Early Modern Translations Research Articles

Jansenist Education and Racine’s Intertextuality in European Context: Can an Early Modern Translation of Andromaque Help Revisit an Old Concept?

Abstract The article deals with the intertextual dimensions of Jean Racine’s tragedy Andromaque and its rendering by the seventeenth–century Polish translator Stanisław Morsztyn. The analysis is based on an old hypothesis concerning the link between Racine’s intertextual literary practice and his erudite education at the Petites écoles de Port-Royal. The translator, although he had not received Jansenist education, was able to identify correctly and develop the original strategy of quotations and allusions. The article attempts to seek the factors that helped the Polish translator render the intertextuality of Andromaque in another cultural context. Three such factors have been proposed—the tradition of neo-Latin poetry developed both in France and in Poland, the Italian Petrarchism (along with the idea of sprezzatura), perceived not as a store of topics but as a pattern of free operation with Ancient allusions. The similarity between Racine’s education and that of Morsztyn, which combined the influence of the Polish Brethren with homeschooling, could have been the third factor. The article closes with a question concerning the perspectives of cultural studies in intertextual strategies of poets connected with various religious circles of the seventeenth century.

Early Modern Translation and the Digital Turn in the Humanities

Early Modern Translation and the Digital Turn in the Humanities

Spinoza the Classicist: A Response to Susan James’s ‘Spinoza and the Poetic Imagination’

ABSTRACT In response to Susan James’s ‘Spinoza and the poetic imagination,’ this essay illustrates how Spinoza and his interlocutors in the artistic society Nil Volentibus Arduum developed approaches to art and its social and political utility in conversation with Aristotle’s Poetics, as well as with its early modern translations, redactions, and applications. They, in turn, developed a poetry and a poetics grounded in the philosophical apprehension of nature, emphasizing vraisemblance or probability and necessity; foregrounding the careers of the affects; and affording critics the ability to mobilize pleasure to their advantage and to shape audiences—a classicist project.

Linguistic Colonization through Print and Translation: John Eliot’s Algonquin Bible and Writings on the Algonquin Language

Puritan missionary John Eliot, translator of the Bible into Algonquin and author of several texts related to the Algonquin language, also wrote texts that reveal a very politically minded seventeenth-century colonialist. In recent years, critics have characterized Eliot’s translations and writings on the Algonquin language as colonial and linguistic imperialism but have not adequately addressed the extent to which Eliot’s translation projects and his conscious use of the print trade inform this cultural and linguistic imperialism. Close examination of the printings and paratexts of Eliot’s “Indian Library” reveals colonial agendas, and placing Eliot’s translation projects in the context of early modern translation theories underscores Eliot’s single-minded purpose for learning Algonquin: to indoctrinate the Native Americans into Christianity. Once known as the “Apostle to the Indians,” Eliot thus becomes a colonizer subjugating the colonized with religion. Although Eliot’s missionary work likely stemmed from a sincere Christian concern for the state of Native Americans’ souls, the presentation of his texts reveals an unconscious agenda of biopolitical theology that unintentionally undermines Eliot’s genuine project as a man of God.

On Mediated Translation: A Fruitful Dialogue between Specialists in Translation Studies and Early Modern Translation

On Mediated Translation: A Fruitful Dialogue between Specialists in Translation Studies and Early Modern Translation

The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500–1700 by Liam Semler

Reviewed by: The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500–1700 by Liam Semler Rocío G. Sumillera Rocío G. Sumillera. Liam Semler, The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500–1700. London: Routledge, 2019. 338 pp. ISBN 9780367664961. Early modern scholars interested in the grotesque, in the broadest sense of the word, are in luck with Liam Semler's collection of one hundred and twenty extracts from a highly varied range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources which either mention the term or allude to the concept in some way. Those teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses on early modern literatures and art history will find this work very useful, not only due to the information it offers specifically on England, as the volume's title suggests, but more generally because the volume also provides an overview of how the concept has been understood at a European level. This is so partly because some of the selected primary sources are in fact early modern translations into English of Italian, French, and Spanish works by, among others, Castiglione, Lomazzo, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Cervantes, and partly because some of the extracts are taken from dictionaries of modern languages (French, Italian) into English. Overall, the volume serves as a complement to existing canonical monographs on the grotesque—including Clayborough's The Grotesque in English Literature, Barasch's The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings, Farnham's Shakespearean Grotesque, Rhodes's Elizabethan Grotesque, Harpham's On the Grotesque, and McElroy's Fiction of the Modern Grotesque—as well as to more recent scholarship on the subject, such as Chao's Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque and Connelly's The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture. Semler's collection of primary sources is a neatly structured conceptual map of sorts (to use Semler's words, a "terminological and aesthetic ecosystem" and "a philological map") which illustrates in context the meanings and understandings of the grotesque and of a range of its conceptual relatives, including not only predictable terms such as imagination, fantasy, and dream, but also more unexpected ones, such as morisco and arabesque. His one hundred and twenty "Items," as Semler calls them, are usually one or two paragraph-long fragments taken from, among others, book catalogues and inventories, biographies, travelogues, plays, dictionaries, letters, and essays and treatises on [End Page 173] varied subjects. Forty-three of these date from the sixteenth century, and the remaining seventy-seven from the seventeenth. To give an idea of the diversity of the sources, which Semler arranges chronologically, Item 1 is a six-line fragment taken from a text dated January 6, 1517, and included in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII; the final Item, number 120, is an eighteen-line paragraph from the anonymous English translation of Parrhasiana, written by the Genevan theologian Jean le Clerc (1657–1736), and published in French in 1699, and a year later in English. Item 1 describes the architecture and floral arrangements of the royal pageant's garden at Greenwich Palace, and Semler notes its relevance in being the first text where the term "antics," a relative of grotesque, is used with regard to architecture and in connection with a theatrical context. Item 120, by contrast, is from le Clerc's long essay on diverse topics that opens with the chapter "Of Poets and Poetry," where the admiration for poetic accomplishments in works in verse is compared to an admiration for "Grotesque Figures upon Marble" for "the fineness of the Sculpture" (252). Semler in fact notes that most of his sources tend to deal with either theatricality, bodily behavior (gesture, movement, posture), and artistic categories (drama, dance, and other forms of entertainment and performance), or with the visual arts, and in this sense they involve not just architecture and sculpture, but also textiles, plates, and decorative objects in general. The twenty figures included in the volume (from book covers, tapestries, and various objects, to details of paintings and architectural motifs) illustrate this multiplicity. Every Item is followed by Semler's insightful annotations, which range from single-paragraph commentaries to more detailed and in-depth explanations running to several pages. These "Notes...

Of Spices and Spies: Paradise Lost, Os Lusíadas, and Richard Fanshawe’s Lusiad (1655)

It has long been thought that John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) engages with Os Lusíadas (1572), the Portuguese epic written by Luís Vaz de Camões about Vasco da Gama’s 1497–99 voyage from Lisbon to India, and that Milton probably did so using the English Lusiad (1655) produced by the royalist, diplomat, and translator Richard Fanshawe. However, scant attention has been paid to exploring Fanshawe’s treatment of the material Milton is believed to have referenced. This essay illuminates how Fanshawe subtly yet significantly reworked Camões’s poetry, suggesting that the allusions Milton is thought to have made to Os Lusíadas should be viewed as existing—intentionally or otherwise—in conversation with the opinions Fanshawe imbued his translation with too. This essay complicates the established critical perception that Milton was hostile to his Portuguese counterpart by revealing surprising similarities between Milton’s and Camões’s presentation of the spices traded across the early modern world, contending that it is the English Lusiad, not the Iberian original, that exists in opposition to Paradise Lost. This essay further posits that Satan’s address to Chaos in Paradise Lost, an incident that has previously been as read as parodying Camões’s portrayal of global commerce, can profitably also be read in connection with a domestic issue that Fanshawe introduced and that Camões had little to do with—namely, royalist espionage. Overall, this essay extends our understanding of the relationships among Milton, Camões, and Fanshawe, and contributes to the burgeoning fields of study on early modern translation and globalization.

The Role of Lexical Collocation in Luther’s Translation of עָמָל (ʿāmāl) in Eccl. 1:3

Abstract This article investigates an unexplored facet of Luther’s translation of the Book of Ecclesiastes. It shows how he identified a technical linguistic phenomenon in the Hebrew text known as lexical collocation and how this ultimately shaped a number of his German renderings. This helps to solve an enigma concerning his translation of עָמָל (ʿāmāl) in Eccl. 1:3 in his Deutsche Bibel. This article also illuminates the role of intertexts in Luther’s Bible translation method, demonstrating how he frequently consulted, compared, and ultimately borrowed from multiple texts and languages to formulate his German renderings, far beyond the simple colloquial German of his day—the language of the ‘common man in the market’ and the ‘mother in the home’, which biographers of Luther so often cite. It also furthers the scholarly understanding of certain linguistic aspects of intertextuality which have not been discussed before. Finally, it identifies a number of important implications for Hebrew and German linguistics, Luther studies, and the history of medieval and early modern Bible translation. In short, this research opens up a new window, in an area never before addressed, for studies on one of the most important and influential Bible translators of all time.

Translating Luther into Swedish in the Sixteenth Century

This article investigates the production of religious literature published in Swedish from 1520 to 1599, specifically looking for translations of Luther’s texts. Previous research has concluded that Luther was relatively absent from the Swedish book market during the sixteenth Century – apart from translations of the Small Catechism and his Bible. In order to challenge previous research, the article applies a wider understanding of the early modern translation practice and incorporates adaptions and translations of smaller text excerpts compiled into larger works as well as word-for-word translations of complete texts.Luther was present in the Swedish book market through various forms of translations, from faithful literal translations to mere inspirations. These findings have implications for the study of translations of Luther into other vernaculars during the early modern period. The argument in this article, that we must pay more attention to contemporary translation practices in order to understand the volume of translations, implies that there are more hidden translations, also in other vernaculars, and that looking for them may be rewarding. (Less)

Balbín’s Diva Montis Sancti (1665) and Its Vernacular Versions as a Type of Early Modern Translations

Balbín’s Diva Montis Sancti (1665) and Its Vernacular Versions as a Type of Early Modern Translations

Translating and Transgendering Orestes in Early Modern England

In early modern theatres, beyond his appearances in productions of classical plays, Orestes featured in new plays by writers including Pickering, Chettle, Dekker, Heywood, and Goffe, as well as inspiring allusions in plays by Kyd, Greene, Marlowe, Marston, and Jonson. In contrast with the female protagonists who typically featured in early modern translations of Greek tragedies, Orestes resonated with the melancholy, malcontent male characters who took central roles in new tragedies by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. This essay suggests that Euripides’ identification of Orestes with female tragic figures offered a template for rewriting iconic female tragic roles at a moment when playwrights were redesigning tragedy to showcase increasingly prominent male actors.

Early modern receptions of Iphigenia at Aulis

AbstractThe sacrifice of Iphigenia, appearing influentially in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, assumes various forms in early modern translation, reading, and adaptation. Early modern receptions variously constrict, domesticate, Romanize, and Christianize the story. Publication in Latin, especially in Erasmus’ translation (1506) transposes Greek linguistic and cultural referents to later hermeneutics, rendering mysterious ancient elements into familiar Roman analogues — Stoic ideals, fortuna, prudentia, and the like. Caspar Stiblin’s Latin translation (1562) and Gabriel Harvey’s copious marginalia in his copy of Erasmus’ translation show that constriction and domestication often take the form of fragmentation of the text into sententiae, or wise sayings. The search for rhetorical figures, political maxims, or moral lessons generates many Christian applications and culminates in Buchanan’s biblical reworking of Iphigenia’s story in Jephthes, wherein Artemis gives way to the Judaeo-Christian god and Iphigenia, here Iphis, becomes a type of Christ. The Vernacular Adaptations of Jane Lumley, Jean Racine, and Abel Boyer continue to dismantle the heroic ethos of Euripides play and re-imagine the story: Achilles dwindles into a romantic lead, Agamemnon, into a vicious ruler and father, and Iphigenia becomes a pious and submissive daughter.

Kalila and Dinna by Nasrullah Munshi (review)

Reviewed by: Kalila and Dinna by Nasrullah Munshi Albrecht Classen Nasrullah Munshi. Kalila and Dinna, trans. from the Persian by Wheeler Thackston. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2019. 187 pp. Recent scholarship has begun to explore more specific lines of contact between India, the Middle East, and Europe during the late Middle Ages. One most impressive example of global literature already at that time was Nasrullah Munshi's Kalila and Dinna, which made its way to medieval Europe and was available in numerous different translations. It was based on the Indian Pañcatantra. This collection of animal stories in the ancient fable tradition served exceedingly well as a kind of "mirror for princes," and the didactic approach was obviously highly welcomed by, and useful to, aristocratic circles in many different cultures. Despite many adaptations and modifications, in essence, Kalila and Dinna exerted a deep influence on many East and West cultures and can certainly be regarded as a prime example of global literature. There could be many ways of making this enormously influential collection of fables better known to modern audiences, such as translating it into a modern language, and here into English. Wheeler Thackston draws from the Persian translation created by Abu'l-Ma'ali Nasrullah around 1120, although that one was subsequently replaced several times by newer and more expansive Persian versions, such as the one by Husayn Va'iz Kahifi (late fifteenth century) and by Abu'lFazl (again ca. 100 years later). On the basis of either the Arabic or the Persian version, medieval European poets such as Rabbi Joel, Giovanni da Capua (John of Capua), Agnolo Firenzuola, Anton Francesco Doni, and Anthonius von Pforr created their own rendition, and those in turn became the sources for a variety of early modern translations into a range of other languages. The original collection often was also called Bidpai Fables, but in Nasrullah's version, we only hear of the Brahman and Raja of India who debate with each other about ethical conflicts and issues. Comparing the many different translations, it proves to be rather complicated and highly confusing to distinguish the 'original' from subsequent renditions. Thackston translates in essence Nasrullah's version, published by Mujtabā Mīnuvī-Ţihrānī in 1983 (in a previous [End Page 221] footnote [6], listed as published in 1964), but he also draws from the Arabic version edited by Louis Cheikho (1905, rpt. 1981), whereas he deletes many quotations of Arabic poetry included by Nasrullah. The issue of authenticity of the available text thus remains rather murky, so it proves to be helpful that Thackston begins with a concordance of the tales as they appear in the ancient Sanscrit (Pañcatantra), in Syriac, Arabic, medieval Persian (Nasrullah) and late medieval Persian (Kashifi). In short, there is a lot of confusion, and the present English translation does not necessarily clarify this complicated situation. The translator offers first Nasrullah's preface, then the preface by Ibn alMuqaffa and the one by Buzurjmihr Bokhtagan, who is introduced only in a footnote as advisor to the Persian kings Kavadh I (d. 531) and Chosroēs I Anoshirvan (d. 579). This can only be the physician named Burzoë whom Thackston mentions at the beginning of this book as the author of the Middle Persian translation, but how can it be that here we face his preface, whereas Thackston claims that Burzoë's work has been completely lost (ix)? This is then followed by the latter's testament, but we do not learn anything about the critical edition. Thereupon follows the body of the text, but there are no explanatory notes, no references to relevant scholarship, and we are missing a bibliography or an index. It would have been extremely important if Thackston had made transparent his translation method, that is, whether he rendered the Middle Persian text literally, or more freely. In fact, the translator took quite a bit of liberty in dealing with his source text, eliminating passages that are "insolubly problematic." He follows here the model of Kashifi who had already deleted them, which leads Thackston to the conclusion that "these places in the text were already corrupt in his time" (xvi). The general reader might...

Found through Translation: Female Translators and the Construction of ‘Relational Authority’ in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic

‘It is a pity that not someone like Christina Leonora de Neufville found the time to take on that work’, translator and author Elizabeth Wolff stated when she set eyes on one of the Dutch translations of Voltaire’s Mahomet (1741) in October 1770. Wolff’s comments on these translations provide fascinating insights into some of the underlying dynamics of the eighteenth-century Dutch literary marketplace, where translations made up an important part of the literary production. As recent studies in the field of translation studies have stressed, early modern translations seldom proved to be straightforward renditions of the original but provided eager and upcoming authors to make their claim to literary fame as the translator of more renowned authors. Translating in particular turned out to be a unique opportunity for many early modern European women writers, who often still struggled to establish their names. The case of the Dutch Republic, with its advanced print culture and strongly internationally oriented book market, however, remains hitherto understudied. This article examines the role translation played in the careers of three Dutch women writers by showing how they used their role as translators to establish and renegotiate their name and (literary) authority, often by interacting directly with the reputation of the translated author. We will use the concept of ‘relational authority’ to address the ways in which Wolff herself, as well as fellow authors Christina Leonora de Neufville and Margaretha Cambon-Van der Werken, used translation as a textual platform to convey their intellectual posture and voice. Our analysis will focus specifically on both the textual and visual dimension of their public image-building by considering how ‘relational’ representations appear in paratexts and portraits respectively.

Introduction: Translation as “Transformission” in Early Modern England and France

Among the various forms of “transformission” that mark the transmission and transformation of early modern texts when they move from one context to another, translation ranks high. The term transformission, coined by Randall McLeod to describe the permutations and variations that occur in the passage of a text through print and reprint, edition and re-edition, may indeed be fruitfully applied to translations, protean texts par excellence. The textual remediation that they represent does not solely concern linguistic change, nor is it simply a question of crossing social and ideological boundaries; it most often involves changes of a cultural, material, and visual nature. Early modern translations could be refashioned to a sometimes surprising degree through various forms of manipulation and adaptation: by employing encoding strategies pertinent for the new readership, reframing the text by the judicious choice of paratexts of both a discursive and visual nature, and applying a range of editorial and commercial tactics favourable to marketing the work.

Principles of Anatomy According to the Opinion of Galen by Johann Guinter and Andreas Vesalius. Vivian Nutton, ed. Routledge Early Modern Translations. London: Routledge, 2017. xii + 190 pp. $160. - Professors, Physicians and Practices in the History of Medicine: Essays in Honor of Nancy Siraisi. Gideon Manning and Cynthia Klestinec, eds. Archimedes 50. New York: Springer, 2017. xliv +

Principles of Anatomy According to the Opinion of Galen by Johann Guinter and Andreas Vesalius. Vivian Nutton, ed. Routledge Early Modern Translations. London: Routledge, 2017. xii + 190 pp. 99.99. - Volume 72 Issue 2

Translation and Transformission; or, Early Modernity in Motion

Translation and Transformission; or, Early Modernity in Motion A. E. B. Coldiron Just walk into virtually any Renaissance document, and it is liable to open in its own small ways into multiplicity, into non-identity with itself. By attending to such examples of text’s [sic] mis-self-representation, we can gauge something of what I call its “transformission”—how it was transformed as it was transmitted. (And since we don’t have texts that aren’t transmitted, transformission should cover most everything.) (Random Clod 246) The concept of “transformission,” created by Randall McLeod, does indeed “cover most everything.” It proves broadly generative for studying early modernity and is especially applicable to early modern translations, as the essays in this issue demonstrate. The most direct contribution of the idea of transformission to translation studies is procedural: when looking at translations, we should look also at changes made to their material texts. The idea of transformission, however, originated in textual studies and editorial theory, and those origins help us understand its special relevance to translation studies. This Foreword to a special issue on transformission and translation first considers briefly the textual origins of the idea of transformission, particularly examining how the perennial problem of variant versions can be reimagined through the lens of transformission and related textual-studies concepts. From there, the idea of transformission connects readily to translation studies: translations, after all, are variant versions of a work, and they, too, are transformed when transmitted. Transformission asks us in particular to consider material textuality [End Page 205] as a co-factor in translation, concomitant with verbal or linguistic factors. The idea of transformission helps us keep an eye on process, on exactly how material texts convey a translation’s meanings, and it helps us attend differently to difference as a factor in the construction of meaning. In a final stretch, we might also connect the Heraclitean idea of transformission to changes in cosmography and historiography that have long been identified with early modernity/Renaissance. McLeod’s foundational and often hilarious essay “Information on Information,” like his longer, vivid essay “Obliterature” and other works, uses the facts of textual variation to intervene in several arguments in textual studies, such as the surprisingly stubborn ones around a so-called “fixity of print.” In textual studies, the idea of transformission can in part be understood as a sensible, enlightened extension of the work of D. F. McKenzie: if the material text uniquely inflects, shapes, or even constructs the meaning of the work it conveys, as McKenzie established, then in transmission, any other text(s) of that work will inflect, shape, or construct different meaning(s) of it. This is most obviously true of re-mediations, works that are born in one medium and reappear in another, such as transcriptions of spoken texts, or manuscripts put into print, or digitizations. In such cases of re-mediation, it is easy to see McLeod’s point that when a text is transmitted, it is necessarily transformed. It is also easy, and useful, to bring other concepts in to play with the idea of transformission. For example, Wai-Chee Dimock’s idea of resonance would apply when considering, say, mise-en-page as an instrument of transformission in early modern poetry; Walter Ong’s theories of orality and residue would apply in discussing transcriptions of spoken words or written accounts of performances as transformissions; and Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura, advanced in a 1935 essay, would apply when examining transformissions from script to print. (This notion might also apply to transformissions from print to script, as in the case of early modern commonplace books or other manuscripts copied from printed books; my question would then be, “can aura be reinscribed in transformission?”) McLeod, however, at least when writing as a material-bibliographer, seems more interested in cases of non-re-mediated transformission (i.e., of texts reiterated within the same medium, such as re-editions, reprints, or copies). Most modern readers assume such texts are identical, just as they too often assume that there should be equivalence, fidelity, or even identity between a translation and its prior foreign text. Whether or not re-mediation is involved...

“Of Barbarouse People and What Miserable Lyves They Leade” – William Thomas’s Tana and Persia and the Cultural Techniques of Early Modern Translation

Abstract The article analyses early modern cultural techniques of translation focusing on the example of William Thomas’s Travels to Tana and Persia, one of the first travel accounts of the Middle and Far East in the English language. It argues that cultural techniques of translation are constituted by multiple operative practices, such as writing, reading, and gift making, which provide the aesthetic and material-technical foundation for abstract concepts including the self and the other.

Tra fonti erudite e lettori ordinari: una traduzione seicentesca del <i>Satyricon</i>

The paper presents a 17th-century translation of the Satyricon into Italian transmitted in manuscript. The translation is anonymous and presumably was intended for the illegal market of clandestine manuscripts. Material evidence shows that the translation actually circulated across time and among popular readers. The comparison between the Italian translation and 16th – and 17th editions of Petronius has revealed that the translator started his work on the obsolete text of the excerpta brevia (that is, the Satyricon as published before1575) and then shifted to the the excerpta longiora tradition, likely using the Satyricon edition published in 1601 (reprinted in 1608). Such a mixture of source texts proves the translator’s total lack of philological accuracy. In addition, he made several translation errors. However, surprisingly enough, the Italian translation underpins an excellent work of textual criticism on Petronius’ text. The suggested explanation is that the translator or a later reviser emendated the translation following a highly specialised commentary. Some translation errors, in fact, can be explained only as critical indications that have been completely misunderstood. The papers concludes putting in relation the success of the Satyricon among 17th-century popular readers with its reception as a subversive parody of the Greek novel and its traditional values.I have a PhD in Italian Studies (2006) from the Università RomaTre of Rome. Currently, I am a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the EHESS in Paris. My recent research interests are focused on the Early Modern Period; more specifically, on the translation and receptions of Classics and the circulation of heterodox texts. I am working at the research project Popular readers and clandestine literature: the case of an early modern translation of Petronius’ Satyricon into Italian (17th C.) funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, and, more broadly, I am exploring the 17th-c. success of the Satyricon and its reception as a novel and as a satire.Affiliation: Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre des Recherches Historiques of the EHESS in Paris (research group: Grihl – Groupe de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur l’Histoire du Littéraire ).Relevant publications:‘La retorica dell’esperimento: per una rilettura delle Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl’insetti di Francesco Redi (1668)’, Italian Studies (2017), 72, 1, 41-56.Bartolomeo Beverini (1629-1686) e una versione inedita della Metafisica di Aristotele’, in L. Bianchi, J. Kraye and S. Gilson (eds), Vernacular Aristotelianism in Italy from the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Century, London, The Warburg Institute, 2016, 183-208.‘Freedom and censorship: Petronius’ Satyricon in seventeenth-century Italy’, Classical Receptions Journal (2014), 6. 1, 104-130.‘Con oscurità mutando in nomi: Napoli epicurea nei Successi di Eumolpione (1678)’, California Italian Studies (2012), 3. 1, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2tr7x1nd.

Tra fonti erudite e lettori ordinari: una traduzione seicentesca del <i>Satyricon</i>

The paper presents a 17th-century translation of the Satyricon into Italian transmitted in manuscript. The translation is anonymous and presumably was intended for the illegal market of clandestine manuscripts. Material evidence shows that the translation actually circulated across time and among popular readers. The comparison between the Italian translation and 16th – and 17th editions of Petronius has revealed that the translator started his work on the obsolete text of the excerpta brevia (that is, the Satyricon as published before1575) and then shifted to the the excerpta longiora tradition, likely using the Satyricon edition published in 1601 (reprinted in 1608). Such a mixture of source texts proves the translator’s total lack of philological accuracy. In addition, he made several translation errors. However, surprisingly enough, the Italian translation underpins an excellent work of textual criticism on Petronius’ text. The suggested explanation is that the translator or a later reviser emendated the translation following a highly specialised commentary. Some translation errors, in fact, can be explained only as critical indications that have been completely misunderstood. The papers concludes putting in relation the success of the Satyricon among 17th-century popular readers with its reception as a subversive parody of the Greek novel and its traditional values.I have a PhD in Italian Studies (2006) from the Università RomaTre of Rome. Currently, I am a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the EHESS in Paris. My recent research interests are focused on the Early Modern Period; more specifically, on the translation and receptions of Classics and the circulation of heterodox texts. I am working at the research project Popular readers and clandestine literature: the case of an early modern translation of Petronius’ Satyricon into Italian (17th C.) funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, and, more broadly, I am exploring the 17th-c. success of the Satyricon and its reception as a novel and as a satire.Affiliation: Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre des Recherches Historiques of the EHESS in Paris (research group: Grihl – Groupe de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur l’Histoire du Littéraire ).Relevant publications:‘La retorica dell’esperimento: per una rilettura delle Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl’insetti di Francesco Redi (1668)’, Italian Studies (2017), 72, 1, 41-56.Bartolomeo Beverini (1629-1686) e una versione inedita della Metafisica di Aristotele’, in L. Bianchi, J. Kraye and S. Gilson (eds), Vernacular Aristotelianism in Italy from the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Century, London, The Warburg Institute, 2016, 183-208.‘Freedom and censorship: Petronius’ Satyricon in seventeenth-century Italy’, Classical Receptions Journal (2014), 6. 1, 104-130.‘Con oscurità mutando in nomi: Napoli epicurea nei Successi di Eumolpione (1678)’, California Italian Studies (2012), 3. 1, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2tr7x1nd.