Translation and Neo-Latin

TRANSLATION AND NEO-LATIN Brenda M. Hosington Translation has always been a vehicle for the transmission of knowledge and the exchange of cultural and spiritual values between communities. Its importance across the centuries and throughout the world cannot be over-emphasised, a fact of which Neo-Latin translators were well aware. Not surprisingly, their contribution to the understanding and practice of translation is significant. It takes four forms: theoretical treatises on translation; copious commentary in letters and paratextual materials accompanying editions and translations; educational tracts promoting the role of Latin translation in linguistic instruction; and a corpus of translations into and out of Neo-Latin. Theoretical treatises The first Neo-Latin theoretical treatises on translation emerged from Italy in the fifteenth century. The humanists’ desire to revive the true culture and science of the ancient world was made possible through the practice of philology, the close lexical analysis that restored the newly available texts, and this they brought to bear on their theory and practice of translation, which they believed also transmitted historical veracity. In the early years of the fifteenth century Cicero’s texts containing his principal statements on translation, the De finibus, De oratore and De optimo genere oratorum, were discovered, and in 1416, Bracciolini came across the whole text of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria; in Book X, now available for the first time, translation plays a prominent role. The most pertinent passages are as follows: De finibus, I.ii.6 and III.iv.15; De oratore, I.xxxiv.155; De optimo genere oratorum, IV.14; Institutio oratoria, X.v.9-25. Cicero’s authorship of the De optimo genere oratorum is today questioned but throughout the period under discussion, from 1390 to the late seventeenth century, the work was believed to be his. In these works, rhetoric and translation were closely related, with the former providing a hermeneutic model for the latter. As a result, the humanists and those theorists who followed in their wake gave due consideration to questions, not only of what to translate, but also of how to translate. Between the 1420s and 1661, they did so in five treatises specifically and solely treating of translation. Other authors included sections or chapters on translation in works on various aspects of language and literary composition. The first of the specialised treatises was Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta (1424-1426), written to defend his Latin translations of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and Politics and the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics. The text is found in Leonardo Bruni Aretino Humanistich-Philosophische Schriften mit einer Chronologie seiner Werke und Briefe, ed. Hans Baron (Leipzig: Teubner, 1928; repr. Wiesbaden: Säundig, 1967) and in an updated version with Italian translation in Sulla perfetta traduzione, ed. Paolo Viti (Naples: Liguori Editori, 2004). The first part explains how to translate. Bruni’s definition of translation is deceptively simple: ‘dico ( . . .) omnem interpretationis vim in eo consistere, ut, quod in altera lingua scriptum sit, id in alteram recte traducatur’ (I say that all the strength of a translation consists in transferring correctly into one language whatever is written in the other). His method of achieving this is also seemingly obvious: ‘recte autem id facere nemo potest, qui non multam ac magnam habeat utriusque linguae peritiam’ (however, nobody can do it without a large and extensive practical knowledge of both languages). He does not underestimate the importance and difficulty of translating correctly, ‘magna res igitur ac difficilis est interpretatio recta’, and states that the only way to achieve the necessary deep understanding of the languages involved is to study philosophers, poets and other writers. Parts two and three of the treatise focus on practical applications of this conception of translation by discussing examples taken from his own Latin renderings of Aristotle and Plato and disputing the errors found in an anonymous one of the Ethics. Bruni’s insistence on Aristotle’s mastery of rhetoric, and particularly on his eloquence, coloured his translation theory and resulted in his emphasising strongly the need to master both source and target languages from the point of view of style. This, together with his insistence that in penetrating and rewriting the source text the translator becomes virtually a second author, and that translation is closely allied to imitation, a Ciceronian precept, marks Bruni out as the first to articulate the new method of translating in a treatise on the subject. Bruni’s emphasis on the need for eloquence in a translation did not meet with universal approval. Strong disagreement was voiced by Alonso de Cartegena, for example, in his 1430 Declamationes and in a series of letters; privileging eloquence over matter in translating Aristotle’s Ethics, he argued, results in betraying the ‘simplicitatem rerum et restrictam proprietatem verborum’ (the unadorned nature of things and strict propriety of words), an accusation Bruni mockingly dismissed. Generally, however, Bruni’s influence was felt strongly by other translators. One compared his own translations with those of others in order to identify and define what he and Bruni called the ‘right way to translate’. In the 1450s, Giannozzo Manetti translated the Psalter and later attached to it an essay on the problems of Biblical translating entitled Apologeticus. For a detailed discussion of this work, see Alfonso de Petris, ‘Le teorie umanistiche del tradurre e l’Apologeticus di Giannozzo Manetti’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 37 (1975), 15-32, and Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance. The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 63-114. Although dealing exclusively with Scriptural translation, a subject never broached by Bruni, Manetti’s claim that all aspects of a text are integral to its meaning and must be thoroughly analysed by the translator’s immersion in the source language obviously owes much to him; in fact, Manetti’s title of Book V of the Apologeticus, ‘De interpretatione recta’, is a conscious echo of Bruni’s treatise. In developing the notion of how what we call today text typology pertains to translating, he takes it beyond St Jerome’s binary division of religious versus secular texts and ad verbum versus ad sensum methods of translating. Rather, he differentiates between philosophy and theology on the one hand and poetry, history and oratory on the other. The former require a translation to be ‘pressior ac gravior et exactior’ (closer and more serious and exact), the latter afford the translator greater freedom in the areas of both content and form. The ideal, however, for translating philosophical and moral works lies in adhering, not to the original in an ad verbum manner, but to a middle and safe road, ‘medium et tutum,’ between literality and total restitution. Following in the footsteps of Bruni in terms of writing a treatise inspired by a translation of Aristotle, Joachim Périon, an anti-Ramist Benedictine scholar, penned Cormorriaceni de optimo genere interpretandi commentarii (Paris: Tiletanus, 1540). It was published in the same year as the edition of Cicero’s translation of the Nichomachean Ethics and relies heavily on the De optimo genere oratorum and De finibus. A detailed examination of Périon’s treatise is found in Glyn P. Norton, The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance France and their Antecedents (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1984), pp. 217-221. Périon states that the author’s thoughts can only be fully understood if submitted to philological scrutiny and can only be subsequently conveyed in translation through the power of expression, which the successful translator must possess. The treatise, although brief, does not stop short of giving practical advice: the translator must advance ‘per singulas clausulas’ (one clause at a time) in order to capture the meaning by deconstructing the text, to re-articulate it through ‘inventio’, then finally to put it into his own words through ‘elocutio’, which will enable him either to re-arrange the original words or to replace them with his own. Two decades after Périon’s work there appeared a treatise by Laurence Humphrey, a committed Protestant and president of Magdalene College, Oxford, who in 1554 went into exile in Switzerland and subsequently spent time there as a translator and corrector for Froben and Oporinus. The fruits of his practice and observations while working for the two printers resulted in his Interpretatio linguarum seu de ratione convertandi et explicandi autores tam sacros quam prophanos (Basel: Froben, 1559), a work that Norton says ‘has no equal in the literature of Renaissance translation’. Norton, p. 14. It was the most extensive treatise on translation to date and the first to attempt to explain the act of translation in a codified manner, presenting a method with the aid of diagrams. The drawback is that in so doing, it reduces translation in all its complexity to a one-method-fits-all simplicity, as is especially seen in part I, ‘De ratione interpretandi’. However, although in many ways traditional in its borrowings from Cicero, Horace and Quintilian, the treatise also breaks new ground. While Humphrey states that the translator must have an excellent understanding of rhetoric, a claim that Bruni had made long before but with relation simply to the style of the source text, he goes further by demonstrating that it is essential for understanding (‘intelligere’), interpreting (‘exponere’) and translating or transforming (‘convertere’) the old text into the new. He also claims that it is possible for the translator, through a process known as ‘mutatio’, to mediate between principles and practice by making grammatical changes such as the interchanging of parts of speech or the substitution of one verb form for another, although this must not be done to excess. Frederick M. Rener, Interpretatio. Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 1989), pp. 138-41. Finally, he devotes the whole of his second book, ‘De imitatione, exercitatione et fine interpretis’, to a brief theoretical explanation and much longer practical application of imitation in translating texts. A century elapsed before the next treatise devoted entirely to translation. In 1661, the French scholar, translator and editor Pierre-Daniel Huet published De interpretatio libri duo (Paris: S. Cramoisy), which is notable for its opposition to the then current preference for extremely free translations nicknamed ‘belles infidèles’. Huet identifies as crucial to all good translations three principles: ‘religio’ (scrupule) in conveying the author’s ideas, ‘fides’ (faithfulness) in reproducing, in as far as the target language permits, the words of the source text, and ‘summa sollicitudo’ (the greatest care) to express its ‘colours’, or stylistic features, with no additions or omissions. Unlike Humphrey and others, he does not propose a ternary pattern for classifying types of translating (literal, free, and a middle path between the two), elaborating, rather, on the Classical binary pattern of ad verbo and ad sensum. He does so by sub-dividing each according to translation types (pedagogical or informational) and goals (either reader-oriented or translator-driven). His comments on the need to respect the individual author’s style and rhetorical ornamentation, dictated by the matter, or subject, of the source text, is perhaps more clearly emphasised than in many previous writings on translation, especially when he is criticising the ubiquitousness of the Ciceronian style. The remaining four lengthy discussions of translation are found in treatises, not on translation per se, but on rhetoric, on imitation, and on hermeneutics. In 1536, Vives published Rhetoricae, sive de Recte dicendi ratione (Basel: Lasius), his major treatise on rhetoric comprising three books, the last of which discussed the composition of different literary genres, including translation. In Chapter 12, entitled ‘Versiones seu interpretationes’, he defined translation, like Bruni, in a disarmingly simple way: ‘versio est a lingua in linguam verborum traductio, sensu servato’ (translation is the transfer of words from one language into another, keeping the meaning). Like Manetti, he recognises the importance of text typology, but procedes from the opposite direction, first defining three methods of translating and then fitting each to the appropriate genre of text. A translation that takes only meaning into account, ‘solus spectator sensus’, is suitable for non-literary texts and offers the translator a certain freedom vis-à-vis the source text; one that concerns itself uniquely with diction and style (‘sola phrasis et dictio’) he dismisses as nonsense since it is impossible given the differences between languages; the third, seeking to take into consideration meaning and expression (‘res et verba ponderantur’), is suitable for literary texts and particularly for poetry, where the constraints of metre justify taking greater freedom with the source text. The link between rhetoric and translation is also found in two writings by Pierre Ramus, principal of the Collège de Presle in Paris, which produced a large number of Latin interlinear translations with commentaries. In 1547, he wrote Dialecticae praelectiones in Porphyrium, a treatise on imitation that defines translation as one form of imitation, albeit a lesser and rather dangerous one because the translator is tempted to improve on the original text. Peter Sharratt, ‘Peter Ramus and Imitation: Image, Sign and Sacrament’, Yale French Studies, 47 (1972), 19-32. A decade later, he published his Ciceronianus (Paris: A. Wechel, 1557), a much longer treatise on imitation, where he again confirms its close relationship with translation. However, he is speaking less of inter-lingual than of intra-lingual translation, the conversio that Cicero and Quintilian recommended: the turning of a Latin text into a Latin paraphrase through amplification, contraction, rewording, and so on. Translation would continue to be associated with imitation well into the next century. In 1610, the Flemish Jesuit editor and author Andreas Schottus published Tullianarum quæstionum. De instauranda Ciceronis imitatione libri IIII (Antwerp: Moretus). One of the chapters was entitled ‘De optima interpretandi ratione’, in which, after discussing many of the issues that we have mentioned, Schottus turned his attention particularly to the rapport between Cicero’s two methods of translating. Like many other theorists in the period, Schottus conserves the basic binary model of translation, although he renames the two components ‘interpretatio fida’, a translation that literally reproduces the actual number of words found in the source text, and ‘interpretatio liberior’, a freer translation that comes near to doing so, even if some words must be added to render the complete meaning of the original. However, he adds a sub-category to the second type that he says has its origin in the translator’s own control of the material (‘e fontibus illis suo iudico arbitrioque’); the expression echoes Cicero’s term for the way in which the orator imitates according to his own judgement, ‘suo iudicio artbitrioque’ (De oratore, I.xxiii.108). Rener, p. 287. Translators must similarly, Schottus argues, go beyond simply rendering the words of the original and search out words and expressions they judge suitable for working into a new composition. Finally, there appeared in 1689 a five- volume work by the German jurist Johannes von Felde, Tractatus de scientia interpretandi, cum in genere omnes alias orationes, tum in specie leges romanas (Helmstedt: Hessius). This treatise constituted an attempt to classify grammatical interpretation as the basis for explaining both literary and legal texts and defined ‘interpretation’ or hermeneutics as ‘explication’. Translation is defined thus: ‘Translatio seu versio linguae in linguam est repraesentatio orationis internae contentae in oratione externa’ (translation, or the rendering of one language into [another] language, is the vivid representation of internal speech enclosed in external speech). In other words, the translator must seek out the author’s thoughts and then put them into a new language that is better known and can be more easily understood. In this statement, Von Felde was echoing earlier commentators like Périon in seeing translation as the reconstruction of an author’s thoughts. He was also aware that translating means different things to different people and, like others before him, favoured a tripartite division of the possible methods: some think the best method is to reproduce both meaning and words, cleaving to the source text, adding and subtracting nothing, and demonstrating the greatest possible fidelity; some prefer word for word translating; others do not, believing that it results in a loss of meaning. Given von Felde’s preoccupation with the relationship between language and hermeneutics, it is not surprising that he favours the first. This stance, like that of Huet, places him in stark opposition to the prevailing ‘libertine’ method of translating in the seventeenth century. Comments on translation The numbers of Neo-Latin comments on translation found in paratextual materials accompanying editions and translations of Classical texts are legion. They cover some of the themes that received more detailed treatment in the above-mentioned treatises, as well as discussing practical aspects of translating, but they also reveal two particular preoccupations: the rapport between philology and translation and the interpretation of the Horatian dictum from the Ars poetica: ‘nec verbo verbum curabis reddere fides interpres’ (nor if you seek to render word for word like a faithful translator) (133-34). Many of the comments are scattered through several works by the same author, others are restricted to one. The question of the link between philology and translation was first made explicit by Alfonso de Madrigal in the two prefaces, one in Spanish and one in Latin, to his Comento de Eusebio of 1506-07 (Salamanca: Hans Gysser), a discussion of St Jerome’s translation of Eusebius. Whereas in a first movement the original and the translation occupy the same textual space, he says, they gradually move apart as the translator introduces new rhetorical and linguistic features to his text. Yet this is only possible through the practice of philology, which secures the authority of the source text, yet replenishes it by giving it new forms. The translator starts out by ‘construing’ the grammar of the source text, then comparing it with that of the target text and, finally, compensating for the differences by having recourse to rhetoric; this leads to the creation of a new text, yet one that never severs completely its connections with the old one. The dilemma that Madrigal confronts is how to maintain the balance between the two, maintaining the ‘authority’ of the original despite the transformation that translation inevitably entails. Philology also informs the views expressed by Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus on translating, both secular and religious. These are found in the two humanists’ prefaces to their own translations, which like many other Renaissance paratexts, seek to defend the translator’s chosen text and his or her method of rendering it in another language; they also serve to establish the rapport between source and target texts and even to express the translator’s intention to compete with the source text. In his preface to his translation of Demosthenes’ Pro Ctesiphonte, or De corona, Valla sets out some translating principles that we have seen discussed in later treatises: the translator must be skilful in rhetoric and know both languages perfectly in order to be able to supply alternative solutions when Greek words and expressions are lacking in Latin, or to provide new figures of speech when necessary. Lorenzo Valla, Opera Omnia (Basel: 1540; repr. Turin: Botega d’Erasmo, 1962), Vol II, p. 139. He also articulates clearly the sense of competition between original and translation, perhaps suggested by Quintilian’s similar mention of rivalry between translation and paraphrase (Institutio oratoria, X.v.5). Admitting that it is not always possible to keep to a via media between literal and liberal translation, Valla says that one must aim for a translation that outdoes the original for ‘plus honoris Greco auctori habes si superasse illum, quam si ab eo superatus esse videare’ (you honour your Greek author more if you surpass him than if you appear to have been surpassed by him’). In the case of his Pro Ctesiphonte, of course, Valla was competing, not only with Bruni, whose translation had by then become standard, but also Cicero himself, who in the most famous passage on translation in the De optimo genere oratorum claimed he had rendered the oration into Latin (IV.14). Ciceronian views of translation are expressed even more explicitly in two of Erasmus’s dedicatory epistles accompanying his own translations. In 1503, in dedicating his Latin translation of three of Libanius’ speeches to Nicolas Ruistre, Erasmus refers to the two methods of translation described in De optimo genere oratorum: ‘Secutus sum veterem illam M. Tulli regulam, ut in vertendo sententias modo mihi putarim appendas, non annumeranda verba. Tamestsi, novus interpres, religiosior esse malui quam audacior’ (I have followed Cicero’s old rule, that in translating I thought that one should just weigh the meanings, not count the words. However, as a new translator, I preferred to be more scrupulous than bold). Desiderius Erasmus, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, 12 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906-1958), Vol. 1, Ep. 177. In his letter to Johann van Botzheim in 1523 he calls the first of the Libanius translations ‘my first experiment’ (Ep 327.). The Libanius translations were published in Leuven (Dirk Martens, 1519). He appears equally cautious three years later in presenting his translations of Euripides’ Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis (Paris: J. Bade, 1506) to his English patron, William Wareham. He says that he has chosen to translate the tragedies into Latin but has preserved their Greek nature; he has tried to keep the shape of the Greek verse, translating almost word for word (‘verbum pene verbo reddere’), and has followed Cicero’s advice in following the meanings of the text rather than the words themselves; however, unlike Cicero and the other translators that the Latin author addresses, Erasmus wants to be neither a free translator, risking shipwreck and drowning, nor a paraphraser spreading obscurity as the cuttlefish spreads ink, in the hope of escaping detection as an ignorant translator. Opus epistolarum, Vol I, Ep. 188. The principles of philological translation drawn up at first for secular translating were quickly carried over to biblical translation. The careful establishment and subsequent interpretation of the source text before transferring its meanings and, where possible, its stylistic features, were declared essential for translating biblical texts. Again, Valla and Erasmus are in the forefront of the humanist move towards a new method of translating the Scriptures, although they differed in their methods. For a comparison of the two humanists’ views on biblical translation see Jerry H. Bentley, ‘Biblical Philology and Christian Humanism: Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus as Scholars of the Gospels’, Sixteenth Century Journal, VIII, Supplement (1977), 9-28. For Erasmus, see Bentley’s ‘Erasmus’ Annotationes in Novum Testamentum and the Textual Criticism of the Gospels, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 67 (1976), 33-53, and Erika Rummel, Erasmus as a Translator of the Classics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 89-102, and Erasmus’ ‘Annotations on the New Testament. From Philologist to Theologian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). Valla, in his Collatio Novi Testamenti, completed in the mid-1540s and printed by Erasmus in 1505 as Laurentii Vallensis viri tam graecae que latinae linguae peritissimi in latinum noui Testamenti interpretationem ex collatione Graecorum exemplarium Adnotationes apprime utiles (Paris: J. Bade), sought to compare the Greek text with the Vulgate translation in order to evaluate the latter but, as Erasmus himself points out in his 1515 letter to Martin van Dorp, he annotated only selected passages; he did not undertake a translation of the whole of the New Testament. Opus epistolarum, II, Ep. 337. Erasmus, in his Annotationes in Novum Testamentum published a decade later, cast his net wider, concentrating on problems of a philological, translative and exegetical nature and evaluating the Greek text as well as the Latin translation, as he makes clear in his preface. Both men, however, shared one ultimate aim, to help readers come to a better understanding of the Scriptures. A theme that resonates throughout the correspondence and paratextual materials in the period, and for centuries following, has its origin in the famous statement taken from Horace’s Ars poetica and quoted above: ‘nec verbo verbum curabis reddere fides interpres’. Misunderstood and misquoted from the earliest Horatian commentators up to even recent times, the statement constitutes, not a criticism of the literal, slavish method of translating as opposed to a faithful yet freer, more creative one, but a warning to the poet to rework familiar material into a new form rather than loitering on well-worn paths (‘circa vilem patulumque moraberis’) (132), cleaving to the word, as does a faithful translator. The earliest example of a Renaissance humanist’s erroneous extrapolation of the Horatian dictum is found in a letter written by Coluccio Salutati to his friend Pietro Loschi in 1392, encouraging him to revise a poor Latin prose rendering of Homer’s Iliad. Coluccio Salutati, Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. Francesco Novati, 4 vols (Rome: Forzani e Istitutio Storico Italiano 1891-1911), II (1893), Book II, Letter XIII, pp. 354-8. He tells him to go beyond considering the simple rendition of ‘inventio’ (content), or ‘verba’ (words) in the manner of the previous translator, and to concentrate on rendering the res, or entire content of the work, which includes both meaning and style. How can this be done? By obeying the precepts of creative poetic composition: ‘illas [res] oportet extollas et ornes et tum propriis, tum novatis verbis comas talemque vocabulorum splendorem adicias (it is fitting that you adorn and decorate, first the words belonging to the text, then the new words that you set beside them, and in such a way you add to the splendour of the vocabulary). This is no doubt Salutati’s application to the art of translation of a Horatian principle involving poetic creation, namely that the poet should search out new words (Ars poetica 46ff.). The Horatian context is confirmed a little further on, when Salutati warns Loschi that the translator must not translate word for word, as Horace says: ‘non etiam verbo verbum, sicut inquit Flaccus, curabis reddere fidus interpres’. His belief in the need for a translator to use rhetorical flourishes or introduce stylistic changes to the text in order to capture its whole meaning, and to put this consideration above that of the ordering of words and matter, had already been made very clear some twenty years earlier, although not couched explicitly in Horatian terms. In a letter to Cardinal Pietro Corsini, the dedicatee of his translation of Plutarch’s De cohibenda ira, Salutati had commented on Simone Atumano’s 1373 translation, saying it was obscure on account of its poor Latin and was ‘rough’ in style. His own had sought ‘teporem accendere’ (to liven up the ‘flat’ text) and ‘per exclamationes aut interrogationum stimulos excitare’ (to rouse interest by adding exclamations or questions), all of this while maintaining the ‘sententia’ (meaning). A series of editors of the Ars poetica unfortunately share Salutati’s misunderstanding of Horace’s warning to poets, pursuing the earlier misinterpretation and inevitably linking it on the one hand with Cicero’s dichotomy between faithful and free translation in his De optimo genere oratum and on the other with St. Jerome’s scathing criticism of word-for-word translation of secular texts in his Letter to Pammachius (also known as De optimo genere interpretandi). For the misinterpreters and subsequent revisers of the Horatian dictum, both Neo-Latin and vernacular, see Norton, pp. 57-86. First among these are Giovanni Britannico, in Q. Horatii Flacii odarum libri quatuor. . . (Venice: Gulielmo de Fontaneto, 1520), Aulo Giano Parrasio, in Q. Horatii Flacciars (sic) poetica cum trium doctissimorum commentariis (Lyons: Philippo Rhomano, 1536) and Francesco Filippi Pedemonte, in Ecphrasis in Horatii Flacii artem poeticam (Venice: apud Aldi Filios, 1546). However, the mistake was soon revised. In a rather daring emendation, Henricus Glareanus, in Q. Horatii Flacii opera cum quatuor commentariis . . . (Paris: Ioannis Roigny, 1543), adds a crucial adverb, ‘tamquam’ (just as), to make clear that Horace is comparing, not different ways of translating, but different methods of composing: poets must not cleave to the existing text as a faithful translator does, rendering the available matter, Horace’s ‘publica materies’, word for word, ‘quam maxime fieri queat, & linguarum patiatur proprietas’ (as much as it is possible to do so and the property of the languages allows); they must reformulate and recreate their material. Vincenzo Maggi, in Q Horatii Flacci de arte poetica librum ad Pisones, interpretatio, appended to his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics (Venice: Erasmiana Vincentii Valgrisii, 1550), offered a more subtle interpretation, although still inaccurate, claiming that Horace is not drawing a distinction between desirable and free versus non-desirable and literal methods of translating, but between language as used by a translator and by an orator, as did Cicero, and that he was telling the writer to make the ‘publica materies’ his own through imitation. Later in the century, Henri Estienne issued a stinging criticism of previous editions and interpretations of Horace’s Ars poetica. In his 1575 ‘Henri Stephani diatribae, de suae editionis Horatianae accuratione, & variis in eum observationibus’, part of his Quinti Horatii Flacci poemata, novis scholis et argumentis ab Henrico Stephano illustrate (Paris: H. Estienne), he reserves his harshest words for all those who have perverted the meaning of ‘nec verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus interpres’, founding his arguments on both philology (he corrects earlier editors’ renditions of the line) and translation theory (the act of translating cannot be narrowed down to a simple dichotomy between ‘interpretatio’ and ‘ars oratoria’). Finally, Pierre Gaultier trained his Ramist eye on Horace’s text. In 1582, he published Petri Gualterii Chabotii . . . expositio analytica & brevis in universum Q. Horatii Flacii poëma (Paris: Aegidius Beys), following it up in 1587, the year of his death, with Praelectionum quibus Q. Horatii Flacci Venusini Vatis poemata omnia . . . (Basle: Leonhardius Ostenius). Although little read today, it must have been considered important in its day since it was re-issued in 1591 as Petri Gualterii Chabotii pictionis sanlupensis praelectectionum in Q. Horatii Flacci Poemata, 3 vols. (Basle: Leonhardius Ostenius, 1591) and re-edited in 1615 by J. J. Grasser in Cologne as Q. Horatii Flacci opera omnia a P. Gualt. Chaboti. In ‘Epistola tertia libri secondi ad Pisones de arte poetica’, Gaultier re-reads the Ars poetica from a new perspective that merges grammatical, dialectical and rhetorical concerns and sets himself a new goal, to discover a method for understanding how discourse functions. Of particular interest to translation theory, however, is his gloss of line 133: ‘non reddes verbum verbo, sed sensum e sensu exprimes’. The added verb, ‘exprimes’, belongs to the domain of rhetoric and suggests that the translator not only has to render the meanings of words, but also to describe, or to articulate them in a dynamic fashion. Thus Gaultier goes beyond earlier commentators to present a new interpretation of the long misunderstood Horatian dictum. Horace’s description of the fidus interpres was indeed brief, which makes its lasting impact on translation theory even more surprising. Cicero’s description of the interpretis officium, or interpretis munus, the duty or task of the translator, was more detailed and related to his concept of literal translating. The subject is fully explored by Theo Hermans in ‘The Task of the Translator in the European Renaissance: Explorations in a Discursive Field’, in Translating Literature. Essays and Studies, ed. Susan Bassnet (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 14-40. In his Letter to Pammachius, St. Jerome had commented on the linkage of literalism and the translator’s duty (the Ciceronian ‘officium’) when defending himself against criticism for his translation of a Greek text: ‘si ad verbum interpretor, absurde resonant; si ob necessitate aliquid in ordine, in sermone mutavero, ab interpretis videbor officio recessisse’ (if I translate word for word, it sounds absurd; if of necessity I change anything in the order or in the diction, I shall seem to have recoiled before the duty of a translator). As Hermans points out, Madrigal, Erasmus, Schottus, Humphrey and Glareanus had all written on what this duty entailed, as also did John Christopherson. In his 1553 dedication of his translation of Philo Judeaus, Philonis Judaei . . . libri quatuor (Antwerp: J. Verwithagen), he defines the translator’s duty: it is to transfer the original text without additions or omissions. He even extends this ‘duty’ to editing or correcting a text. Yet, he adds, this must not be at the expense of an author’s diction and style, which a translator must try to emulate. These sentiments will be echoed in the preface to his Latin translation of Eusebius in 1569, printed in his Historiae ecclesiasticae scriptores Graeci (Louvain: Savatius Sassenus). Finally, and in a different vein, are comments on the various figurative terms used for translating. In Classical Latin a variety of verbs was used: ‘transferre’, transvertere’, transcribere’, ‘transvehere’,‘exprimere’, ‘convertere’, ‘vertere’ and ‘interpretari’, to name but the most common. Etienne Dolet, in his Commentarium linguae latinae (Lyon: Sebastien Gryphius, 1536-38), discusses these and related terms used by later writers like Bruni. Norton, pp. 191-95. He makes a special entry for ‘convertere’, saying that ‘Convertere propriè est commutare, vel traducere’ (to translate, strictly speaking, is to change or to transfer). The difficulty that Dolet faced in attempting to regulate and define the act of translation was in part due to the plethora of terms used in both the Classical and earlier humanist writers. Bruni, for example, in his letter to Salutati, uses ‘traducta’ for his translation, ‘convertere’ for ‘to translate’ and even coins the noun ‘conversor’, which sits rather uneasily beside ‘interpres’. Manetti uses both ‘interpretatio’ and ‘conversio’ for translation, Vives both ‘versio’ and ‘traductio’. Robert Estienne adds to the problems of terminology in his 1531 Dictionarium, seu Latinae linguae thesaurus (Paris: Robert Estienne), muddying the waters further by introducing the term ‘paraphrasis’ for expository translation and ‘paraphrastes’ for a translator ‘qui non literam ex litera, sed sensum e sensum transfert’ (who translates not letter for letter but sense for sense). In Cicero and Quintilian, the two terms have very different connotations and involve, not translation, but the intralingual lexical and grammatical reworking of a text. In later vernacular translation theory, they will mean something very different again. Educational tracts Translation played an integral role in language acquisition in the Renaissance classroom, as it did in introducing students to Classical literature. See Remigio Sabbadini, Il Metodo degli umanisti (Florence : Felice Le Monnier, 1922), pp. 20-22, and William Harrison Woodward, Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance, 1400-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906). Humanist educators drew on the De optimo genere oratorum and De finibus but especially on Book X of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria in using translation as a pedagogical exercise. Neo-Latin language manuals from the earliest, Chrysoloras’ Erotemata (1398), which explained grammatical paradigms by means of dialogues in Latin between student and teacher, to those of the seventeenth century presented grammar, syntax, vocabulary descriptions, and exercises in bilingual or even trilingual form, thus encouraging the student to learn by translating. One of the earliest Latin language manuals to contain Italian translations is Niccolò Perotti’s Rudimenta grammatices, completed in 1468 (Rome: Sweynheim and Pannartz, 1473), a work that became a best-seller and was itself subsequently ‘translated’ into Latin and German and Latin and French. One year later, there appeared in print Battista Guarino’s De ordine docendi et studendi (Ferrara: Andreas Belfortis, 1474), composed in 1459 and containing Latin translations of Greek grammar but also passages of Greek to translate into Latin. As Woodward says, Guarino considered the practice of composition in Latin via translation the most efficient way of acquiring good Latin style. Woodward, p. 46. Indeed, Guarino claims that translating both from Greek into Latin and vice versa leads the student to a greater understanding of an author’s style. In a paraphrase of Pliny, he says ‘multa enim quae legentem forte fallerent, transferentem nullo modo fugere possunt’ (for many things that escape the notice of the reader can in no way bypass the translator) (Section 3). Later, he asserts that translation is also useful for learning vocabulary; the student should keep the Greek original and Latin translation side by side in order to make careful comparisons (Section 5). Translation as a learning tool was not limited to improving compositional abilities in Greek and Latin. The vernaculars also played a role in Latin acquisition. Two English educators, for example, recommended bilingual lists of Latin and English vocabulary and sayings. John Anwykyll, in Vulgaria quedam abs Terencio in Anglicam linguam traducta (Oxford: Theodoric Rood, 1483), recommended Latin sayings and accompanied them with English glosses, while William Horman, in Vulgaria uiri doctissimi Guil. Hormani (London: Richard Pynson, 1519), produced the first English manual containing English sayings divided by subjects and translated into Latin. For the most part, however, the authors of pedagogical texts reserved a very specific role for translation in language acquisition, namely that of teaching grammar. Erasmus felt so strongly that the student must be able to comprehend grammatical explanations that he translated Theodore of Gaza’s Greek grammar, Institutiones grammaticae (Venice: 1495), into Latin as an aid, publishing the first volume in 1516 (Basel: Froben, 1516) and the second in 1517 (Basel: Froben). Later educationists believed that bilingual and interlinear explanations, in Latin in Greek grammars and in the vernacular in Latin ones, enabled the student to understand grammatical paradigms through comparative analysis and facilitated the task of ‘construing’. One way in which such methods operated was through ‘double’ or what is now known as ‘back-translation’, translating from Latin into the vernacular, then back into Latin, through a process of deconstruction, analysis and reconstruction. This was first recommended by Pliny the Younger in a letter to the aspiring orator Fuscus Salinator whom he told to translate from Latin into Greek, then back into Latin (Epistulae, 7.9). It was promoted in many Neo-Latin language manuals, which perhaps also took their lead from the anonymous Exercitium grammaticale puerorum per Dietas distributum (Antwerp: 1485). For example, Jean Pellisson’s Contextus Despauterianae grammaticae (Paris: Du Chemin, 1549) called the three movements ‘destructio’, followed by ‘ordo’, ‘resolutio’ and ‘declaratio’, and finally ‘constructio’, through which resolution could be reached. Norton, p. 26. Other French Neo-Latin manuals present a similar harnassing of grammar to translation with the aim of teaching through comparative analysis: Mathieu Cordier’s De corrupti sermonis emendatione libellus (Paris: n.p., 1530), which used both literal and free vernacular translations to teach Latin to the students at the Collège de Guyenne where Cordier taught Latin, Robert Estienne’s De Gallica verborum declinatione (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1540), and Elie Vinet’s Schola Aquitanica (Bordeaux: S. Millangium,1583), also emanating from the Collège de Guyenne. Norton, pp. 125-26, 140-41 and 144-45. Translation as a means of teaching Latin was not limited to French authors, of course. In Germany, for example, Melanchthon, in Enchiridion elementorum puerilium (Wittenburg: 1523), taught the rudiments of Latin through vernacular translation, with short sentences and prayers in Latin and German. In 1551, Conrad Heresbach claimed in his De laudibus graecarum literarum (Strasbourg: W. Rihelius) that translation would enable students to reproduce the thoughts and stylistic qualities of the Greek original in their own Latin compositions. In Spain, Pedro Simón Abril used translation and a contrastive approach juxtaposing Latin and Spanish at every level of instruction. His Latinis idiomatis docendi ac dicendi, methodus first appeared in Lyons in 1561 but was re-edited as Methodus Latinae linguae docendae atque ediscendere in Saragossa in 1569. In 1573 a third edition appeared in Tudela entitled De lingua latina vel de arte grammatica, libri quatuor, cum Hispanae linguae interpretatio and in 1587 his contrastive method was carried over into the teaching of Greek, with trilingual phrases in Latin, Spanish and Greek in La gramática griega. Nor was pedagogical translation limited to the sixteenth century. In 1647, Richard Busby in his Graecae grammatices compendium, in usum Regiae Scholae Westmonasteriensis (London: Roger Daniel) provided translations into and out of Greek and Latin and from English into Latin; his Hebraicae grammatices rudimenta, in Usum Scholae Westmonasteriensis, using the same method, was published posthumously as late as 1708 (London: n.p.). Three decades earlier, William Bathe, an Irish Jesuit living in Spain, had produced the Janua linguarum (Salamanca, 1611), an enormously popular work in two parts, the first presenting 1,220 short sentences in Latin and Spanish and the second a word-list of 5300 Latin lexemes. His title brings us to a work by the great pedagogical reformer, Jan Amos Comenius, who in 1632 produced the Janua linguarum reserata (Leipzig: Grosius) using translation to teach vocabulary. He followed this in 1658 with the first encyclopedic textbook for children, the Orbis sensualium pictus (Nuremberg: Michael Endteri), which took pedagogical translation to another, semiotic, plane by juxtaposing word and picture. Publications of his work continued until the 1820’s, covering Latin, Greek and a dozen vernaculars in trilingual and quadrilingual versions, but all retaining Latin titles and respecting the original aim of teaching Latin through translation based on the word for word or one-to-one principle. Translations into and out of Neo-Latin Translation has always been central to the dissemination of knowledge in all branches of intellectual and practical endeavour, and at all times. More specifically during the period of Neo-Latin, the number of translations into and out of Latin is staggering and probably this fact alone would explain why the total number has never been calculated. Within this huge corpus, Neo-Latin translated texts can claim their rightful part, accounting for a considerable number made into a wide range of vernacular target languages but also, albeit to a far lesser degree, a number of vernacular texts translated into Latin. It is obviously beyond the scope of present scholarship to list all those Neo-Latin texts that were translated into the vernaculars of Europe in the period stretching from roughly 1350 to the present day, or even to hazard a guess at their number. Once the Universal Short-Title Catalogue, which tags translations, is completed, this will be possible. In the meantime, it is useful to make some general remarks and to use as a case study one catalogue of translations that is readily available, although limited in time and space, the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue, which lists all translations having a connection with Britain between 1473 and 1640. Brenda M. Hosington et al., The Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Online Catalogue of Translations in Britain 1473-1640 <http://wwwhrionline.ac.uk/rcc> The purpose of translating Neo-Latin literature was no different from that of translating any other; it was to bring to a new audience works written in a language that most could not understand. It is no coincidence that the bulk of such translations date from a period in which the vernaculars were strengthening to the detriment of Latin, literacy rates were rising, the power of the printing press was increasing exponentially, and the margins of the known world were expanding, both literally and figuratively. The thirst for foreign books, or at least those written in a foreign tongue, was great, and of the source languages Latin held pride of place, although this meant both Classical and later versions of the language. The Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue, for example, has 2041 entries for translations from Latin, well ahead of its next rival, French, with 1142. Neo-Latin original texts, as well as Neo-Latin translations serving as intermediary texts between Greek authors and vernacular translators, account for over 1000 of these. The range of topics treated in the translations from Neo-Latin is enormous, although some fields dominate, such as religion, politics, history and literature, but the sciences, philosophy, travel accounts and biography are also well represented. In fact, it would be true to say that no area of human endeavour written about in Neo-Latin escapes the translator’s eye. In terms of the distribution of translations, it is also true that in the years 1473 to 1640, at the height of the Neo-Latin period, these fluctuate but keep in step with book production figures. With the gradual decline of Latin after 1700, one would expect the number of translations from Neo-Latin into the vernaculars to increase, although for the moment no such statistics are available. Vernacular texts translated into Latin are predictably fewer. The Renaissance Cultural Crossroads catalogue, for example, records only 216. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have received less attention. In 1954, W. Leonard Grant made a catalogue of such works, proceeding by European country but also by topic (literature, history, biography, political propaganda, and so on). He concluded that for over four hundred and fifty years ‘every conceivable sort of book’ was translated into Latin, which in a remarkably widespread manner assured the international circulation of ideas. W. Leonard Grant, ‘European Vernacular Works in Latin Translation’, Studies in the Renaissance, 1 (1954), 120-56. Peter Burke, writing over fifty years later, casts a more modest net, offering a list of 1,140 for a limited period (between the invention of printing and 1799) and omitting anonymous texts, manuscript originals, works written in ancient Greek and texts he deems too short. These exclusion criteria result in a rather partial account of the true number and nature of such translations, even within the time limits he sets himself. 24 Peter Burke, ‘Translations into Latin in early modern Europe’, in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 65-80. He nevertheless provides a good overview of the range of subjects that feature, giving them in descending order: religion, history, natural philosophy, geography and travel, fiction, politics, and a small group of miscellaneous topics. The article also provides information about the translators and charts the fortunes of translations into Latin over the chosen period. More representative, certainly, of those fortunes is Part 1 of Jozef IJsewijn’s Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, which covers the whole period of Neo-Latin writings up to the present day, regardless of genre and source language, and provides examples from no fewer than twenty-three countries. Jozef IJsewijn, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, Part 1, History and Diffusion of Neo-Latin Literature, 2nd ed. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990). As to be expected given its greater chronological and geographical span, the work presents an amazingly wide range of topics and offers the reader pleasing nuggets of information from unexpected sources: Malta’s Josephus Zammit, who translates Sappho, Croatia’s Gerbitius, who translates Hesodius and Aeschylus, Slovenia’s Sorret, who translates Plato’s Apologia, Columbia’s Mattacini with Pinocchio, Brazil’s Padberg-Drenkpol with Max und Moritz; India is represented by the German Franciscus who made the first Latin translation from Sanskrit, and China by various Europeans who translated Confucius, Chinese poetry and a work of astronomy. We shall end with a reference work of narrower focus than that of Grant’s, Burke’s or IJsewijn’s, but one that provides an impressive picture of Neo-Latin literary scholarship and translation activity. The Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum. Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries lists all translations made from ancient Greek into Latin up to the present day, although by far the largest number were published in the heyday of Neo-Latin, from 1400 to 1700. Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum. Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries, ed. Paul O. Kristeller, F. Edward Cranz and Virginia Brown (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1960-2003). A quick count of authors listed, but which excludes Aristotle, Plato, Euripides, Plutarch, Lucian and the Church Fathers and includes only first editions, comes to over 550. Were these major authors factored in, as well as all the subsequent editions, re-issues and reprints of the translations, the number would rise into the thousands and give a rather more accurate picture of how Latin translations contributed to what IJswijn calls ‘the basic principle of nearly the whole Neo-Latin literature . . . the imitation and emulation of ancient predecessors’. IJsewijn, p. 2. 24