, where Henrietta Maria subsequently had a fixed stage erected in 1632 […] other extremely well-lit indoor rooms, and the two courtyards’. Gweno Williams, ‘Translating the Text, Performing the Self ’, in Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700, ed.  by Alison Findlay, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright and Gweno Williams (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 15–41 (p. 23). 34  See Patricia Demers, ‘On First Looking into Lumley’s Euripides’, Renaissance and Reformation, 23 (1999), 25–42 (p. 38), on Lumley’s ‘domestic idiom’. 35  Hodgson-Wright, p.  137. On the Jephthah plays of Buchanan and Christopherson, see Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule. Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 92–122. 36  Hodgson-Wright, p. 138. 32  33 

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English readers of Euripides in the sixteenth century were dependent upon texts imported from the continent, meaning that the reception of Euripides in England in this period is deeply bound with this European context, and Lumley is no exception. 2. How Jane Lumley read her Euripides Given that the texts used by Lumley for her translation still survive, surprisingly little attention has been paid to them, even to the extent that a misconception is frequently repeated that she was using a single edition which contained both the Greek texts and Erasmus’ Latin translations of Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis.37 This, however, was not the case. The Greek text she used was the 1520 edition of the two plays printed by Thierry Martens in Louvain. It is now bound together with Erasmus’ translations printed in 1519 by Konrad Caesar in Cologne, but when they reached Arundel’s library in 1553 they were bound in separate volumes, and the catalogue of the Lumley library from 1609 testifies that they remained separate at that time. The catalogue specifies that the Greek text was bound with Plutarch’s Education of Children and two works by Erasmus (an epistle in praise of matrimony and another in praise of the art of medicine), which accords with a manuscript list of contents written in the first owner’s hand on the verso of the title page of the Euripides.38 This little collection places Euripides’ plays firmly in an educational context. Erasmus’ Latin translations, meanwhile, were bound with Perseus’ Satires; all the texts in the two volumes, with the exception of the Greek Euripides, were printed in Cologne.39 They bear witness to the strength of the connections between England and Cologne in the sixteenthcentury book trade.40

Most recently by Pollard, p. 77 no. 48. British Library 999.d. 1. See The Lumley Library. The Catalogue of 1609, ed. by Sears Jayne and Francis R. Johnson (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1956), nos 1736 and 1591. See also David Selwyn, The Library of Thomas Cranmer (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1996), nos 474–75. 39  The Plutarch seems to have been the 1519 edition printed by Eucharius Cervicornus (or Hirtzhorn) in Cologne, and the epistles by Erasmus were printed in 1518 by Nicolaus Caesar, also in Cologne. The Latin text was bound with Perseus’ Satires, printed once again by Hirtzhorn in Cologne. 40  Between 1515 and 1518, for example, Arnold Birkmann ran the London branch of a family bookselling operation based in Cologne. 37  38 

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The fact that two editions of the same plays by Euripides, one in Latin, one in Greek, were printed within a short space of time suggests that they were intended as companion pieces. Even in the fifteenth century Louvain and Cologne were considered close: when the University of Louvain was founded in 1426, it was not allowed to have a theology faculty, to avoid competition with the University of Cologne, so communication between printers in these two cities is highly plausible.41 Caesar may have contacted Martens about a joint project, knowing that Martens had expertise in printing Greek which he lacked; or perhaps Martens got hold of a copy of Caesar’s text and spotted an opportunity. Either way, these two texts came to England as part of a transnational Euripidean project. Their first owner was John Toker, who writes on the verso of the title page of the Greek text: ‘Liber Ioannis Toker / Collegij Card. in Oxonij’.42 Cardinal College was the precursor to Christ Church, founded by Cardinal Wolsey in 1525, and Toker was among its first canons.43 The college only existed until 1531, so Toker must have acquired the Greek text at least between 1525 and 1531, indicating that it made its way to England fairly quickly. He also helpfully gives the price he paid for it: 6s. 4d. This is the equivalent of about £150, presumably reflecting the fact that he bought it new, imported from the continent, and along with several other texts. Toker annotated the Greek text heavily, making linguistic corrections, and frequently copying out short extracts of Erasmus’ translations, with the source indicated, into the margins. He also added manuscript commonplace marks, in the form of double commas in the margins alongside noteworthy passages. Erasmus’ Latin text, meanwhile, is notably clean, indicating that none of its Renaissance readers felt the need to annotate it. From Toker, both texts passed to Thomas Cranmer (probably as gifts), who signed his name (‘Thomas Cantuariensis’, or Thomas of Canterbury) on the title page of the Greek text but left no further marks. Cranmer ended up on the wrong side of the Lady Jane Grey affair, and Arundel acquired his library when Cranmer was arrested after the accession of Mary. The striking resonances between Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia and Arundel’s own involvement in the betrayal and eventual execution of Lady Jane Grey, his niece and Jane Lumley’s cousin, have often been noted. Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters. The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 20. 42  ‘The book of John Toker, Cardinal College, Oxford’. 43  See Selwyn, p. lxiv. 41 

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As Hodgson-Wright points out, ‘the similarities between the cousins make the connection even more unsettling: Jane Lumley and Jane Grey shared a Christian name, were virtually the same age and had received a very similar education’.44 In fact, Purkiss argues that Iphigeneia could not have been written after Jane Grey’s execution in February 1554, since that would have made it ‘very uncomfortable reading for Arundel, and raised questions about just who had been sacrificed and how willingly’.45 However, this is to under­ estimate the dimensions of translation, coupled with ‘the polyphonic nature of drama’, which renders it ‘impossible to equate character with author, let alone character with translator’.46 Lumley was using texts which had been obtained by her father ‘as an indirect result of betraying Jane Grey’.47 Since Cranmer inscribed his name on the Greek title-page, the text physically bore witness to her father’s ambition at another’s expense. The presence of Cranmer’s signature shows that the characteristics of the texts Lumley read matter, because ‘literature exists, in any useful sense, only and always in its materializations’, which ‘are the conditions of its meaning rather than merely the containers of it’.48 This is perhaps intensified in the case of translation, in which a work is created through intense and specific concentration of attention on one or (in this case) two source texts. Less sensationally, Toker’s annotations make two key sixteenth-century reading strategies visible on the page. Lumley’s interest in sententiae, to which we will return later, has been noted by several critics, but it has not been recognized that she inherited a text which visibly advertises its sententious content through Toker’s addition of marginal commonplace marks.49 Meanwhile, his insertion of passages from Erasmus’ translations into the margins

Hodgson-Wright, p. 134. Purkiss, p. xxv. 46  Deborah Uman, ‘“Wonderfullye Astonied at the Stoutenes of Her Minde”: Translating Rhetoric and Education in Jane Lumley’s the Tragedie of Iphigeneia’, in Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England. Gender, Instruction, and Performance, ed. by Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 53–64 (p. 55). 47  Hodgson-Wright, p. 134. 48  David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 4. 49  For example, Hodgson-Wright, p.  138. A  manuscript from some twenty years later containing a transcription of the sententiae painted on the walls at Gorhambury was ‘sent to the Good Ladye Lumley at her Desire’ (British Library MS Royal 17.A.xxiii, fol. 3r). Mary’s translations of sententiae for their father further suggest that this was a family interest and one certainly encouraged by their education. 44  45 

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of the Greek text encourages a kind of double-vision, reflecting and producing what Patricia Demers has called ‘the blended experience of the Greek and Latin texts’ at this time.50 Turning to Erasmus’ full translations, Lumley would have found not only the plays themselves, but the prefatory material in which Erasmus sets out his methodology. Lumley thus had Erasmus’ theo­r y and practice before her when she came to make her own translation of Iphigenia in Aulis. In the remainder of this paper, I will argue that Lumley’s Iphigeneia constitutes a meaningful engagement with Erasmus on a conceptual level, beyond simple echoes in phrasing and vocabulary. First, however, it is necessary to revisit the case for Lumley’s use of Greek. 3. ‘Translated out of Greake’ Early criticism established beyond a shadow of a doubt that Lumley made use of Erasmus’ Latin translation of Iphigenia in Aulis. The Greek text does not include a hypothesis for this play, and so Erasmus supplies his own; Lumley translates his ‘Argumentum’ as ‘The Argument of the Tragadie [sic]’. Her phrasing frequently echoes Erasmus’, most obviously when he deviates from the Greek text. So, for example, Erasmus expands ἀλλ᾽ εἶα (‘but come’, 435) to ‘sed interim haec omittimus’ (‘but meanwhile let us leave aside these things’, 562); in Lumley’s translation this becomes ‘[b]ut nowe let us leave to speake of suche thinges’ (287).51 Her choice of words, too, is often inflected by Erasmus’ Latin: compare, for instance, iniuria (100), iniurye (68); salutans (434), salutinge (202); dignitatis (480), dignite (241), to name just a few instances. These Erasmian fingerprints have suggested to some critics that Lumley need not have consulted the Greek at all; Crane concluded that ‘Lady Lumley shows no knowledge of Greek’ whatsoever.52 Though some critics have been tempted to take Lumley’s claim in her title to have ‘Translated out of Greake’ more seriously, limited evidence has been forthcoming so far. Gillian Wright’s verdict in 2010 was that ‘it is not yet

Demers, p. 38. The Greek text is quoted from Euripides, Euripides. Iphigenia in Aulis, ed. by Christopher Collard and James Morwood, (Liverpool: Aris & Phillips, 2017). Erasmus’ translations are quoted from Desiderius Erasmus, Erasmi Opera Omnia, ed.  by J.  H. Waszink et al. (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1969-), I-1, henceforth ‘ASD’. Literal English translations of Euripides and Erasmus’ plays are my own. For further examples of Lumley’s use of Erasmus, see Greene; Crane. 52  Crane, p. 228. 50  51 

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clear’ whether Lumley ‘also draws on Euripides’ original Greek’.53 The most significant points to have been raised so far are as follows. Child considered that Lumley’s spelling of ‘Iphigeneia’ reflects the Greek Ἰφιγένεια;54 in Latin (and in Erasmus’ version) it is Iphigenia. Though sixteenth-century spelling might seem rather too volatile to be a reliable guide, Lumley is remarkably consistent in using either Iphigeneia or Iphigeneya throughout the manuscript. Pollard adds that Lumley’s ‘Truly, it is a uerie troblesome thinge to haue children: for we are euen by nature compelled to be sorie for their mishappes’ (831–33) reveals an ‘emphasis on the terrible passions intrinsic in maternity’ which ‘is strikingly Euripidean’; Erasmus, by contrast, ‘emphasizes strength’.55 On closer inspection, the text reveals some compelling internal evidence for Lumley’s use of Euripides’ Greek. In the simplicity of her diction Lumley often seems closer to the Greek than to the Latin, though it is difficult to isolate conclusive examples because English and Greek syntax can naturally fall into some patterns that are alien to Latin. However, at times a clearer picture emerges. She translates line 463 (Ὦ πάτερ, ἀποκτενεῖς με;), for example, very directly as ‘O father will you kill me?’ (305), whereas Erasmus expands to ‘O pater, me occidere / Paras?’ (‘O father, are you preparing to kill me?’, 597–98). Line 343 (κᾆτ᾽ ἐπεὶ κατέσχες ἀρχάς,  μεταβαλὼν  ἄλλους  τρόπους) she translates as ‘But as sone as you had obtained this honor, with [sic] you began to change your condicions’ (204–05). Erasmus’ translation, ‘Ast [sic] ut imperio es potitus, non es iisdem moribus’, is literally ‘But when once you obtained the power, you are not of the same disposition’ (437). Lumley thus follows the Greek (literally, ‘Then when you obtained the command, [you began] changing your manners’), which aligns more easily with English syntax. As a preposition, μετά commonly means ‘with’, possibly explaining Lumley’s initial ‘withe’, subsequently deleted. Erasmus exercised greater freedom in translating Iphigenia in Aulis than in his previous translation of Hecuba, as Erika Rummel has demonstrated.

Gillian Wright, ‘Translating at Leisure: Gentlemen and Gentlewomen’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 2:  1550–1660, ed.  by Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 58–67 (p. 63). 54  Lumley, p. vii. 55  Pollard, p.  52. Euripides: δεινὸν τὸ τίκτειν καὶ φέρει φίλτρον μέγα  / πᾶσίν τε κοινὸν ἐσθ᾽ ὑπερκάμνειν τέκνων (917–18); Erasmus: ‘Res efficax peperisse, vimque maximam  / Amoris adfert omnibus communiter, / Uti pro suis summe adlaborent liberis’ (1259–61).

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Where his Hecuba is less than a hundred lines longer than Euripides’, his Iphigenia in Aulis exceeds the Greek by over 700 lines.56 Lumley’s impulse, as we have seen, is towards concision and simplicity, and at times this comes into conflict with Erasmus’ amplifications. A  good example comes in Erasmus’ treatment of stichomythia, in which Euripides’ characters rapidly exchange single lines of iambic trimeter. The resulting syntactical and grammatical compression makes stichomythia notoriously difficult to translate (or at least to translate well), and Erasmus gets around the problem by translating each of Euripides’ lines with two of his own in the same metre.57 Iphigenia’s line, σὺν μητρὶ πλεύσασ᾽ ἢ μόνη πορεύσομαι; (literally, ‘Shall I travel having sailed with my mother or alone?’, 668) is expanded to ‘Utrumne dulci navigavero comes / Matri anne ego istam sola conficio viam?’ (‘Shall I have sailed as companion to my sweet mother or do I complete this journey alone?’, 904–05). Lumley, meanwhile, cuts through Erasmus’ padding, to produce ‘shall I goo alone, or els with my mother?’ (418). Moreover, her reversal of the structure is inexplicable in relation to Erasmus’ two main verbs (navigavero and conficio), whereas it is a perfectly logical way to deal with the subordination of the participle (πλεύσασ᾽) to the verb (πορεύσομαι) in the Greek. Lumley, then, does not follow Erasmus indiscriminately where his translation proves to be unnecessarily verbose, or more convoluted than the Greek. The evidence suggests that she was using both Erasmus’ Latin and Euripides’ Greek in parallel. She had access to both texts, and the linguistic skills to use them. As a result, her translation beautifully conveys the ‘blended experience’ articulated by Demers. Erasmus’ influence, however, goes beyond the linguistic. He encouraged, through his theory and practice, certain modes of reading Euripides which find expression in Lumley’s translation, and which remained influential throughout the sixteenth century. 4. Reading Euripides with Erasmus Lumley’s copy of Erasmus’ translations includes his prefatory epistles to both Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis. These are of particular interest because they

Erika Rummel, Erasmus as a Translator of the Classics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), esp. pp. 31–37. 57  Lumley, of course, is untroubled by metrical considerations, and is able to vary her linelengths to preserve both clarity and concision, though at the expense of the rapid pace of the Greek. 56 

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contain comments on his methodology in translating each play. In Hecuba, he explains, ‘I try, as far as possible, to represent the shape and (as it were) texture of the Greek poetry, and I strive to render verse for verse, and almost word for word, and I study everywhere to mete out the force and weight of the meaning with fidelity for Latin ears’.58 However, when it comes to Iphigenia in Aulis, he notes that he relaxed his approach somewhat, in order to translate it ‘a little more freely’ (‘paulo […] fusius’).59 Erasmus thus explicitly validated an approach which privileged the target language, and indeed the target audience, licensing some degree of creativity with regard to the source text to that end. This greater freedom is most evident in his treatment of the choral odes. In Hecuba, he had attempted to reproduce the complex effects of the Greek choruses directly, leading him to complain that they were ‘so obscure, that it is a task for some Oedipus or Delian prophet rather than a translator’ (‘adeo obscuros, ut Oedipo quopiam aut Delio sit opus magis quam interprete’).60 For Iphigenia in Aulis, he opted ‘to differ from the author’ (‘ausi dissentire’) in reducing the metrical complexity of the choruses.61 Rummel notes that this was due to more than their technical difficulty: ‘Erasmus’ aversion to the extravagance and concomitant obscurity of the choral parts’ made it ‘as much an emotional as a practical decision to deviate from the original form, which was alien to his spirit, and to impose a new form that was more congenial to his own taste’.62 He even declared that should he translate another Greek tragedy, he would ‘not be afraid to change the style and contents of the choruses entirely’ (‘non vererer chororum et stilum et argumenta commutare’).63 Lumley’s decision to omit the choral odes should be seen in the light of these comments. Given her general strategy of reduction and simplification, Lumley would have responded to the extravagance and obscurity of the choral odes, which are linguistically convoluted and crowded with mythological ASD I.1, p. 218: ‘conor, quoad licet, Graecanici poematis figuras quasique filum representare, dum versum versui, dum verbum pene verbo reddere nitor, dum ubique sententiae vim ac pondus summa cum fide Latinis auribus appendere studeo’. Translations of Erasmus’ prose are based on R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson in The Correspondence of Erasmus, Vol. 2: Letters 142 to 297 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975). 59  ASD I.1, p. 272: ‘Proinde Iphigeniam paulo tum fusius tum copiosius traduximus, at ita rursum, ut ab interpretis fide neutiquam recederemus’. 60  ASD, I.1, p. 217. 61  ASD, I.1, p. 272. 62  Rummel, p. 32. 63  ASD, I.1, p. 272. 58 

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references, with as much aversion as Erasmus. Cutting them, on the other hand, has the clear benefit of increasing the dramatic pace. Lumley does not, however, choose to eliminate the chorus from the play entirely. This may partly have been because it would be inconvenient to re-assign its dialogue, where necessary, amongst the other characters. But having a chorus of women also translates effectively into the domestic context of Lumley’s work, creating an intimate female setting which she was presumably reluctant to lose. In addition, she clearly recognized in the chorus a convenient dramatic device – the first line she gives it, in fact, is an invented cue line (‘What is this? Me thinks I see Menelaius strivinge withe Agamemnons servante’, 133–34). A further function of the chorus which Lumley seems to have appreciated is its penchant for speaking in sententiae, something that Erasmus too was interested in. The second choral ode in the Greek, for example, opens with the idea of moderation in love: ‘Happy are those who, with the goddess [Aphrodite] in moderation…’ (μάκαρες οἳ μετρίας θεοῦ, 543). Erasmus here inserts a more expansive general adage: ‘Felices, quibus obtigit  / Sors nec summa nec infima / Sed sane modica’ (‘They are happy, to whose lot befalls neither the highest nor the lowest things, but the happy medium’, 696–98). Although she omits the remainder of the ode, Lumley retains these lines from Erasmus, expanding them still further: ‘Truly we may see nowe, that they are mooste happie, whiche beinge neither in to hye estate, nor yet oppressed with to moche povertie, may quietly enjoye the companie of their frindes’ (366–72). The Renaissance tendency to value Euripides for the utility of his sententiae was encouraged by Quintilian, the Roman author of the rhetorical handbook Institutio Oratoria, who observes that the tragedian is ‘full of striking thoughts (sententiae), and almost a match for the philosophers in expressing their teaching’ (10.1.68).64 Erasmus, who worked on his popular collection of Adages throughout his life, certainly appreciated Euripides for his sententious content, and his translations emphasize this characteristic.65 The utility of Greek, for Erasmus, went beyond the acquisition of gnomic wisdom. Learning Greek was crucial to pursuing a better understanding of

Donald A. Russell, trans., Quintilian. The Orator’s Education, 5 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 65  Aside from occasionally tweaking his phrasing to produce suitable maxims, the 1507 edition printed at Erasmus’ request by Aldus Manutius contained printed commonplace marks to draw them to the reader’s attention. Lumley’s edition of the Latin text, however, does not contain gnomic pointing. 64 

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scripture, a connection which he draws in his preface to Hecuba. Here, he proclaims that he began translating Greek authors to further the cause of theology, and hints that this is preparation for a greater work, his eventual Latin translation of the Greek New Testament.66 But he also encouraged a strong tendency to read the potential for Christian allegory into Greek tragedy. Iphigenia in Aulis’ fable of a father sacrificing a daughter recalled the biblical story of Jephthah, while the substitution of a deer for Iphigenia on the altar finds a pattern in Abraham and Isaac. The figure of the willing sacrifice, of course, is inevitably read as a type of Christ. Erasmus extends the messenger’s speech describing Iphigenia’s sacrifice considerably, from 72 lines of Greek to 107 lines of Latin, and ‘renders the Greek with implicitly Christian diction’.67 In the Greek, the messenger concludes with ‘this day saw your daughter dead and seeing [the sun]’ (ἦμαρ γὰρ τόδε / θανοῦσαν εἶδε καὶ βλέπουσαν παῖδα σήν, 1611–12). Erasmus’ messenger declares: ‘this one day has seen your daughter both dead and alive’ (‘hic unus filiam mulier tuam / Et mortuam conspexit et vivam dies’, 2325-26) in phrasing which, as Elaine Beilin points out, echoes Revelation 1.17–18 in the Vulgate (and in Erasmus’ translation), ‘ego sum […] et vivus et fui mortuus’.68 Lumley reverses the order she finds in the Greek and in Erasmus, translating the lines as ‘this daie your daughter hath bene bothe alive and deade’, aligning the syntax even more closely to the biblical phrasing. Most significantly, she makes a subtle alteration to the description of the deer which is substituted for Iphigenia. In the Greek, it is an ἔλαφος (‘deer’, 1587), which agreement in the rest of the passage genders female. Erasmus thus translates it as cerva, or ‘hind’ (2288). Lumley was not the only English Renaissance reader to be struck by this moment; in his copy of Erasmus’ translations, Gabriel Harvey underlined ‘eius loco cerva supposita est’ (‘in her place a hind was substituted’) in Erasmus’ argument for the play, and wrote underneath: ‘Cerva pro Iphigenia’ (‘a hind for Iphigenia’).69 But Lumley goes further, identifying it as ‘a white hart’ (942). The white hart was a symbol for Christ, and Lumley deftly exploits the gender ambiguity of ‘hart’ as a translation of

ASD I.1, p. 216. Elaine  V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve. Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 156. 68  Beilin, p. 314 n. 13. 69  Euripides, Hecuba & Iphigenia in Aulide…in latinam tralatae, Erasmo Roterodamo interprete (Venice, 1507), Harvard, *EC.H2623.Zz507e, digitized at https://iiif.lib.harvard. edu/manifests/view/drs:437297525$281. Sig. D1r. 66  67 

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ἔλαφος/cerva, so that her ‘white hart’ is a placeholder for both Christ and Iphigenia. Finally, I would like to suggest that Lumley’s simple prose, so deficient in the eyes of earlier commentators, might be a serious attempt to engage with the style of Euripides’ Greek in Iphigenia in Aulis, as articulated by Erasmus and experienced by Lumley herself. In the preface to Hecuba, Erasmus writes: Although nowhere here will they hear the grandiloquence of Latin tragedy, the bombast and enormous words (as Horace says), they should not blame me if, discharging the office of translator, I have been inclined to reproduce his concise purity and elegance rather than an inflation alien to it, and which does not please me particularly anyway.70

The strong contrast which Erasmus draws between the ‘concise purity and elegance’ (‘pressam sanitatem elegantiamque’)71 of Euripides’ style and the ‘grandiloquence, bombast, and enormous words’ (‘grandiloquentiam, ampullas, et sesquipedalia verba’) of Latin tragedy is striking. Elsewhere in the epistle, Euripides is described as ‘admirably concise, delicate, and exquisite in style’ (‘mirum in modum presso subtili excusso’). The repeated word ‘concise’ (pressus) clearly expresses something important about Euripides for Erasmus.72 Moreover, in the preface to Iphigenia in Aulis, Erasmus identifies the particular style of this play: ‘it has’, he says, ‘a little more naturalness [candor] and its style is more flowing’.73 These key terms, pressus (concise) and candor (simplicity, naturalness), could also be used to articulate the fundamental qualities of Lumley’s style. It is worth noting that one highly influential English reader developed a very similar vernacular prose style to Lumley’s, explicitly in order to translate the qualities which he perceived to be characteristic of Greek. William Tyndale’s ASD, I.1, p.  218: ‘quod Latinae tragoediae grandiloquentiam, ampullas et sesquipedalia (ut Flaccus ait) verba hic nusquam audient, mihi non debent imputare, si interpretis officio fungens eius quem verti pressam sanitatem elegantiamque referre malui quam alienum tumorem, qui me nec alias magnopere delectat’. 71  C.  O. Brink, ed., Horace on Poetry: The ‘Ars Poetica’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 344: ‘In that sense [of ‘healthy balance’] sanitas in rhetoric is presumed to be characteristic of the Attic style or its imitators’, as in Quintilian 10.1.44, ‘healthy and truly Attic style’ (sana et vere Attica). 72  Quintilian uses pressus as an antonym for abundans: ‘laete an severe, abundanter an presse’ (‘luxuriantly or severely, abundantly or concisely’, 8.3.40). He does not use it to describe Euripides but finds Homer ‘idem laetus ac pressus’ (‘at the same time luxuriant and concise’, 10.1.46). 73  ‘plusculum habet candoris et fusior est dictio’ (ASD I.1, p. 271). 70 

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English prose has been described as ‘simple, terse, idiomatic, and homely’74 – all terms which are equally applicable to Lumley’s style (Agamemnon, for example, complains that ‘this renowne is verye brickle’, 24). Tyndale believed that ‘the Greeke tounge agreeth more with the English, then wyth the Latin’, something that Lumley too seems to have found at times.75 Of course, the differences between the language of the Greek New Testament and Euri­ pides’ verse are considerable, and Tyndale’s Protestantism is not likely to have appealed to the Catholic Lumley. But her translation of Euripides uses a register that could well reflect a sense of the pressus candor of Euripides’ Greek. 5. Conclusion It is often observed that for early modern women translation, particularly of religious texts, offered a sanctioned outlet for intellectual expression (to some extent at least), allowing them to break their culturally imposed silence through a form of ventriloquism.76 Drawing attention to the multivocal nature of translated texts, Deborah Uman proposes that ‘translation may have presented [women] not with a vehicle that facilitated clear selfexpression but rather with a strategy of articulation that accurately mirrored their own complicated positions in the public and private spheres’.77 Lumley’s translation highlights the domestic, vernacular experiences of women in ways that might be seen as resistant to academic humanist paradigms, and the undertaking itself may be explained partly by her gender – she carried on her classical studies after her male relatives had abandoned them to pursue careers at court.78 At the same time, her text exhibits modes of reading Euripides that are typical of Renaissance humanism, and it should be taken

William Tyndale, The Work of William Tyndale, ed. by G. E. Duffield (Appleford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1964), p. xxvi. 75  Tyndale, p. 326. 76  See, for example, Margaret Hannay, ed. Silent but for the Word. Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985). 77  Deborah Uman, Women as Translators in Early Modern England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), p. 5. 78  On the Cooke sisters, Gemma Allen remarks: ‘As befits women who were educated outside of an institution, their learning was unbounded by specific time-frames and took place throughout their lives’. Gemma Allen, The Cooke Sisters. Education, Piety and Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 43. 74 

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seriously as a place in which these are performed and made visible. Lumley’s work illustrates the extent to which the reception of Euripides in this period was inseparable from the European context, not only through the material texts she was using but also through her engagement with Erasmus’ theory and practice. Far from representing the shortcomings of Lumley’s efforts, the presence of Erasmus as an intermediary text establishes her translation as a participant in the wider European reception of Euripides in the sixteenth century. Refocusing attention on her work’s claim to be a ‘Tragedie of Euripides […] translated out of Greake’, without losing the productive emphasis of recent criticism on its dramatic qualities, sets the concision and simplicity of Lumley’s prose in a new light.

Plutarch in sixteenth-century France and England: an insight into The Life of Coriolanus as translated by Amyot and North Angelica Vedelago

I

n a recent volume, Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson highlight the intensity of the ‘interaction between the cultures of translation’ in England and France between 1500 and 1660.1 A text that exemplifies this vibrant exchange is Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, published in 1579 under the title The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. North’s translation was not a direct rendition of the Greek original: he primarily translated from a French version of the Plutarchan biographies entitled Les vies des hommes illustres grecs et romains, first published in 1559 and produced by the French bishop, royal tutor and counsellor Jacques Amyot.2 The aim of this paper is twofold: first, I will try to reassess the importance of the intermediary translator Amyot in light of his contribution to the histories of French and English translation; then, I will focus on a specific biography, The Life of Coriolanus, in order to investigate North’s relationship to Amyot. This will hopefully demonstrate that North shares Amyot’s translation methods more than has been previously maintained, though North does deviate from his source text on numerous occasions. What I set out to do is to reassess, if not disprove, F. O. Matthiessen’s famous contention that The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660, ed. by Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015),  p.  6. I  am grateful to Fred Schurink for his insightful suggestions. 2  Plutarchus, The Liues of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together by that graue learned philosopher and historiographer, Plutarke of Chaeronea (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1579). Plutarchus, Les vies des hommes illustres grecs et romains, trans. by Jacques Amyot (Lausanne: François Le Preux, 1574). All quotations from North and Amyot will be taken from these editions, henceforth referred to as ‘Plutarchus, Lives’ and ‘Plutarchus, Vies’ respectively. 1 

Acquisition through Translation: Towards a Definition of Renaissance Translation, ed. by Alessandra Petrina et Federica Masiero, TMT 18 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 93–114 © DOI 10.1484/M.TMT-EB.5.120920

FHG

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North’s alterations from the French were a way of complying with ‘the habits of Elizabethan speech’.3 I will argue that many of these habits turn out to be less specific to the English language than it might seem: rather, they are writing practices shared by most European languages, which were on their way towards definition. These habits belong to a ‘common background […] inherited from Greece and Rome’ which, as F. M. Rener has demonstrated, formed a set of widely shared norms affecting also the practice of translation.4 These rules inform also Amyot’s version of Plutarch. Therefore, when North conforms to these classical patterns of writing and translating, he is not distancing himself from Amyot, but is rather following his model by readapting his translation methods. North’s Plutarch appeared in a period in which translation activity with English as a target language was particularly thriving: between 1571 and 1584, translations printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, as well as those into English printed abroad, amounted to 24.75% of the relative total printed output, the second highest figure in the period 1473–1640.5 More specifically, North’s translation epitomizes the close interrelations between French and English, well illustrated by the data gathered by Demetriou and Tomlinson on the basis of the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads catalogue. Over the time-span 1500–1660, French represented the second intermediary or ‘pivot’6 language of translation into English, second only to Latin: English translations with French and Latin as their intermediary language respectively amounted to 40% and 42.1% of the total output of translations into English in this period, while the other main European vernaculars had far smaller percentages (Italian: 8.5%, Dutch: 5%, German: 2.4%, Spanish: 1.2%).7 French was the predominant source language amongst the vernaculars in direct translations, too: according to the RCC catalogue, English translations from French considerably outnumbered those from the other European languages, representing 18.1% of the total output of 3  F. O. Matthiessen, Translation. An Elizabethan Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), p. 78. 4  F.  M. Rener, Intepretatio. Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), p. 7. 5  Warren Boutcher, ‘From Cultural Translation to Cultures of Translation?’, in The Culture of Translation, p. 25. 6  These definitions are based on Demetriou and Tomlinson, in turn referring to the terminology adopted by the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads catalogue; Demetriou and Tomlinson, ‘Introduction’, in The Culture of Translation, p. 3. 7  Demetriou and Tomlinson, ‘Introduction’, p. 4.

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direct translations, followed by works translated from Spanish (5.6%), Italian (5.3%), German (3.6%) and Dutch (3.6%).8 In ‘horizontal’9 translation, from a vernacular language into another, French held a prominent position. What is more, the increased importance of French challenged the supremacy of the ‘vertical’ kind of translation: although Latin’s hegemony remained undisputed, representing the original language of 31.7% of English translations in this period, the number of translations from French surpassed those from Greek and Hebrew, which amounted to 13.9% and 17.8% respectively. However, North’s Lives has mostly been studied not for its representativeness but because it is the major source of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. If this helped North defy oblivion, it is surprising that the same cannot be said about Amyot, who enabled North to English them in the first place. Matthiessen did acknowledge the importance of Amyot not only for North, who ‘without Amyot […] could not have written’,10 but also for the development of English prose as a whole.11 However, Amyot’s merits towards English culture, which are not limited to his translation of Plutarch’s Lives, have since been ignored.12 Only very recently have they been reassessed, with Demetriou and Tomlinson going so far as to label Amyot as ‘more important to [English culture] than North’.13 Among Amyot’s first admirers, North himself duly acknowledged his debt to the French scholar in the very subtitle of his translation: ‘translated out of Greeke into French by Iames Amyot, Abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, one of the Kings priuy counsel, and great Amner of Fraunce, and out of French into Englishe, by Thomas North’. North’s esteem for the French humanist is also testified by his decision to include Amyot’s ‘Epistle to the Reader’: ‘The profit of stories, and the prayse of the Author, are sufficiently declared by Amiot, in his Epistle to the Reader:

Demetriou and Tomlinson, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. Gianfranco Folena, Volgarizzare e tradurre (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), p. 13. Although Folena employs these terms with reference to medieval translations, they can be safely applied to Renaissance translations, too, if we look at translation from a hierarchical conception of languages. Neil Rhodes, Gordon Kendal and Louise Wilson refer to ‘vertical and horizontal lines of translation’ with similar hierarchical implications; Rhodes et al., ‘Introduction’, in English Renaissance Translation Theory (London: MHRA, 2013), pp. 32, 47. 10  Matthiessen, pp. 57, 67, 74. 11  ‘[T]he whole course of English prose owes a great debt to the Bishop of Auxerre than has ever been generally recognized’; Matthiessen, p. 68. 12  Also Plutarch’s Moralia and Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe were translated into English out of his French; see Demetriou and Tomlison, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. 13  Demetriou and Tomlison, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. 8  9 

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So that I shall not neede to make many words thereof ’.14 In France, Amyot’s legacy to French literature was celebrated as early as 1580 by Michel de Montaigne in his Essais: Je donne avec grande raison, ce me semble, la palme à Jacques Amiot sur tous nos ecrivains François, non seulement pour la naiveté & pureté du langage […], ny pour la constance d’un si long travail, ny pour la profondeur de son savoir […], mais sur tout ie luy sçay bon gré d’avoir seeu trier & choisir un livre si digne & si a propos pour en faire present a son pais. Nous autres ignorans estions perdus si ce livre ne nous eut relevés du bourbier, sa mercy nous osons a cet’heure & parler & escrire, les dames en regentent les maistres d’escole, c’est nostre breviaire.15

As Warren Boutcher points out, Montaigne counts Amyot among writers, not translators:16 this classification alone testifies to the significant role that Montaigne attributed to Amyot in the shaping of French prose. Amyot’s work as a translator indeed left a decisive imprint in France on both the history of translation and that of language – two histories which often go hand in hand in Renaissance Europe. In Antoine Berman’s ‘archeology of translation’, Amyot is one of the two key figures that contributed to the physiognomy of translation in France together with Nicole Oresme, who, like Amyot, was bishop, royal tutor and counsellor.17 Oresme can be inscribed in the first stages of the ‘linguistic policy’18 initiated by French kings in the fourteenth century, the practice of the translatio studii, i.e., the systematic translation of Latin works by ancient authors into vernacular. This operation entailed the creation of the learned vocabulary, previously absent

North, ‘To the Reader’, in Plutarchus, Lives, sig. *3r. Michel de Montaigne, Essais. Livre Second (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1580), pp. 35– 36. ‘It seems to me that I am justified in awarding the palm, above all our writers in French, to Jacques Amyot, not merely for the simplicity and purity of his language […], nor for his constancy during such a long piece of work, nor for the profundity of his knowledge […]; but above all I am grateful to him for having chosen and selected so worthy and so appropriate a book to present to his country. Ignorant people like us would have been lost if that book had not brought us up out of the mire: thanks to it, we now dare to speak and to write – and the ladies teach the dominies; it is our breviary’. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 408. For other contemporary or near-contemporary judgements on Amyot, see Antoine Berman, Jacques Amyot, Traducteur Français (Paris: Belin, 2012), pp. 206–08. 16  Boutcher, p. 28. 17  Berman, pp. 16–18. 18  Berman, p. 33. 14  15 

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in the French language, and reflected the French monarchs’ intention to gain more independence from the pervasive influence of the Church and its Latin-speaking culture: by encouraging and financing translations, the kings aimed at the foundation of a French national culture, which was expected to legitimize their power.19 More than Oresme, Amyot paved the way for subsequent developments of French translation. In his Vies two constant and distinct tendencies coexist: in Berman’s terms, the ‘Belles Infidèles’ trend and the literalizing one.20 On the one hand, Amyot’s approach to the original text was philologically precise, as his research in the libraries of Venice and Rome during his stay in Italy (1546–52) confirms; furthermore, his version shows a high degree of fidelity to the original, which is visible in the tendency to Graecize the French language.21 On the other hand, the literal adherence to the source text is sacrificed when it comes to facilitating the understanding of the target text in accordance with a ‘domesticating’ method.22 As we have seen above, Montaigne himself underlined the accessibility of Amyot’s version. Amyot’s attention to his reader’s expectations is greater than he declares. In his preface, he discusses the reasons why his version might appear less flowing than his previous translations from Greek,23 thereby pre-empting any criticism about its quality: If it so fortune that men find not the speech of this translation so flowing, as they have found some other of mine […]: I beseech the reader to consider, that the office of a fit translater, consisteth not onely the faithfull expressing

Berman, p. 32. King Charles V commissioned to Oresme the translation of some Aristotelian works, completed by the bishop between 1370 and 1377 against good payment and with the king constantly ensuring that he worked under the best conditions (Berman, p. 45). 20  Berman, pp. 20–21. The definition of the first tendency is based on Gilles Ménage’s famous description of Nicolas Perrot D’Ablancourt’s translation of Lucian (1654); see Vincent Giroud, ‘Translation’ in The Oxford Companion to the Book, ed. by Michael F. Suarez, S. J. and H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 1215–17 (p. 1216). 21  On Amyot’s Grecization of the French see Berman, pp. 183–85. 22  Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 20. 23  Before Plutarch’s Lives, Amyot had translated Heliodorus’s Aithiopiká under the title L’Historie éthiopique ou Théagène et Chariclée (1547), Diodurus Siculus’s Βιβλιοθήκη ἱστορική published as Sept livres des Histoires de Diodore (1554). The year 1559 saw the publication of both the Vies and Les Amours de Daphnis et Chloé, his translation of Longus’s novel. Later, he translated Plutarch’s Moralia as Œuvres morales et meslées (1572). See Henri van Hoof, Dictionnaire universel des traducteurs (Geneva: Slatkine, 1993), p. 7. 19 

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Angelica Vedelago of his authors meaning, but also in a certain resembling and shadowing out of the forme of his style and the maner of his speaking […] For how harsh or rude soever my speech be, yet am I sure that my translation will be much easier to my countrymen, than the Greeke copie is, even to such as are best practised in the Greeke tonge, by reason of Plutarkes peculiar maner of inditing, which is rather sharpe, learned, and short, than plained, polished, and easie.24

Any obscurity in his translation is less imputable to the translator than to the original, whose ‘sharped, learned, and short’ style is faithfully conveyed by Amyot, even to the detriment of clarity. A similar stance is expressed in the dedication to Henri II, son of the king who had commissioned the translation of the Lives, François I:25 Je confesse avoir plus éstudié à render fideliment ce que l’autheur a voulu dire, que non pas à orner ou polir le langage, ainsi que luy-mesme à mieux aimé escrire doctement et gravement en sa langue, que non pas doucement ny facilement.26

Such statements – partly a rhetorical strategy of modesty – are nonetheless revealing of Amyot’s concern for his readership. Although Amyot seems to regard his translation as opaque, the translator’s fidelity does not impair his legacy to the French language, as Montaigne and others after him have recognized.27 Amyot’s translation not only contributed to the development of prose composition,28 but also enriched French learned vocabulary. Without renouncing the rhetoric of modesty, Amyot takes explicit credit for this in his dedication to Henri II: J’espère, Sire, que […] vous aurez pour agreable l’humble affection que j’ay euë en ce faisant, de recommender à la posteritè la memoire de vostre glorieuse

Amyot, ‘Amiot to the Readers’, trans. by North, in Plutarchus, Lives, sig. *8r. Berman, p. 57. 26  ‘I admit that I strove more to render faithfully what the author wanted to say than to embellish and polish the language in the same way in which he himself preferred to write learnedly and gravely in his language rather than sweetly or easily’ (translations are mine unless otherwise indicated); Amyot, ‘Au très puissant et très chrestien Roy de France Henry deuxième’, in Plutarchus, Vies, sig. A2v–A3r. 27  Berman, pp.  206–08; Gérard Walter, ‘Introduction’, in Plutarchus, Les vies des hommes illustres, ed. by Gérard Walter (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), i, pp. vii–xxxii (pp. xxv–xxvi). 28  Berman, p. 7.

24 

25 

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regne, de server au bien public de vos sujets, et d’enrichir nostre langue Francoise, selon la foible portee de mon peu de sens et de literature.29

Amyot’s Plutarch, therefore, fulfils the twofold function that Oresme assigned to translation: the appropriation of knowledge, the translatio studii, and the attendant forging of a ‘français lettré et savant’.30 The importance of Amyot’s translation can be better appreciated if set against the background of the translation history of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.31 Composed between the first and the second century ad, the work enjoyed a long afterlife during the Roman empire but, after the fall of the Western empire, the history of its transmission took two different routes: in medieval Byzantium the Lives survived thanks to the philological endeavour of Maximus Planudes, while in the Latin West Plutarch’s works fell into oblivion, apart from sporadic mentions of the author’s name. Early humanists such as Petrarch tried to read the collection in the original version, and there was no attempt at translating the Lives until around 1380, when a translation into Aragonese appeared. This first version in a vernacular language inaugurated what Roberto Weiss has defined a Plutarchan age, which lasted up to the 1420s, with an increased interest in Plutarch’s biographies and the effort to translate them into Latin.32 The first Latin translation was prompted by the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras, whose pupils in Florence, including Leonardo Bruni and Guarino Guarini, produced Latin versions of various biographies.33 These translations were gathered in a text circulating in 1460: this manuscript version indicates the name of each translator, though some attributions are uncertain.34 In 1470 this partial Latin version was edited

‘I hope, Your Majesty, that  […] you will hold dear my humble affection in doing this, i.e., recommending to posterity the memory of your glorious reign, contributing to the commonwealth of your subjects, and enriching our French language according to the feeble measure of my small sense of literature’; Amyot, ‘Au très puissant …’, sig. A2v–A3r. 30  Berman, p. 6. 31  This overview of the transmission of Plutarch’s Lives is indebted to Marianne Pade, ‘The Reception of Plutarch from Antiquity to Italian Renaissance’, in A Companion to Plutarch, ed. by Mark Beck (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), pp. 531–43. 32  Roberto Weiss, Medieval and Humanist Greek. Collected Essays (Padua: Antenore, 1977), p. 226. 33  V.  R. Giustiniani, ‘Sulle traduzioni latine delle Vite di Plutarco nel Quattrocento’, Rinascimento, 1 (1961), 3–62 (p. 4). 34  For example, Giovanni Antonio Campano’s edition attributes the Latin version of The Life of Cato to Bruni, who did translate The Life of Cato between 1405 and 1408; however, the version in Campano’s edition is by Francesco Barbaro (Giustiniani, p. 27). 29 

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by Giovanni Antonio Campano, first printed by Ulrich Han in Rome, and later reprinted at least eighteen times throughout Europe between 1470 and 1560.35 It was then the basis for several vernacular translations between 1482 and 1564: Italian, German, and Spanish versions were published,36 whereas French and English ones remained in manuscript form.37 The 1560s saw the publication of two other Latin translations (one in 1561 by the German Wilhelm Holtzman [Xylander] and one in 1564 by the Dutch Herman Croeser [Cruserius]), which were both more precise than Campano’s version but did not enjoy equal success.38 In terms of circulation, Amyot’s French translation ensured the longevity of Plutarch’s Lives throughout the Renaissance more than the Latin versions of the two humanists, also partly indebted to Amyot;39 moreover, his was the first complete direct rendition of Plutarch from the original into a vernacular language.40 Amyot’s engagement with Plutarch’s Lives covers at least forty years of his life, from 1542 to 1584.41 However, Amyot’s actual work of translation dates back only to the period from 1542 to 1559, the publication year of his first edition.42 Giustiniani, pp. 4, 44–45. Giustiniani, p. 6. 37  On French manuscript translations from Campano’s edition, see Auguste De Blignières, Essai sur Amyot et les traducteurs français au XVIe siècle (Paris: Durand, 1851), p. 177 and Elina Suomela-Härmä, ‘Simon Bourgouin, traducteur à l’avant-garde’, Studi Francesi, 176 (2015) 235–46 (p.  236). One of the French translators is Simon Bourgouin, who translated six biographies. The English, manuscript translations based on Campano’s version were authored by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, who translated five biographies into English; see James  P. Carley, ‘The Writings of Henry Parker, Lord Morley’ in ‘Triumphs of English’. Henry Parker, Lord Morley Translator to the Tudor Court, ed. by Marie Axton and James P. Carley (London: The British Library, 2000), pp. 27–68 (p. 28) and Jeremy Maule, ‘What Did Morley Give When He Gave a “Plutarch” Life?’, in Triumphs of English, pp. 107–30. 38  Giustiniani, p. 6. 39  Giustiniani, p. 6. 40  He was not the first to attempt to translate Plutarch’s Lives directly from Greek into French, though: before him Lazare de Baïf, Georges de Selve and Arnauld Chandon had been commissioned by Francis  I to translate the work into French but they managed to translate only few biographies; see Walter, ‘Introduction’, p. xxiii; Filippo Fassina, ‘I paratesti dell’Electra di Lazare de Baïf (1537)’, Corpus Eve (2013), 1–13 (pp. 2, 12); Fassina, ‘Georges de Selve, Arnauld Chandon e Simon Bourgouyn’, Enthymema, 19 (2017), 17–41 (pp. 18– 19, 25). 41  René Sturel, Jacques Amyot, Traducteur des Vies parallèles de Plutarque (Geneva: Slatkine, 1974), pp. 3–11, 147, 151, 164. 42  Sturel, pp. 92, 148. 35  36 

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It is not easy to establish which edition of the Greek text he used. According to René Sturel, for the first, manuscript translation (1542–46), Amyot relied on the edition printed by Giunta (Florence, 1517).43 For the first printed edition of his Vies (1559), Amyot did not make an extensive use of the Greek printed versions but rather employed his collation of the manuscripts he consulted in Venice and Rome during his stay in Italy (1548–52).44 However, a copy of the Aldine edition, now in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, includes a series of manuscript notes attributed to Amyot: these are the variants reported by the French scholar after his study of the Italian manuscripts. Notwithstanding such evidence, Amyot did not adopt any of these variants in the 1559 edition but continued to rely on the Florentine text.45 Whilst it is difficult to establish the Greek edition used by Amyot, persuasive evidence has been provided that North translated a copy of Amyot’s Vies printed by François Le Preux (Lausanne, 1574).46 The text of this 1574 printing is probably based on the second edition revised by Amyot himself and entrusted to the royal printer Vascosan in 1565.47 By the time North embarked on his version of Plutarch, he had already translated Bishop Antonio de Guevara’s The Diall of Princes (1557) from the Spanish original Relox de principes (1529) and Anton Francesco Doni’s Morall Philosophie (1570) from the Italian La moral filosophia (1552). North’s translations are all inspired by the intent to edify their readers, as the prefatory materials confirm.48 In his preface to his Lives, appearing after the dedicatory epistle to Queen Elizabeth  I, North extols Plutarch as the best non-Christian author able to convey moral teachings more effectively

See Sturel, pp. 164, 169, 274 and Denton, ‘Translation and Manipulation in Renaissance England’, Journal of Early Modern Studies, 1 (2016), 1–104 (p. 48). However, there were two other printed editions of the Greek text available before 1542: the Aldine edition (Venice, 1519), and another (Basel, 1533), which has been disregarded because it mostly reproduces the text of the Aldine; see Giustiniani, p. 8. 44  Denton, p. 48. Amyot himself refers to his philological work in his letter to the readers; Amyot, ‘Au Lecteurs’, sig. A7r. 45  Sturel, pp. 269–71; Denton, p. 48. 46  Denton, p. 47. Fred Schurink, ‘Introduction: Thomas North, Demosthenes and Cicero’, in Plutarch. Essays and Lives, ed.  by Schurink, 2  vols (Cambridge: MHRA, forthcoming). I would like to thank Fred Schurink for allowing me to read his as yet unpublished manuscript. 47  This assumption is based on Sturel’s proposal of stemmatic filiation (Sturel, pp. 94, 615). Sturel’s study is outdated but there is still no critical edition of the Vies to verify this genealogy; Schurink, ‘Introduction’, forthcoming. 48  Matthiessen, pp. 61–63. 43 

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than philosophical works, i.e., through the stories of memorable figures of the past: There is no prophane studye better then Plutarke. All other learning is private, fitter for Universities then cities, fuller of contemplacion than experience, more commendable in the students themselves, than profitable unto others. Whereas stories are fit for every place, reache to all persons, serve for all tymes […], as it is better to see learning in noble mens lives, than to reade it in Philosophers writings.49

North here proves his assimilation of Amyot’s conception of learning, i.e., learning virtue by means of delightful stories, as emerges in the French scholar’s preface. Amyot first insists on the effective combination of ‘pleasure and profit’ of Horatian derivation in books with edifying aims: This commendation  […] is most proper to the reading of stories, to have pleasure and profit matched together, which kind of delight and teaching […]. [M]en are more beholding to such good wits, as by their grave and wise writing have deserved the name of Historiographers, then they are to any other kind of writers.50

As he repeats a few lines later, history is a better instrument to teach virtue because it does not rely on abstract reasoning like ethical writings or ‘morall Philosophie’: history does not explain or describe virtue, it shows it by means of examples.51 The paradigmatic quality of history and the intrinsic ‘beautie’ of virtue realize the victorious alliance between ‘pleasure and profit’ ensuring the success of historiography over other genres. Along with this shared exaltation of history, North’s close rendition itself conspicuously testifies to his fidelity to Amyot. Even Matthiessen, whose declared aim was ‘to point out North’s differences’ from Amyot, acknowledged that ‘North follows his model, cadence for cadence, and almost word for word’;52 such dependence inevitably led him to reproduce Amyot’s errors, too.53 However, North’s debt to Amyot is not limited to patent similarities in vocabulary and syntax on a word-for-word or clause-for-clause basis:54 North equally absorbs Amyot’s translational methods. In the remainder of

North, ‘To the Reader’, in Plutarchus, Lives, sig. *2r. Amyot, ‘Amiot to the Readers’, in Plutarchus, Lives, sig. *3v. 51  Amyot, ‘Amiot to the Readers’, sig. *4r. 52  Matthiessen, p. 78. 53  Schurink, ‘Introduction’, forthcoming. 54  On North’s reliance on Amyot, see Schurink, ‘Introduction’, forthcoming. 49  50 

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this essay, I will argue that North does not limit himself to translating closely vocabulary and grammar structures in corresponding passages; he also replicates Amyot’s stylistic choices in other contexts. As we have seen, Matthiessen accounted for these interventions as examples of ‘habits of Elizabethan speech’.55 North’s version does display aspects that cannot be traced back to Amyot, e.g., a colloquial and everyday quality. As Fred Schurink has pointed out, this is achieved on two levels through specific processes: at the level of vocabulary and register, with the preference for concrete terms and the use of idiomatic expressions, figurative language, and exclamations; at the level of syntax, with a general simplification of sentence structure by reducing Amyot’s lengthy periods, using fewer verbs and preferring the active voice over the passive.56 However, Matthiessen numbers also other features amongst Elizabethan habits. In the following comparative reading of Amyot and North’s The Life of Coriolanus, I  will focus on four of these other features – nominalization, domestication, copia (abundance), and enargeia (dramatization) – to show that these phenomena are less aspects specific to the English language of the time than norms of a common theory of language of classical derivation, which informed also translation practices. As Rener puts it, the many centuries between classical antiquity and the eighteenth century should be regarded as a unit which is cemented by a strong tradition. The binding element is a common theory of language and communication and an equally jointly shared idea of translation.

Perfected by classical Greece and Rome, this theory of language formed part of the educational system in all European countries during the period under investigation.57 Rener refers to ‘a whole manual on translation’, which ‘though never written, nevertheless existed and was known to all translators and particularly to their critics’.58 By referring to this unwritten manual, first Amyot and later North, following on his footsteps, shaped their Plutarch. Matthiessen Matthiessen, p. 78. Schurink, ‘Introduction’, forthcoming. 57  Rener, p. 7. 58  Rener, p. 7. In a recent article, Sheldon Brammall has questioned Rener’s assumption of a uniform stance in early modern translation; see Brammall, ‘Laurence Humphrey, Gabriel Harvey, and the Place of Personality on Renaissance Translation Theory’, The Review of English Studies 69 (2017), 56–75 (p.  57). The differentiations of early modern translation theory, however, are not relevant to the present essay. 55  56 

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himself had implicitly pointed towards this transnational unity of style in sixteenth-century Europe, or at least France and England, when he attributed Elizabethan qualities to Amyot’s language.59 My contention will be that at least some of North’s seemingly independent interventions derive from the imitation of Amyot’s translational methods, in turn based on the shared norms of translation described by Rener. The phenomena of nominalization, domestication, copia, and dramatization will serve as tools to test this contention. In light of Rener’s classification, these four phenomena are classified into either instruments of the translator as a grammarian or of the translator as a rhetorician.60 The strategies of nominalization and domestication respectively fulfil the criteria of puritas (elegance, attractiveness) and perspicuitas (clarity), which should inform the selection of words. Since this selection pertains to grammar, they fall within the competence of the translator as grammarian.61 An example of nominalization, the first aspect that Matthiessen presents as a typically Elizabethan trait,62 appears at the beginning of the text (The Life of Coriolanus, 1. 3): Amyot: Aussi a ce mesme personnage tesmoigné ce qu’aucuns estiment.63 North: This man also is a good proofe to confirme some mens opinions.64

North turns Amyot’s verbs témoigner and estimer into good proof and opinions. Later in the text, in the passage in which the tribunes of the plebs are introduced by the Senate (The Life of Coriolanus, 7.1), North nominalizes the verbs fouler & opprimer (to abuse and oppress) into violence and oppression: Amyot: les Tribuns du people, lequels autroyent charge de soustenir & defendre les poures qu’on voudroit fouler & opprimer.65 Matthiessen, p. 67. Rener, p. 7. 61  Rener, p. 89. Rener identifies these criteria on the basis of various theorists on translation, especially Laurence Humphrey; see Laurence Humphrey, Interpretatio linguarum, seu de ratione convertendi (Basel: Froben, 1559). Humphrey also includes proprietas (appropriateness), comprehensiveness (‘plena sit interpretatio’, i.e., ‘the translation must be comprehensive’), and aptness (aptitudo) (Humphrey, pp. 31, 81). 62  Matthiessen, p. 78. 63  ‘Furthermore, this same character has confirmed what some have thought’; Plutarchus, Vies, pp. 255–56. 64  Plutarchus, Lives, p. 237. 65  ‘The tribunes of the people, who are in charge of helping and defending the poor who happen to be abused and oppressed’; Plutarchus, Vies, p. 258. 59  60 

Plutarch in sixteenth-century France and England 105 North: Tribuni Plebis, whose office should be to defend the poore people from violence and oppression.66

The confirmation that this was an Elizabethan trend is provided by a muchignored treatise on translation, Interpretatio linguarum printed in Basel in 1559 and written in Latin by the Oxonian theologian Laurence Humphrey. In this work, the first instance of translation theory in England, Humphrey addresses the subject of translation not only from a theoretical perspective but also from a more practical point of view, providing examples from Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.67 Although it did not enjoy great circulation, it has been recognized as one of the most comprehensive works on translation of the Renaissance.68 In a section devoted to mutationes parti orationis (the changes affecting the parts of speech),69 nominalization is illustrated through examples of translations from English into Latin: Verbum enim nomine mutatur, aut adverbio saepissime, in alium sermonem convertendo. ‘Non dubito’, licebit mutare, ‘Non est mihi dubium’. […] Bre­ viter haec antimeria cognitu necessaria est, ut hanc mutandi rationem ad manum promptam paratamque habeamus: Sive verbum mutetur in nomen et alium casum, ut saepe et quidem eleganter accidit, in huiusmodi locutionibus. Finge nostrum idioma exprimendum Latine, ‘Multum curo tuam valetudine’, non ineleganter transtuleris, cum Cicerone, ‘Magne nobis solicitudini valetudo tua’, aut, ‘Impedio te, Sum tibi impedimento’.70

The insistence on elegance (eleganter, non ineleganter) confirms that nominalization ensures the respect of puritas, also described in terms of elegance elsewhere in his treatise.71 In this passage, Humphrey decides to clarify Plutarchus, Lives, p. 240. Rhodes et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 263; Rener, p. 47. 68  Denton, pp. 16–17. 69  Humphrey, p. 445; Rener, p. 140. 70  ‘A verb is substituted by a noun, or very often by an adverb, when translating into another language. “I don’t doubt” could be changed into “I have no doubt”. […] In brief, we need to know this enallage in order to have this method of changing ready to hand, for instance, when a verb is turned into a noun, as often happens with an effect of elegance, in expressions like the following. Suppose we have to render our tongue into Latin in the sentence “I care much about your wellbeing”, you would translate not inelegantly just as Cicero “I have a great care about your wellbeing”, or “I hinder you, I am a hindrance to you”’; Humphrey, pp. 447, 455. 71  ‘Tertia virtus puritas, καθαροτῆς, perspicua quaedam & elegans ut sit interpretatio’, ‘The third essential quality is attractiveness, in Greek katharotēs. The translation should be clear and graceful’; Humphrey, p.  57; translation by Gordon Kendal in English Renaissance Translation Theory, ed. by Neil Rhodes (London: MHRA, 2013), p. 271. 66  67 

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nominalization with an example involving English, which is quite unusual since his examples are usually taken from classical languages. However, an English theorist’s reference to this strategy does not mean that this was an exclusively English feature. Neither is it conclusive that he uses an example with English: English is mentioned as the source language in a translation into Latin, not the other way round. Rather, Humphrey mentions Cicero as a model for this phenomenon, which proves that this is part of the shared, unwritten theory of language identified by Rener. An Oxonian theologian, Humphrey was certainly familiar with this theory and the auctoritates from which it was derived, eminently Cicero and Quintilian. That nominalization is not an exclusively Elizabethan trend becomes evident if we consider some passages of Amyot’s translation. In The Life of Coriolanus, 4. 3, Plutarch is describing Martius’s ambition as the typical behaviour of valiant men and Amyot translates as follows: τοῦτο παθὼν καὶ ὁ Μάρκιος αὐτὸς αὑτῷ ζῆλον ἀνδραγαθίας προὔθηκε.72 Cette affection estant en Martius, il s’efforçoit de se vaincre soy mesme en bien faisant.73 This desire being bred in Martius, he strained himself still to passe him selfe in manlines.74

Amyot renders the participial construction τοῦτο παθὼν with the noun phrase ‘cette affection’. Interestingly, he acts in the opposite way at the end of this very sentence: he turns the noun phrase ζῆλον ἀνδραγαθίας into a participial structure ‘en bien faisant’, which proves that nominalization was far from a constant norm. In any case, this passage demonstrates that also Amyot makes use of nominalization, which confirms that North may have familiarized with this process while translating Amyot and then independently re-applied it in other passages such as those considered above (The Life of Coriolanus, 1. 3 and 7. 1). In his translation of this passage, North does not make any significant change in the first part of the sentence, whereas he seems to have consulted the original for the last word (‘manlines’), since Amyot does not make any reference to the idea of bravery. This seems proof ‘It was in this spirit that Marcius vied with himself in manly valour’; Plutarchus, Plutarch’s Lives, trans. by Bernadotte Perrin, 11 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914–26), iv (1959), pp. 124–25. All translations from the Greek are taken from this edition, henceforth referred to as ‘Plutarchus, Plutarch’s Lives’. 73  Plutarchus, Vies, p. 257. 74  Plutarchus, Lives, p. 238. 72 

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that, as critics have argued with other examples, North on occasion consulted the Greek text, possibly in Henri Estienne’s 1572 bilingual edition.75 The only alternative source for this translation is Cruserius’s Latin version.76 North may have accessed Cruserius’s Latin translation both in its first, 1564 edition or in Estienne’s 1572 edition, since the latter reproduced Cruserius’s version along with the Greek original.77 Cruserius translates the sentence above as follows: ‘Eo animo cum esset Martius, emulationem sibi ipse proposuit fortitudinis’.78 We could consider also another complete Latin translation available at the time, Xylander’s version, although there is no evidence that he consulted it: ‘Hoc modo affectus Marcius, seipsum fortitudinis laude superandum sibi proposuit’.79 By comparing Plutarch, Xylander, Cruserius, and North, it appears that North may indeed have referred to the original this time: although Xylander’s and Cruserius’s fortitudo and North’s manlines have a very similar meaning, North’s manlines is etymologically related to the Greek ἀνδραγαθία. The second phenomenon under the category of grammar is domestication, i.e., the translator’s tendency to prioritize the reader’s target culture. As such it fulfils the need of perspicuitas (clarity), which Humphrey explicitly connects with an easier understanding for the reader.80 In the following passage (The Life of Coriolanus, 1. 4), Plutarch discusses the benefits of education and encapsulates this notion into the figures of the Muses; both

Matthiessen, pp.  71–74; Schurink, ‘Introduction’, forthcoming. Plutarchus, Plutarchi Chaeronensis quae extant opera Cum Latina interpretatione (Geneva: Henri Estienne, 1572). 76  Plutarchus, Vitae comparatae illustrium virorum, Graecorum & Romanorum, ita digestae ut temporum ordo seriesque constet, trans. by Herman Cruserius (Basel: Thomas Guerin [Guarinus], 1564). 77  Schurink has pointed out that North’s marginal notes, which function as paragraph headings, are mostly derived from Cruserius’s 1564 edition (Schurink, ‘Introduction’, forthcoming). The Life of Coriolanus is no exception: it will suffice to look at the first pages of Cruserius’s version in parallel with North’s to see that the majority of the marginalia are retained and translated into English; for instance, ‘Marciorum familia’ into ‘The family of the Marcians’; ‘Coriolani ingenium’ into ‘The wit of Coriolanus’; ‘Musarum fructus’ into ‘The benefit of learning’; Plutarchus, Vitae comparatae, p. 90. On the translation of ‘Musarum’ into ‘learning’, see below. 78  ‘Martius, who was in the same situation, set himself the goal to emulate his own strength’; Plutarchus, Vitae comparatae, pp. 90–91. 79  ‘Martius, feeling the same way, set himself the goal to surpass himself in the worth of his strength’; Plutarchus, Plutarchi summa et philosophi et historici opus, quod parallela et vitas appellant, trans. by Wilhelm Xylander (Heidelberg: Ludovicus Lucius, 1561), p. 196. 80  Humphrey, pp. 114–15. 75 

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Amyot and North introduce changes in order to clarify this metaphor, but their solutions differ: Οὐδὲν γὰρ ἄλλο Μουσῶν εὐμενείας ἀπολαύουσιν ἄνθρωποι τουσοῦτον.81 Aussi à dire la verité, le plus grand fruict, que les hommes rapportent de la douceur & de la benignité des Muses, c’est à dire, de la cognoissance des bonnes lettres.82 And to saye truly, the greatest benefit that learning bringeth men unto, is this.83

Amyot is aware that his main readership is not the learned, who would rather read a Latin translation.84 That is why he explains ‘Muses’ with a gloss introduced by the textual marker ‘c’est à dire’, a recurring practice throughout his translation. North avoids any mythological reference by substituting the vehicle of the metaphor (Muses) with its tenor (learning).85 The digression about Roman names (The Life of Coriolanus, 11. 3) also features an example of domestication in the way both Amyot and North translate the term μονομάχων (from μονομάχος, i.e., gladiator). However, they employ different strategies: the former adds the gloss ‘d’escrimeurs à outrance’ (‘swordsmen fighting to death’); the latter assimilates the violent Roman fight to fencing, an activity more familiar to his contemporaries. As John Denton notes, North also adds an evaluative adjective condemning the practice (‘cruell’), thus leading his readers to think, quite incorrectly, that Plutarch disapproved of this type of combat.86 North’s domesticating drive is not idiosyncratic but can be traced back to a more general tendency. This ‘lexical actualization’ will become common ‘Verily, among all the benefits which men derive from the favour of the Muses, none other is so great as that softening of the nature which is produced by culture and discipline’; Plutarchus, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 120–21. 82  Plutarchus, Vies, p. 256. 83  Plutarchus, Lives, p. 237. 84  Amyot’s targeting lower readers would attract criticism a century later; see Rener, pp. 225– 27. However, it also won some praise: in the quotation above, Montaigne commends Amyot on his decision to make Plutarch available to ‘ignorant people like us’. Also, Amyot does not exclude that his French version may be read by those ‘countrymen […] best practised in the Greeke tonge’. 85  On vehicle and tenor to describe metaphors, see David Punter, Metaphor (Oxford: Routledge, 2007), pp. 15, 148. 86  Denton, p. 50. 81 

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practice in Philemon Holland’s version of Livy (1600)87 but this does not mean that it characterizes only Elizabethan translators. Rather than a trend, domestication is a strategy of what Susan Bassnett would define a ‘line of approach’, which is not limited to a specific temporal frame but survives and resurfaces in literary history.88 Domestication belongs to a line of approach initiated by Horace and Cicero: the prioritization of meaning over form or, in Cicero’s terms, of res over verba.89 Translators, to quote Rener, ‘were eager to enrich their language with the res, i.e. the knowledge or wisdom heretofore available only in the foreign tongue’.90 This stance emerges in Amyot’s ‘Dedication to King Henri II’, too: vos sujets en recueilleront ce fruict, que, sans se travailler pour apprendre les nobles ancients langues […] ils auront en leur maternelle, & chez eux, par maniere de dire, ce qu’il y a de plus beau & de meillueur en la Latine & en la Grecque.91

In the examples examined above North arguably adheres to this principle more than Amyot himself, who for instance preserved the reference to the Muses. By avoiding such rhetorical embellishments, North better fulfils the translator’s role as a grammarian: he pursues the principles of recte dicere (speak correctly) and perspicuitas (clarity), thereby prioritizing the understanding of the meaning over the form.92 However, translators did not always renounce rhetoric. Rather, they were expected to master it along with grammar and logic so as to guarantee the effectiveness of communication and achieve the equally relevant purposes of docere (teaching), delectare (delight), and movere (stirring the emotions).93 Translators, therefore, not only had to be impeccable grammarians; they also needed to be trained rhetoricians mastering the ornatus, i.e., ‘the entire palette

Denton, p. 50; on Holland, see Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies (New York: Methuen, 2002), p. 64 and Matthiessen, p. 206. 88  Bassnett, p. 47. 89  Cicero, On the Orator. Book 3, trans. by  H.  Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), p. 99; see Rener, p. 20. 90  Rener, p. 54. 91  ‘Your subjects will collect this fruit, which is that, without troubling themselves to learn the noble and ancient languages […], they will have in their mother-tongue and by them, so to speak, the most beautiful and the best that Latin and Greek can offer’; Amyot, ‘Au très puissant …’, in Plutarchus, Vies, sig. A3. 92  Rener, pp. 36–37, 143. 93  Rener, p. 150. 87 

110 Angelica Vedelago

of rhetorical devices’.94 They had to strike a balance between perspicuitas, thereby avoiding obscuritas, and varietas (variety) as a remedy against similitudo (sameness), which Humphrey regarded as a source of boredom and an obstacle to communication.95 Among the rhetorical strategies adopted by Amyot and North, abundance and dramatization appear to be particularly marked. Abundance translates the Latin term copia, a feature central to Renaissance literary language and theorized in Erasmus’s De copia (1512). North produces an overall effect of abundance by means of additions and doublets, a typically Ciceronian feature96 consisting in the juxtaposition of synonymic couples of terms such as ‘praise and commend’ or ‘by their dedes and actes’.97 Typical of contemporary writing practice,98 they are used extensively by both Amyot and North, but not in the same way and amount in all contexts. On the basis of his analysis of the Lives of Demosthenes, Cicero, and Caesar, Schurink has argued that the overall quantity of doublets in North’s translation is significantly smaller than in Amyot’s.99 But North does not simply cut Amyot’s doublets: while in some passages he reduces them,100 in others he adds some. In The Life of Coriolanus, North amplifies ‘blessures’ into ‘all the wounds and cuts’, ‘leur chose publique’ into ‘their countrie and common wealth’, ‘esclaves’ into ‘slaves and bond men’, and, with a combination of nominalization and doubling, ‘se mutiner ouvertement’ into ‘flat rebellion and mutine’.101 The last aspect considered in this analysis – enargeia or dramatization – is another rhetorical embellishment expected from translators. By enargeia, Erasmus meant a ‘description of things, of time circumstances, of places, and of people’, which presents the object ‘expressed in colours, as if it were meant to be contemplated in a painting, so much so that it seems that we

Rener, p. 166. Rener, pp. 77, 158, 234; Humphrey, p. 446: ‘Similitudo est satietatis mater, expultrix fastifii varietas’, i.e., ‘Sameness is the origin of satiety, variety expels the disgust’. 96  ‘[N]on uno verbo, at duobus, ut saepe fecit M. Tullius’, ‘not with one word, but with two, as Cicero used to do’; Humphrey, p. 71. 97  Plutarchus, Lives, pp. 239–40. 98  Sylvia Adamson, ‘Literary Language’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, ed. by R. M. Hogg et al., 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–2001), III: 1476–1776, ed. by Roger Lass (1999), pp. 539–653 (pp. 557, 583). 99  Schurink, ‘Introduction’, forthcoming. 100  For instance, see the example from The Life of Coriolanus, 7.  1 above, where Amyot’s ‘soustenir & defendre’ becomes ‘defend’ in North. 101  Plutarchus, Lives, p. 239; Plutarchus, Vies, pp. 257–58. 94  95 

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[the authors] are painting, not narrating, and that the reader is contemplating, not reading’.102 Peter Mack summarizes this effect as a kind of ‘vivid description, using words to bring something before the eyes of the audience’.103 North achieves this effect through a plethora of techniques aimed at enhancing the ‘picture of an action’, such as the use of direct speech or the insertion of ‘precise details that brought glowing reality to his words’.104 This last section will be devoted to this technique, i.e., the insertion of realistic details, in order to show again how North absorbs Amyot’s translation strategies and reproduces them independently, in unrelated passages. Unlike the previous aspects, Amyot himself proves to have assimilated this technique from his own model, Plutarch. Borrowing and, to a certain extent, distorting a category identified by Antoine Berman with reference to morphosyntactic features,105 it can be argued that the addition of realistic details works as a matrix, which both Amyot and North reapply autonomously. The following sequence of examples will clarify this process of multiple acquisition. In The Life of Coriolanus, 3. 4, Plutarch first indulges in a realistic detail, i.e., the sweating horses of Castor and Pollux, who appear to announce the victory at Lake Regillo: ἐν ἐκείνηι δὲ τηι μάχηι καὶ τοὺς Διοσκόρους ἐπιφανῆναι λέγουσι, καὶ μετὰ τὴν μάχην εὐθὺς ὀφθῆναι ῥεομένοις ἱδρῶτι τοῖς ἳπποις ἐν ἀγορᾶι.106 On dit, qu’en cette bataille apparurent Castor & Pollux, & que soudainement apres le combat on les vit à Rome sur la place avec leurs chevaux tout trempez de sueur.107

‘[D]escriptione rerum, temporum, locorum, personarum’; ‘[rem] coloribus expressam in tabula spectandam  […], ut nos depinxisse, non narrasse, lector spectasse, non legisse, videatur’; Erasmus, De copia verborum ac rerum, ed. by B. I. Knott, in Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1988), i: VI, p. 202. 103  Peter Mack, A  History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 332. 104  Matthiessen, pp. 79–82. 105  Berman, p. 200. 106  ‘In the battle of which I was speaking, it is said that Castor and Pollux appeared, and that immediately after the battle they were seen, their horses all a-drip with sweat, in the forum, announcing the victory’; Plutarchus, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 124–25. 107  ‘They say that in this battle Castor and Pollux appeared and that they immediately after the battle they were seen in Rome in the square with their horses damp with sweat’; Plutarchus, Vies, p. 257. 102 

112 Angelica Vedelago They saye that Castor and Pollux, appeared in this battell, and how incontinently after the battell, men sawe them in the market place at Rome, all their horses being on a white fome.108

Amyot faithfully renders the expression ῥεομένοις ἱδρῶτι τοῖς ἳπποις (‘their horses all a-drip with sweat’) as ‘tout trempez de sueur’, whereas North further elaborates by referring to the sweat metonymically – by means of the white foam – replacing cause with effect (‘all their horses being on a white fome’). In The Life of Coriolanus, 8. 6, Plutarch describes the Volsci’s surrender to the Romans: τῶν δ´ἀπειπαμένων καὶ καταβαλόντων τὰ ὃπλα.109 les autres de frayeur se rendirent & jetèrent leurs armes en terre devant lui.110 & other for feare he made yeld them selves, and to let fall their weapons before him.111

Amyot adds the detail ‘en terre devant lui’ – which North reductively translates ‘before him’ – in order to emphasize the moment of surrender: here only Amyot acts independently of his model. In The Life of Coriolanus, 5. 3, the procedure of enrolment for the imminent war is described as follows: τῶν δ´ἀρχόντων εἰς τὰ ὃπλα τοὺς ἐν ἠλικίαι καλούντων.112 les magistrats firent incontinent crier à son de trompe, que tous ceux qui se trouverayent en aage de porter armes, se vinssent faire enrôler pour aller à la guerre.113 Whereupon the Senate immediately made open proclamation by sounde of trumpet, that all those which were of lawfull age to carie weapon, should come and enter their names into the muster masters booke, to go to the warres.114

Plutarchus, Lives, p. 238. ‘[W]hile others gave up the struggle and threw down their arms’; Plutarchus, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 134–35. 110  ‘The others surrendered out of fear and threw their weapons on the ground before him’; Plutarchus, Vies, p. 259. 111  Plutarchus, Lives, p. 241. 112  ‘[t]he consuls summoned those of military age to arms’; Plutarchus, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 128–29. 113  ‘The magistrates let immediately summon with sound of the trumpet all those that were in military age came to enrol to go off to war’; Plutarchus, Vies, p. 258. 114  Plutarchus, Lives, p. 239. 108  109 

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Here North translates verbatim from Amyot’s ‘à son de trompe’ into ‘by sounde of trumpet’ but, with a domesticating move, he also includes a realistic detail absent in both models and related to military enlistment, i.e., the ‘muster masters book’. In so doing, North proves to have assimilated the tendency to realism of Amyot, who in turn inherited it from Plutarch, and eventually ‘out-Amyots’ Amyot. Although many other examples could be discussed, we can now draw some general conclusions, some of which can be partly extended to the practice of horizontal translation in the mid-sixteenth century. This brief insight into The Life of Coriolanus has confirmed North’s overall adherence to his source text. This fidelity manifests itself not only in the extreme literalness of North’s rendition; it also affects the deeper level of translation methods. The strategies considered above – nominalization, domestication, abundance, and dramatization – were part of the background of any translator of the period. Therefore, North must have been already familiar with these tools before translating the Lives; a study of the evolution of North’s style in his works as a translator might be illuminating but this goes beyond the scope of this essay. What this analysis has hopefully shown is that North was at least particularly exposed to these translation practices in the very process of translating Amyot. North on occasion reproduces features of Amyot’s translation in an unrelated point of his own version: in so doing, he is able to act independently of his model to the extent that he turns Amyot’s strategies into productive matrixes. This independent reuse of translation practices arguably corresponds to a form of imitation, conceived as emulation of styl­ istic features,115 thereby shedding a new light on the relationship between translation and imitative processes. Not only can translation be a category of imitation:116 also the opposite might be true, with a translated text featuring imitation. This is the view expressed by Humphrey, who devotes one of the three books of his treatise on translation to imitation, specifying that:

On imitation of style, see Etienne Dolet’s definition: ‘imitationem vero tribus potissimum constare, doctus nemo ambigit: nimirum splendida verborum copia, arguta sententiarum varietate, et suavi componendi ratione’, ‘In truth, no learned man doubts that imitation chiefly consists of three parts: certainly the splendid abundance of words, the acute variety of sentences and the sweet form of composition’; Dolet, De imitatione Ciceroniana adversus Floridum Sabinum (Lyon: Dolet, 1540), p. 9. 116  Valerie Worth-Stylianou, ‘Translatio and Translation in the Renaissance: from Italy to France’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed.  by G.  P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), iii, 127–35 (p. 129). Bassnett, p. 52.

115 

114 Angelica Vedelago Tantum enim hic de imitatione dicam, quantum erit cum hoc argumento nostro, et cum Interpretis imitatione coniunctum. […]  interpreti aliquem ad imitandum proponi censeo oportere. […] Est igitur necessaria Interpreti futuro imitatio.117

For Humphrey, translation is necessarily and vitally dependent on imitation. In light of the numerous implications that such an imitation–in–translation has proved to have, the phenomenon of intermediary or pivot translations seems to deserve reconsideration, especially within the context of intervernacular translations, which were, if not enabled, at least facilitated by the sharing of the same classical heritage of grammar and rhetorical norms.

‘Here I will deal with imitation insofar as it relates to our subject [i.e., translation] and to the imitation done by the translator. […] I think it is necessary to provide the translator with someone to imitate. […] Therefore, imitation is necessary to the would-be translator’; Humphrey, pp. 212–13.

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Lodovico Dolce’s Italian translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the canonization of the Orlando furioso Marta Balzi

A

t the beginning of the sixteenth century, there were two complete Italian translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses circulating in printed editions. The first was the Ovidio metamorphoseos vulgare by Giovanni dei Bonsignori da Città di Castello, a fourteenth-century translation printed for the first time in 1497 by Giovanni Rosso.1 The other was the Ovidio metamorphoseos in verso vulgar by Niccolò degli Agostini, a sixteenthcentury translation printed for the first time in 1522 by Jacopo da Lecco.2 Neither of these two works was transposed directly from the Latin text of the Metamorphoses. Bonsignori’s text is a prose translation of Giovanni del Virgilio’s Latin Expositio and Allegorie, which present brief prose, verse summaries, and allegorizations to the Metamorphoses. In turn, Agostini’s work is an adaptation in ottava rima of Bonsignori’s Ovidio metamorphoseos vulgare.3 The Trasformationi by Lodovico Dolce was the first complete translation printed in the sixteenth century to be based directly upon the Latin text of Ovid’s poem.4 Dolce was a professional man of letters and an established collaborator of the Venetian printing press owned by Gabriele Giolito dei

In his seminal study on the translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the Middle Ages to the early fifteenth century, Bodo Guthmüller has investigated the origins and fortunes of the Ovidio metamorphoseos vulgare by Bonsignori, which enjoyed a wide circulation in manuscript form (from 1375 to 1377), and also in printed editions (1497, 1501, 1508, 1517, 1519, 1520, 1523). See Bodo Guthmüller, Ovidio metamorphoseos vulgare, trans. by Paola Picchioni (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2008), pp. 302–10. 2  Agostini’s translation was printed many times during the sixteenth century (1522, 1533, 1537, 1538, 1547, 1548). See Guthmüller, Ovidio, pp. 302–10. 3  Guthmüller, Ovidio, pp. 33–140, 204–60. 4  Scholars have not identified the Latin edition from which Dolce was translating. This task is particularly difficult, if not impossible, due to the freedom with which Dolce re-elaborated the Latin source text. 1 

Acquisition through Translation: Towards a Definition of Renaissance Translation, ed. by Alessandra Petrina et Federica Masiero, TMT 18 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 115–133 © DOI 10.1484/M.TMT-EB.5.120921

FHG

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Ferrari, who printed the first edition of the Trasformationi in 1553.5 Other editions followed, the first five printed by the same printing house (1553; 1555; 1557; 1558; 1561), and the last two by Francesco Sansovino (1568) and Domenico Farri (1570) in Venice.6 Despite some textual and paratextual debts to the medieval re-writings of Ovid’s poem, overall Dolce’s translation is a cultural product that is undoubtedly linked to early modernity, rather than focused on recovering the past.7 This translation was conceived of and developed within the context of the vernacular print industry, and its text and presentation respond to the marketing agendas set by printer and editor. At the same time, it engages with one of the liveliest sixteenth-century literary debates concerning the classical status of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. Setting the Trasfor­ mationi within this early modern frame, the following analysis shows how Dolce mediated and applied the forms and subject matter of classical heritage, and it illustrates how he freely manipulated his source text and went as far as to offer his readers a double translation, one from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and one from Ariosto’s Furioso, which resulted in a fully original work: the Trasformationi. Scholars have pointed out the triangular relationship between Dolce’s Trasformationi, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. Daniel Javitch was the first to underline how Dolce and Giolito (the printer of the Trasformationi) published a translation with the formal and prosodic aspects of this famous sixteenth-century chivalric poem.8 The Trasformationi was written in ottava rima and divided into cantos; the layout of Giolito’s ­editions Ludovico Dolce, All’invittissimo e gloriosissimo Imperatore Carlo Quinto. Le Trasformationi di m. Lodouico Dolce. con Privilegii (Venice: Gabriele Giolito dei Ferrari e fratelli, 1553). 6  There are also two modern editions of the Trasformationi, a facsimile reproduction of the 1568 edition with introductory notes by Stephen Orgel (Lodovico Dolce, Le Trasformationi. Venice 1568, ed. by Stephen Orgel (New York: Garland, 1979)), and a facsimile reproduction of the first 1553 edition with an essay by Giuseppe Capriotti, published in 2013 (Lodovico Dolce, Le Trasformationi di Lodovico Dolce: il rinascimento ovidiano di Giovanni Antonio Rusconi, ed. by Giuseppe Capriotti (Ancona: Affinità elettive, 2013)). 7  For instance, in the Trasformationi, the satyr Marsyas is said to be tied to a tree by Apollo and flayed alive. Ovid, however, tells us that the satyr was not tied to a tree before being flayed. This detail was added by Niccolò degli Agostini in his Ovidio metamorphoseos in verso vulgar. In Dolce, Marsyas turns into a stream, but this detail was first added to the Latin text by Giovanni del Virgilio in his Expositio (Bodo Guthmüller, Mito, poesia, arte: saggi sulla tradizione ovidiana nel Rinascimento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), pp. 65–83). 8  Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic. The Canonization of Orlando furioso (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 71–80. 5 

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of the Trasformationi was modelled on the very successful editions of the Furioso that were regularly reissued by Giolito’s printing house.9 According to Javitch, these similarities contributed to the connection of Ariosto with a classical author, Ovid, fostering the process of canonization of the Furioso. Gabriele Bucchi and Chiara Trebaiocchi have shed further light on the relationship between these three works, highlighting Dolce’s imitation of the narrative strategies and macro-structure of the Orlando furioso, and exploring the intertextuality between Ariosto’s poem and the Trasformationi.10 While these scholars have effectively shown Dolce’s use of the Furioso as a secondary source text, there is space left for a discussion of the function(s) of Dolce’s double translation. Former scholarly works have excluded a priori the existence of a literary agenda behind Dolce’s Trasformationi, and have considered his endeavour to re-write Ovid through the Furioso a business strategy to attract a wide readership.11 This contribution adopts a more positive approach towards Dolce’s work, questioning not just the ways in which he imitated the Furioso, but also the purpose behind his translation practice. In order to do so, the following analysis contextualizes Dolce’s imitation of the Orlando furioso in light of the translator’s own critical view of the poem, and in the wider context of the Renaissance debate on the epic nature of the Furioso. In the sixteenth century, the establishment of Trecento Tuscan as a model of standard Italian language brought about a new confidence in the potential of vernacular language and literature.12 This confidence sparked a competition with ancient writers, which, in turn, stimulated the rise of a modern genre theory.13 Numerous manuals were composed following the example of Aristotle’s Poetics, which included specific guidelines on how to understand

Giolito published twenty-seven editions of the Orlando furioso, and Ariosto became the main author of this printing house. See Angela Nuovo and Cristian Coppens, I Giolito e la stampa nel XVI secolo (Geneva: Droz, 2005), p. 222. 10  Gabriele Bucchi, ‘Meraviglioso diletto’. La traduzione poetica del Cinquecento e le Metamorfosi d’Ovidio di Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara (Pisa: ETS, 2011), pp.  83–119. Chiara Trebaiocchi, ‘“Il letterato buono a tutto”. Lodovico Dolce traduttore delle Metamorfosi’, in Per Lodovico Dolce: Miscellanea di studi, ed. by Paolo Marini and Paolo Procaccioli (Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2016), pp. 271–316. 11  Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, p. 74; Bucchi, p. 87; Trebaiocchi, pp. 307–08. 12  For a complete account of language politics in the Italian Cinquecento see Paolo Trovato, Il primo Cinquecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), pp. 75–116. 13  Carlo Dionisotti, ‘Tradizione classica e volgarizzamenti’, in Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 125–78. For a complete account of the epic genre debate see 9 

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and reproduce the form, composition, and function of a genre. The epic genre became the subject of a lively debate, since it lacked a single model for imitation. The major authorities were Homer and Virgil, but their works were not suitable to be written in the vernacular, as demonstrated by the failure of Gian Giorgio Trissino’s Italia liberata dai Goti (1547–48). Many intellectuals saw Ariosto’s Orlando furioso as a model for imitation upon which it was possible to build a modern epic genre theory. The neo-Aristotelians, however, challenged this proposition.14 Their main criticisms were directed at the Furioso’s multiple plot lines, as well as its entangled narrative deriving from the entrelacement, and its many digressions, such as Ariosto’s narrator­ ial interventions at the beginning of the cantos. Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio (1504–73), an Italian novelist and poet from Ferrara, was one of the first to reject neo-Aristotelian criticism. Cinzio defended the Orlando furioso first in an epistolary exchange with Giovan Battista Pigna (1529–75) in 1548, and later in his Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi, printed only one year after the first edition of the Trasformationi, in 1554. Cinzio argued that the wide acclaim the Orlando furioso had so rapidly won justified its deviations from ancient poetic standards. Ariosto, according to Cinzio, raised the romance to new heights, and Orlando furioso became a model to imitate. Cinzio made a case for romance as a genre, claiming that it was a more appealing and relevant genre of poetry for modern audiences than classical epic. Furthermore, he claimed that contemporary Italian poets should follow the example of the best modern practitioners, as opposed to ancient poetic norms that could no longer satisfy modern tastes. Following these appraisals of Ariosto’s work, Dolce, among other Venetian editors and printers, undertook the project of legitimizing Orlando furioso.15 In Giolito’s editions of Ariosto’s poem he included allegories of the cantos that underscored the high literary status of this chivalric poem. In addition, he composed a commentary on the imitation in Orlando furioso, in which he emphasized the epic pedigree of Ariosto’s poem by associating it with Virgil’s Aeneid.16 The Trasformationi was also part of his defence of this poem: Dolce tried to legitimize Orlando furioso as a model of imitation incorporating into the Latin text those features of Ariosto’s work that were Daniel Javitch, ‘The Emergence of Poetic Genre Theory in the Sixteenth Century’, Modern Language Quarterly, 59 (1998), 139–69. 14  Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, pp. 21–47. 15  Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, pp. 31–35. 16  Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, pp. 48–60.

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most criticized by the new Aristotelians: use of multiple plot lines and narratorial digressions. Unlike former Italian translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dolce doub­ led the number of the Metamorphoses’ books, and transformed the fifteen books of the Latin poem into thirty cantos.17 Through the doubling of the sections of the poem, he created suspense by interrupting the narration of a myth before it was concluded. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, the myth of Cadmus and the dragon was entirely narrated in book III (28–130).18 In the Trasformationi, the same myth begins in canto V, and continues in canto VI (Fig. 1; Fig. 2). Through this technique, Dolce imitates Ariosto’s entrelacement, the narrative structure strongly attacked by neo-Aristotelians, despite the fact that a perfect imitation of Ariosto’s narrative strategy was impossible due to the different structure of Orlando furioso and Metamor­ phoses. Ovid’s poem is, as stated in the proem, a carmen perpetuum, a series of myths connected to one another in a linear fashion, from the origins of the world to the author’s time of writing. Therefore the narrative thread could not be interrupted for long, and the suspense lasted only from the end of one canto to the beginning of the next. On the contrary, Orlando furioso is made of various threads intertwined with each other, and each of these is taken up and abandoned according to the narrator’s own judgment, so that the narrative is not presented as a singular story, but as a non-linear sequence of interconnected tales. Hence, a single storyline could be abandoned and taken up after two or more cantos, arousing a state of anxious expectation about what may happen. The Trasformationi touches on a second criticism levelled at Ariosto’s poem: the use of narratorial digressions. In Orlando furioso there are several secondary narrators, along a main author-narrator, who is responsible for the complex interlacing of the various threads of the story. This author-narrator is a pervasive presence within this poem, and his voice is most heard at the beginning and at the end of each canto, when he interrupts the narration to address directly his readers/listeners. Dolce introduces a similar narrative voice and similar narrative digressions at the beginning and the end of each canto. In order to do this, he disrupts the narrative structure of Ovid’s I will take into account only the first edition of Dolce’s Trasformationi. All quotations and references are taken from the facsimile reproduction of the first 1553 edition of the Trasformationi. 18  Ovidio, Metamorfosi, ed.  by Alessandro Barchiesi, trans. by Ludovica Koch (Florence: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 2005). 17 

120 Marta Balzi

Fig. 1 © The British Library Board. Shelfmark G.11114, fol. (Dvi)r.

Lodovico Dolce’s Italian translation 121

Fig. 2 © The British Library Board. Shelfmark G.11114, fol. (Dvi)v.

122 Marta Balzi

Metamorphoses, in which there is not a single author-narrator, but a multitude of narrative voices that can be reduced to a single indistinct one.19 The digressions of the author-narrator are not just an excuse to legitimize the Furioso. Instead, Dolce employed the author-narrator’s space also to guide Giolito’s targeted readership throughout the book, and most importantly to express his views on authorship and translation practice.20 In the Trasforma­ tioni, the proem acts as a window onto Dolce’s contemporary world. It can be devoted to the discussion of political issues, for instance, as in canto VI, when the author-narrator calls for peace on Italian soil (Tr. 1553a VI. 1–3).21 Another example is the proem of canto XII, where Dolce compares the devastation caused by Ceres, enraged by her daughter Proserpina’s disappearance (Met. V. 341–461), with the Italian decadence caused by wars and disagreements (Tr. 1553a XII. 3–4). In these proems, Dolce is borrowing a technique employed by Ariosto before him. At the end of canto XXXIII of Orlando furioso, for instance, the knight Astolfo, thanks to his magic horn, frees Nubia, a region along the Nile in Africa, from the devastation caused by the harpies (OF XXXIII. 107–28).22 In the proem opening the following canto, the author-narrator compares Nubia and Italy, both devastated by enemies and both in need of a saviour (OF XXXIV. 1–3). As we might expect, considering the erotic features of Ovid’s poem, many proems have love as a theme. At the beginning of canto XXI of the Trasfor­ mationi, the author-narrator comments on the myth of Pigmalion. According to Ovid, Pigmalion fell in love with the statue of a woman that he made with his own hands. This beautiful statue became such an obsession for him

Maria Cristina Cabani has studied the narrative structure of the poems written by Ovid and Ariosto tracing similarities and differences between them; ‘Ovidio e Ariosto: leggerezza e disincanto’, Italianistica, 37 (2008), 14–15. For a different account of the narrative structure of the Metamorphoses see Alessandro Barchiesi, ‘Narrative Technique and Narratology in the Metamorphoses’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed.  by Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 180–99. 20  Trebaiocchi has shed light on Dolce’s narratorial digressions at the end and the beginning of each canto, unveiling their dependence on the model of the Furioso. Her analysis, however, is generally critical, underscoring Dolce’s inability to build originally on this model, which he is pedantically imitating (Trebaiocchi, pp. 279–84). This study aims to demonstrate how Dolce, through the imitation of the Furioso, tried to shape his authorial voice. 21  I employ the abbreviation Tr. 1553a to refer to the first edition of the Trasformationi printed by Giolito in Venice. 22  All quotations are taken from Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. by Santorre Debenedetti and Cesare Segre (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1960). Henceforth OF. 19 

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that Venus, moved by this love, transformed the statue into a living body (Met. X. 243–97). In the proem following Pigmalion’s myth, the author-narrator compares the love he feels for his woman to the love between Pigmalion and the statue. According to the author-narrator, his own love is greater, as he bears the image of his woman inside him, in his noble heart, and from there she commands him: È ver, ch’io porto il suo ritratto in parte, Che vivo sta, né s’allontana mai, E senza opra d’intaglio, industra, et arte Il mio gioire il tuo vince d’assai: Che meco sempre è la più nobil parte E del mio core è così donna homai, Che tien lo scettro et il dominio a pieno, E a pioggia, a venti, a sol mai non vien meno. (Tr. 1553a XXI. 2)23

The author-narrator describes his love through themes and images of courtly love. The woman as the poet’s ‘donna’ (mistress), and the image of the woman’s portrait in the poet’s heart are both commonplace in the Italian vernacular love lyric from the Sicilian School to Dante and Petrarch. Through these images, Dolce is transferring the source text into the framework of vernacular poetry. Furthermore, the connection Dolce creates between the authornarrator and Pygmalion is an imitation of the one established between the author-narrator and Orlando in the Orlando furioso, as shown in this proemial stanza: Dirò d’Orlando in un medesmo tratto cosa non detta in prosa mai, né in rima: che per amor venne in furore e matto, d’uom che sì saggio era stimato prima; se da colei che tal quasi m’ha fatto, che ’l poco ingegno ad or ad or mi lima, me ne sarà però tanto concesso, che mi basti a finir quanto promesso. (OF I. 2)24

‘It is true that I carry her portrait in a place that is always alive and does never part from me. Not depending upon any work of carving or any other craft, my happiness is far greater than yours. In fact, the nobler part is always with myself, and it has become such a mistress of my heart that it fully holds the sceptre of power, which never falters because of the rain, the winds or the sun’ (all translations of Dolce’s Transformationi are mine). 24  ‘In the same strain of Roland will I tell  / Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,  / on whom strange madness and rank fury fell, / A man esteemed so wise in former time; / 23 

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The comparison between Orlando and the author-narrator is ironic, because the narrator, on which our understanding of the story depends, risks becoming mad from love in the same way as the protagonist. Although Dolce is appropriating a technique from the Orlando furioso, he is clearly employing it to a different end. Dolce’s author-narrator professes a love that is purer than Pygmalion’s, proposing himself as an exemplary model and a trustworthy guide for his readers. Hence, Dolce employs the narrative tools provided by his model and modifies them for his own poetical purposes. The proems of the Trasformationi are also places where the authornarrator proffers moral and Christian values. Between canto VII and canto VIII, for instance, the author recounts the myth of Pentheus, the king of Thebes, who banned the worship of the god Dionysus. According to Ovid, as a punishment for this action, Pentheus’s own mother and aunts, driven to a frenzy in the Bacchanalia mistook Pentheus for a boar and killed him (Met. III.  692–733). In the proem at the beginning of canto VIII, the authornarrator provides an allegorical interpretation of the myth: the story is an example for all those people who do not believe in the Christian God (Tr. 1553a VIII. 1–3). Something similar happens in the proem of canto XVI, where the author-narrator warns women readers about the correct way to interpret the myth of Procne and Philomela, daughters of the king of Athens, Pandion (Met. VI. 421–674). According to Ovid’s version of the myth, Procne was given in marriage to Tereus of Thrace. Tereus, however, lusted after Philomela and managed to rape her and cut out her tongue. Aware of her sister’s fate, Procne avenged Philomela by killing Itys, her and Tereus’ child. In the Trasformationi, this story is interrupted when Procne, distraught because of what happened to her sister Philomela, thinks about how to take revenge on Tereus, and sees her son Itys. At this point, the author-narrator closes the narration in the style of the chivalric poems, calling the attention of his readers or listeners with a closing remark: Ma: ma [sic] giunto al fin di questo canto i sono. Ne l’altro io vi prometto di dir cose Donne, da farvi meste e lagrimose. (Tr. 1553a XIII. 95. 6–8)25

If she, who to like cruel pass has well / Night brought wastes my sense, concede me skill / And strength my daring promise to fulfil’. All translations of Orlando Furioso are taken from Ludovico Ariosto, The Orlando Furioso, ed.  by William Stewart Rose, trans. by John Harington, 8 vols (London: J. Murray, 1823–31). See also OF IX. 1–2. 25  ‘But I have arrived at the end of this canto. In the following one, ladies, I promise to tell you things that will make you sad and teary’.

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The break of the linearity of the narration aims to create suspense, allowing the author-narrator to intervene before the narration reaches an emotional peak. This break also allows Dolce to intervene in the ensuing proem, and explain that Procne’s act, the murder of her son, was wrong: Donne leggiadre, se benignamente I versi miei, vostra mercede udite: Io dico a voi, che di virtù ardete Il vivo pregio e l’honestà seguite Senza di cui sprezzate altrimente Le cose altrui più care e più gradite: Credo che a tutte chiaro e noto sia, Quanto al figlio fu Progne iniqua e ria. (Tr. 1553a XIV. 1)26

Here the author-narrator is referring exclusively to the female readers or audience, following the gendered address made in the final lines of the preceding canto. This proem stands as a moral guide for women, for whom this story could be potentially misleading. The narrator anticipates the outcome of the myth to render this brutal scene more acceptable, making it an example of ill judgment. A similarly gendered address appears in the Orlando furioso, in the proem anticipating the innkeeper’s story about women’s unfaithfulness:27 Donne, e voi che le donne avete in pregio, per Dio, non date a questa istoria orecchia, a questa che l’ostier dire in dispregio e in vostra infamia e biasmo s’apparecchia; (OF XXVIII. 1. 1–4)28

The author-narrator warns women readers that the contents of the innkeeper’s story might offend them, and suggests that they leave the canto unread, and move on to the following one. The real purpose of Ariosto’s proem, however, is not to educate his readers, but to stimulate their curiosity. These stanzas are profoundly ironic, because the author-narrator is offering an excuse for something offensive that he is going to write anyway. In contrast with the ‘Graceful ladies, you who burn with virtue and despise the things most dear and pleasing to others, if they lack true value and honesty, if in kindness you are approvingly listening to my verse, I tell you this: I believe that it is acknowledged and clear to all of you how much Procne was unjust and guilty towards her son’. 27  Bucchi (pp. 89–90) and Trebaiocchi (p. 280) have already underlined how invocations to female readers in the Trasformationi are one of the most evident instances of adaptation of the Ovidian text to the structures of the Furioso. 28  ‘Ladies, and all of you that ladies prize, / afford not, for the love of heaven, an ear / to this, the landlord’s tale, replete with lies, / in shame and scorn of womankind’. 26 

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Trasformationi, in the Orlando furioso the author-narrator is not playing the role of a moral guide. Dolce is thus only employing the narrative structure of the Orlando furioso, rather than its content. The moral intervention of the author-narrator in the Trasformationi is not limited to the proems. The large number of erotic scenes leads the author-narrator to a censorial intervention inside and outside the limits of their initial digression. We find an example of moralizing intervention in the Trasformationi in the episode of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. Salmacis, according to Ovid, was a nymph devoted to pleasure: she spent time taking care of herself and her beauty instead of hunting with the other nymphs. Ovid describes Salmacis at the edge of a pool, combing her hair, watching her image reflected in the water, and taking long baths. In Dolce’s translation of the scene, the author-narrator intervenes saying that women, unlike Salmacis, should respect their natural, God-given appearance: Così muro talhor putrido e vecchio Huom per celar la sua bruttezza, imbianca; Ma il tempo leva poi la crosta via, E lo fa ritornar, qual era pria. Donne non disprezzate la figura, che vi diè quel, che fe tutte le cose. Son via più grate l’opre di natura, che quelle, u [sic] dotta mano industria pose. (Tr. 1553a IX. 12. 6–8; IX. 13. 1–4)29

The author-narrator tends to address his moralizing comments to female readers. These gendered addresses could be a signal of the targeted or predicted readership of this translation. We know that Giolito, the owner of the shop in Venice that printed this edition, promoted an image of himself as a man devoted to women, and published original works and translations for female readers.30 Furthermore, Giolito stressed his own morality on other

‘Similarly, men sometimes paint a dirty and old wall to conceal its ugliness; but with time the paint comes off and the wall returns it to its pristine status. Ladies, do not despise the shape that was given to you by the Maker of all things. The works made by Nature are far more pleasing than those crafted by a capable hand’. 30  The relationship between Giolito and his female readers has been thoroughly investigated by Helena Sanson in Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della instituzion delle donne, secondo li tre stati che cadono nella vita umana, ed. by Helena Sanson (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2015), and by Androniki Dialeti, ‘The Publisher Gabriel Giolito De’ Ferrari, 29 

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occasions. In his editions of the Orlando furioso, for instance, he added paratextual elements that underscored the moral purpose of the poem, such as a list of exempla of good and evil conduct provided by Ariosto’s text.31 Therefore, the examples of moral interventions in the Trasformationi show how Dolce tried to associate the imitation of Ariosto’s author-narrator with the development of a poem that could suit the expectations of, and also guide, the readership targeted by Giolito. In other words, the Trasformationi originates from a crossover between translator-function and editor-function. The author-narrator intervenes outside the proem’s space not only to moralize, but also to provide further details about the story he is recounting. In book six of the Metamorphoses, Ovid introduces the myth of the Argonauts and their quest for the golden fleece (Met. VI. 719–21). Since in the Latin source text no information is provided about what the golden fleece is, in the Trasformationi the author-narrator intervenes giving details about it: Ma, perché ciascheduno notitia pigli di quel che’l mio Scrittor non ne favella; Vi dico, ch’Athamante hebbe due figli, L’un maschio (Tr. 1553a XIV. 29. 1–4)32

As in the former moralizing interventions, Dolce’s author-narrator plays a didactic function and tries to guarantee a complete and unequivocal understanding of the story. Furthermore, through this digression, Dolce also establishes a relationship between the principal narrative voice and Ovid, to whom he refers as ‘’l mio Scrittor’ (my author). This relationship is comparable to the one between Ariosto’s author-narrator and Turpin. In chivalric poems, Turpin’s writings are the imaginary source of the events narrated. This fictitious writer is mentioned, always ironically, to authenticate the fabulous deeds recounted by the narrator: Quattro altri uccide appresso all’Indovino, che non han tempo a dire una parola: menzion dei nomi lor non fa Turpino (OF XVIII. 175. 3–5)33

Female Readers, and the Debate about Women in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 28 (2004), 5–32. 31  Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, p. 32. 32  ‘To give each of you access to the details that my Writer does not mention, I tell you that Athamas had two sons, one was a boy’. 33  ‘For others he, near the Diviner, slew,  / nor gave the wretches time to say a word.  / Sir Turpin in his story tells not who’.

128 Marta Balzi Turpin, che tutta questa storia dice, fa qui digression, e torna in quel paese dove fu dianzi morto il Maganzese. (OF XXIII. 38 .6–8)34

In some occurrences, such as the one mentioned below, Ariosto’s authornarrator – always ironic about the reliability of his sources – says that Turpin does not report what followed a particular event. Fortunately, he continues, he has another source at his disposal: Non si legge in Turpin che n’avenisse; ma vidi già un autor che più ne scrisse. Scrisse l’autore il cui nome mi taccio, (OF XXIV. 44. 7–8; 45. 1)35

In both the Trasformationi and the Orlando furioso the author-narrator claims to abandon the original source, real in the first case (Ovid) and fictitious in the second (Turpin), to add more information to the story. Impli­ citly, Dolce relegates Turpin and Ovid to the humble role of fictitious source texts, placing himself with Ariosto on a higher level, in the category of ‘true’ director of the narration. This attitude lends support to the view that the acquisition of the narrative strategies of the Furioso enabled Dolce to participate actively within the poem, significantly increasing his own visibility and his perception of being the author, rather than the translator. Dolce’s view of his authorial role is clearly expressed in the proem to the myth of Phaethon, which constitutes a second introductory proem to the whole translation. According to the version of the myth given by Ovid (Met. I. 748–79; II. 1–339), Phaethon was a young boy who wanted to demonstrate that he was the Sun’s child, and therefore insisted that his father allowed him to drive the Sun’s chariot for a day. Placed in charge of the chariot, however, Phaethon was unable to control the horses, and Zeus struck the chariot down to prevent the world from being burned. The programma­ tic function of this canto is notable from the fact that Dolce considerably extended canto II in order to dedicate an entire canto to this myth.36 This episode of the Trasformationi is also one of the most commonly illustrated within the series of woodcuts designed by Giovanni Antonio Rusconi for ‘Turpin, by whom this stody is told, / here makes digression, and returns again / Thither, where faithless Pinnabel was slain’. 35  ‘What these befel Sir Turpin has not said / but more I once in other author read. / This author vouches (I declar not who)’. 36  Trebaiocchi (p.  278) has noticed that the second canto is much longer than the others. However, she does not try to explain this disparity. 34 

Lodovico Dolce’s Italian translation 129

Giolito’s editions of this work.37 At the opening to canto III and IV, there is respectively a woodcut representing Phaethon in front of the Sun’s palace (Fig. 3), and a woodcut representing Phaethon’s fall (Fig. 4). Furthermore, canto III begins with the word folle, where the letter F is the initial of the name Phaethon (Fetonte in Italian), which is also decorated with another representation of Phaethon’s fall (Fig. 3).38 In addition to occupying an entire canto (canto III), the narration of this myth also incorporates the end of canto II and the beginning of canto IV. This structure allowed Dolce to dedicate two proems to this myth. In the first proem at the beginning of canto III (Tr. 1553a III. 1–3), the author-narrator introduces Phaethon’s story as an emblematic tale of human presumption and pride, and compares himself to the protagonist of the myth: E forse anch’io per questo mar audace Sciolsi la vela del mio picciol legno, Debile e poco di solcar capace L’onda, che pria varcò sì chiaro ingegno: Ma, mentre che di voi l’amica face Fia di quest’alma tramontana e segno; Non sol non temo il mio viaggio torto, Ma giunger spero a salvamento in porto. (Tr. 1553a III. 3)39

The author-narrator describes himself as a poet who, like Phaethon, went on a voyage which exceeded the bounds of his given destiny. The theme of poetic creation as navigation is a widely employed literary topos. In the Orlando furioso, Ariosto describes the act of writing as a navigation (OF

For the woodcut series in the Trasformationi see Guthmüller, Mito, poesia, arte, pp.  251–74; Dolce, Le Trasformationi (2013), pp.  15–74; and Giuseppe Capriotti, ‘Mito, magia e iconografia. I  sortilegi di Medea nelle stampe di Giovanni Antonio Rusconi per le Trasformationi di Lodovico Dolce’, Il capitale culturale: Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage, 7 (2013), 33–56. 38  This decorated initial is part of Giolito’s series of ‘iniziali parlanti’, in which each letter of the alphabet is represented through a mythical character. For the use of ‘iniziali parlanti’ in sixteenth-century Venice see Franca Petrucci-Nardelli, La lettera e l’immagine: Le inziali ‘parlanti’ nella tipografia italiana (secc. XIV–XVIII) (Florence: Olschki, 1991). 39  ‘And maybe I too have loosened the sail of my small boat to navigate this bold sea, weak and not fully capable of surviving the same waves previously navigated by such a bright mind. However, as long as your friendly light will guide my soul, I not only hold no fear of straying, but I also hope to arrive safely in harbour’. 37 

130 Marta Balzi

Fig. 3 © The British Library Board. Shelfmark G.11114, fol. (Bvii)r.

Lodovico Dolce’s Italian translation 131

Fig. 4 © The British Library Board. Shelfmark G.11114, fol. (Ciii)v.

132 Marta Balzi

XLVI. 1. 1–4).40 In the proem of the Trasformationi, however, I believe that Dolce is also weaving the Divina Commedia into the intertextual fabric of his translation, as Dante’s poetic journey is also described as a navigation. This intertextuality is underscored by the fact that Dante the protagonist was himself compared to Phaethon. In his persuasive vertical reading of the Commedia, Kevin Brownlee has shown the programmatic use of Ovid’s Phaethon over the course of the poem.41 In canto XVII of each cantica, Dante the protagonist is associated with this mythological character only to create an inversion of the classical model. Dante and Phaethon are both on a journey that goes beyond the reach of human potential, but while Phaethon’s ride ends with a disastrous fall, Dante’s journey is a successful ascent. The difference between the two, however, does not rest solely in their opposite direction of travel. The writer of the Commedia underscores another fundamental divergence between Phaethon and Dante. The mythological character, acting alone, was unable to control his chariot, whereas Dante, by contrast, is led by a guide (Virgil, Beatrice, and Cacciaguida) at every stage of his journey. As emerges from the first proem, Dolce regards his translation as an ambitious poetic journey, which he will successfully accomplish thanks to the guidance of an ‘amica face’. Dolce, like Dante before him, seems to be aware of the importance of a trustworthy guide to accomplish his journey, and the ‘amica face’ could refer to the guidance of God, but it could also refer to the illustrious poets of vernacular literature, who acted as poetic guides. At the beginning of canto IV of the Trasformationi, in the second proem dedicated to Phaethon, the author-narrator blames the poets who are as proud as Phaethon and claim to be as good as Virgil and Homer, or Dante and Petrarch. Furthermore, he blames the vernacular writers who refuse to follow the two greatest modern poets: Dante and Petrarch (Tr 1553a IV. ii–iii). With this second proem, I  believe that Dolce is again painting himself as anti-Phaethon, evoking, like Dante before him, his own poetic guides. This association with Phaethon’s journey communicates to the readers all the transgressive power of the Trasformationi. As stated in the proem, the writer navigates ‘L’onda, che pria varcò sì chiaro ingegno’, publishing for the first time a vernacular version of a classical poem that aimed to stand up to the competition of its source text. In order to accomplish this, Dolce chose

40  41 

Trebaiocchi, p. 279. Kevin Brownlee, ‘Phaeton’s Fall and Dante’s Ascent’, Dante Studies, 102 (1984), 135–44.

Lodovico Dolce’s Italian translation 133

three crucial models of transgression: Ovid, Dante, and Ariosto. Since the Middle Ages Ovid had been an ‘auctor at odds with auctoritas’.42 In fact, he was considered an authoritative writer, but at the same time he played a marginal role on a poetical, political, and moral level. For this reason medieval writers held him dear, and regarded him as a guide for authorial rebellion. Dante represents another obvious model of transgression for Dolce. He was the first to revise the Ovidian myths, and to use Ovid’s imaginative power to exceed human ability in his journey through the afterlife. Additionally, in the sixteenth century, both Dante and Ariosto were poetical figures whose prestige and authority were highly contested on the grounds of the deviation of their poems from the norms established by Aristotle’s Poetics.43 Building on these three marginal poetical guides, Dolce reclaimed and contested the authority of the ancients. He projected his own authorial voice from within that of Ovid, and constructed his own authorial agenda. In conclusion, by highlighting the literary function(s) of the Trasfor­ mationi, this study constitutes a reappraisal of Dolce’s intellectual stature, a process that has already been triggered by studies of Dolce’s tragedies, and that needs to be extended to his translations.44 Dolce’s cultural mediation is evident in his capacity to repurpose and adapt Ovid’s poem for the new readership targeted by Giolito, while at the same time making the work into a manifesto of the vernacular literary tradition that began with Dante and culminated in Ariosto. Thanks to this analysis, we are able to see the Tra­ sformationi as an ambitious poetical project, whose objective is, on the one hand, to legitimize the Orlando furioso as a modern classic and a model for imitation, and, on the other, to legitimize Dolce himself as a vernacular poet.

Jeremy Dimmick, ‘Ovid in the Middle Ages: Authority and Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. by Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 264–87 (p. 264). 43  For further reading on Dante’s reception in the sixteenth century see Simon Gilson, Reading Dante in Renaissance Italy. Florence, Venice and the ‘Divine Poet’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1–20. 44  Stefano Giazzon has conducted important research on Dolce’s theatrical writings with the aim of demonstrating that Dolce was the most important and talented tragedian of the Italian Cinquecento: Stefano Giazzon, Venezia in coturno. Lodovico Dolce tragediografo (1543–1557) (Rome: Aracne, 2011). Giazzon is clearly following the path set up by Stefano Tomassini, ‘L’abbaino veneziano di un “operaio” senza fucina’, in Didone. Tragedia (Parma: Edizioni Zara, 1996), pp. ix–xliv. 42 

Stesso corpo in ‘cangiate forme’: traduzione fedele e ottava rima nelle Metamorfosi di Fabio Marretti (1570) Francesco Roncen

D

elle traduzioni integrali delle Metamorfosi apparse nella seconda metà del Cinquecento, quella di Fabio Marretti (1570) ha goduto sicuramente di minor fortuna editoriale e critica.1 Ancora oggi si tende a liquidarla come un esperimento poco riuscito, deludente sul piano estetico rispetto ai volgarizzamenti di Dolce e Anguillara e condannato ‘all’insuccesso prima e all’oblio poi’.2 Tali considerazioni, certo in gran parte Per i passi delle stampe cinquecentesche citati nel corso del saggio, ho impiegato i seguenti criteri di trascrizione: ho soppresso la h, sia etimologica che non, in posizione intervocalica e a inizio di parola, con normalizzazione delle forme del verbo avere secondo l’uso moderno (conservando h solo in Chaos); ho distinto u da v secondo la fonetica odierna; ho reso il nesso (t)ti  +  vocale con zi  +  vocale o z  +  vocale in conformità all’uso moderno: Marretti impiega tale nesso sia in parole che effettivamente mantengono la semivocale palatale anche nel volgare, sia in alcuni termini che la contengono solamente nell’etimologia latina, come elegantia, diligentia, sententia (la fedeltà a questo principio lungo tutta la traduzione, e non solo nel paratesto, fa escludere l’idea che si tratti di veri e propri latinismi). Ho poi uniformato le varie forme con elisione di che + verbo avere nella forma c’hanno, c’ha, c’ho, etc; ho reso la congiunzione et con ed davanti a e ma con e in tutti gli altri casi; preposizioni articolate e avverbi presenti in forma perifrastica sono ricondotti alla forma sintetica solo in mancanza di raddoppiamento (su gli> sugli ma non de la> della); la j intervocalica è resa con i; ho uniformato secondo l’uso moderno l’impiego delle maiuscole, ad eccezione dei casi in cui hanno funzione personalizzante o allegorica (es. Amore come divinità); ho rispettato l’oscillazione fonetica tra geminate e scempie, che rispecchia la sostanza linguistica delle varianti regionali o delle scelte individuali dei traduttori; ho riportato secondo l’uso moderno gli accenti gravi o acuti; ho modificato la punteggiatura esclusivamente nel caso di segmentazioni sintattiche oggi non accettabili o di difficile lettura: in particolare ho espunto la virgola prima di proposizioni relative restrittive e, nei testi in prosa, prima della congiunzione e all’interno di una dittologia o di un elenco; quest’ultima modifica non viene apportata nei testi poetici, dove potrebbe rappresentare una consapevole memoria petrarchesca. 2  Filippo Ciri, ‘Fabio Marretti’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (2008). Giolito): Giolito aderisce risolutamente alla norma bembesca riguardo a cotesto,25 opta per un lessico più letterario (gravissima e crudele> acerbissima; havrai> apparecchiati), persegue un giro sintattico più articolato, anche a costo di tradire l’atticismo falarideo, o semplicemente di una diversa e più efficace messa a tema (Perché l’arte sana l’infermità del corpo: Et la morte medica solamente la malitia dell’animo> Perciochè la malatia del corpo l’arte la toglie via, ma il morbo dell’anima solamente si puote curar con la medicina della morte), seleziona l’elegante metafora principe della medicina (rispetto al neutro inventor de la medicina) e un più incisivo aggettivare (molte & grandi> infinte & gravi). Tanto più interessante l’operazione traduttoria della giolitina in quanto mette in crisi le partizioni tra traduzioni alla lettera e a senso, giacché la ricerca della letterarietà può cedere il passo a

Elisabetta Selmi, ‘Fra “negotio” e “parole”: per una “institutio” retorica dei “libri del segretario”. La svolta degli anni Novanta’, in Alla lettera. Teorie e pratiche epistolari dai Greci al Novecento (Milano: Guerini, 1998), pp. 173–227; Lodovica Braida, Libri di lettere. Le raccolte epistolari del Cinquecento tra inquietudini religiose e ‘buon volgare’ (Roma: Laterza, 2009), pp. 201–18. 24  Quondam, p. 65, e più in generale pp. 59–80. Per la lettura polimatica dell’epistolario di Falaride, si veda Bianchi. Un analogo sistema di annotazione, volto a enucleare sia notizie storiche sia insegnamenti morali, si riscontra nell’incunabulo postillato della versione latina del 1471 (Tarvisio, Geraert van der Leye: ISTC, ip0054800) conservato presso la Biblioteca Queriniana di Brescia (Incun. B.II.15.m2). 25  Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, III, xxiii, l’editio princeps del 1525 riscontrata con l’autografo Vaticano latino 3210, edizione critica a cura di Claudio Vela (Bologna: CLUEB, 2001).

204 Valentina Gallo

un restauro della lezione latina allorquando il volgarizzamento intermedio ha depositato nuovi valori culturali e morali: così Giolito recupera il morbo dell’anima (animi autem morbo) che Della Fonte-Sansovino avevano reso, dantescamente, in termini di malitia. Ed è forse questo l’unico aspetto davvero rilevante sul piano ideologico, la revisione del sistema etico – più ancora che linguistico – che sorregge la riscrittura delle prime dieci lettere. Così nella lettera a Pitagora, che trattando del rapporto tra il tiranno e il filosofo dovette impegnare a fondo i traduttori, accanto a prevedibili scelte lessicali volte ad ammodernare il testo, come satelliti> guardie, buono & perfetto huomo> huomo da bene riferito a Pitagora, costarti meco senza paura> meco vivere quietamente, ci si imbatte in una variante di spessore allorquando entra in gioco la questione se il tiranno, costretto a esercitare la crudeltà, possa restare un essere umano o sia condannato a ‘imbestiarsi’: il traduttore di Giolito elimina una parola altamente evocativa delle virtù cristiane come mansuetudine e si riscopre volgarizzatore fedele (mi meterò a caminare per più piaceuole strada