No untranslatables! (Box 5, TO TRANSLATE)

Abstract

It was through the Italians that translation as a theoretical enterprise was revived in the Renaissance. This was in large part thanks to Leonardo Bruni, erstwhile chancellor of Florence and indefatigable translator of Greek into Latin at a particularly heady moment in the history of humanism: the early fifteenth century, two generations after that other indefatigable humanist (albeit one ignorant of Greek), Petrarch. Indignant over criticism of his translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Bruni threw himself into De interpretatione recta (On Correct Translation) in the mid-1420s. His anger at a churchman whose critique revealed misunderstanding not only of Greek but also of his own ‘mother tongue,’ Latin, produced a passionate statement about translation’s importance to the modern Western world. Bruni seems to be the first to have used traductio and traducere to mean ‘translation’: words that would come to replace interpretare, vertere, and convertere, as Remigio Sabbadini has noted, and thus words that insist on the act of transporting, and even transformation. Transformation is, in fact, at the heart of Bruni’s meditations: the ‘best translator will turn his whole mind, heart, and will to his author, and in a sense be transformed by him’ (De interpretatione recta). But after