Collaborative Translation as a Model for Multilingual Printing in Early Renaissance Editions of Aesop's Fables

Abstract

The printing of multilingual translations was a widespread activity in early modern Europe. Many translators and editors produced texts that combined different versions of a work on the same page, and they emphasized the value of this labour in their prefatory writings. Yet this practice has remained on the margins of Western literary histories, which tend to follow national-literature monolingual paradigms and models of analysis that presuppose texts should have a single authorial figure and a single reading position. This chapter discusses three of the earliest printed multilingual translations of Aesop’s Fables: Heinrich Steinhöwel’s German–Latin Esopus (Ulm, c. 1476), Bonus Accursius’s Graeco-Latin edition (Milan, c. 1478), and the Latin Aesopus moralisatus with Italian translations by Accio Zucco printed by Giovanni Alvise (Verona, c. 1479). Vis-à-vis the model of the individual translator who produces an autonomous version destined to replace previous renditions of the work, these texts represent a different understanding of translation. Instead of substituting each other, the combined versions generate a space where different writing and reading positions coexist. Each of the texts analysed is the result of different correlation strategies, and their analysis can shed light on some of the models for textual multiplicity available at the time.