GLYN P. NORTON THE IDEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE OF TRANSLATION IN RENAISSANCE FRANCE AND THEIR HUMANIST ANTECEDENTS LIBRAIRIE DROZ S.A. 11, rue Massot GENEVE 19841. ae UL. Contents INTRODUCTION... NOTE THE HUMANIST BACKGROUND ... 1.Translation as Grammatical and Interpretive Process 2.Textual and Lexical Placement 3.Salutati and the ‘More Pleasant Texture’ 4.Leonardo Bruni: Translation as Illusion 5.Giannozzo Manetti and the Via Media PART ONE HORACE AND THE RHETORIC OF FAITH FIDUS INTERPRES: READINGS AND MISREADINGS 1.An Early Misreading of Horace 2.The Preceptive Tradition 3.Giovanni Britannico: An Interpretive Option 4.Francesco Pedemonte: Translative Metaphor 5.Vincenzo Maggi: Literalism Legitimized 6.Pierre Gaultier: Injunction and Correction 7.Henricus Glareanus: The Philological Cortection 8.Henri Estienne: The Contextual Correction 9.Marc-Antoine Muret: The Adverbial Missing Link 10.The Reappraisal FIDUS INTERPRES: VERNACULAR CONTEXTS... 1.Geoffroy Tory: A Syntaxical Deformation 2.Jean Lefévre: The Poetic Setting 3.Jean des Gouttes: Vestigial Readings 4,The Poetic Arts 5.Etienne Dolet: Contextual Detachment 23 25 ST pe360 | PART TWO THE LITERALIST TEMPER IV. CONCEPTS OF BALANCE AND GRAMMAR 1.Literalist Temper 2.Barthélemy Aneau: Letter as Icon 3.Pierre Fabri: Word and Reference 4,Robert Estienne: Pedagogical Sanctions 5.Louis Meigret: Letter as Revelation 113 vv. IMAGES OF THE TEXT ... 1.Schola Aquitanica: The Adjacency of Text 2.Geoffroy Tory: The ‘True’ Text 3.Jacques Gohorry: Rhetoric versus Letter 4.Denis Sauvage: Philosophical Translation as Constriction 5.Richard Le Blanc: Poetry versus Rhetoric 6.Claude Micard: A Typography of Letter 7.Frangois de Fougerolles: Literalist and Truchement 8.Henri Estienne: Semantic Analysis 9.Guillaume Durant: An Impressionistic Strategy 10.Blaise de Vigenére: The Fixed Distance 139 PART THREE THE VOCABULARY OF EXPRESSION VI. CONSTRUCTIO.... 1.Translation and the Rhetorical Tradition 2.The Ciceronian Case for Translation 3.Etienne Dolet: Towards a Theory of Translative Construction 4.Joachim Périon: The Internalized Text 5,Pierre Ramus: Ciceronian Conversio 185 Vil. PHRASIS 1.Phrasis: A ‘Forme of Speakyng’ 2.Tolet and Macault: Phrasis and Composition 3.Phrasis and Proprietas 4.The Preface as Interpretant Postscript— 361 — 5.Phrasis and the Productivity of the Text 6.Jacques Peletier: Motion in Place 7.Abel Mathieu: Translative Writing as Deconstruction VIII. THE TRANSLATIVE ENERGIES OF WORD... 1.Rabelais and Mathieu: Semantic Rivalries 2.Intra muros / Intra textum 3, Antoine Macault: Energies of Voice and Letter 4.Sebillet, Du Bellay, Peletier: Poetic Strategies of Identity 5.Abel Mathieu: Intensifications of Culture, Language, and Text 259 CONCLUSION. BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX OF LITERARY THEORY GENERAL INDEX.....CHAPTER I The Humanist Background «La philologie est une traduction.» Georges Mounin Les problémes théoriques de la traduction (1963) ‘Translation belongs to a process of discovery directed at the very nature of language and thought. From the reader's point of view, he participates in this discovery in a largely passive though not necessarily less enlightening way. For the translator himself, however, the process can have an unsuspect- ed vitality that takes him back to the structures and sources of meaning. In The Schoolmaster (1570), Roger Ascham provides us with a sense of this excitement when he prescribes for the student a double translative movement from Latin into the vernacular and from the vernacular back into Latin. In fact, the passage tells us a great deal about how the typical Renaissance humanist viewed the place of translation in the school curriculum: By this exercise of double translating is learned easily, sensibly, by little and little, not only all the hard congruities of grammar, the choice of aptest words, the right framing of words and sentences, comeliness of figures and forms, fit for every matter and proper for every tongue, but that which is greater also, in marking daily and following diligently thus the steps of the best authors, like invention of arguments, like order in disposition, like utterance in elocution is easily gathered up, whereby your scholar shall be brought not only to like elo- quence but also to all true understanding and right judgment, both for writing and speaking! This passage is largely a paraphrase of remarks made by Pliny (Letters, VIL.ix.1) in which he recommends a circular movement away from and back to ihe Greek text, with Latin serving as a validating language for the scholar’s interpretation of that text. For Ascham, Latin now assumes the central place once held by Greek, with the vernacular commissioned as a conduit for rediscovery of the Latin. What he has added in his paraphrase of > The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Charlottesville, Va., University Press of Virginia, 1967), pp. 85-86.4 Pliny, however, is the crucial proviso, «not only all the hard congruities of grammar», as if to underscore the fact that double translation is a cumula- tive motion grounded in relationships between two parallel grammars, but then advancing to embrace a full complement of rhetorical principles. The integrity of the process rests on the expectation that the scholar is thereby raised to a higher level of enlightenment («all true understanding and right judgment») conditioning not only his reading of the source text, but his abi- lity to write and speak in the source language. 1. Translation as Grammatical and Interpretive Process Ascham’s addition to Pliny is important for the way it calls attention to certain views of translation developed during the fifteenth century and later transmitted into sixteenth-century thought. These views tend to see transla- tion fundamentally as a process of construction. When the scholar trans- lates, it is imagined, he works systematically «by little and little», building on the paradigmatic structures of grammar and moving to assimilate larger syntaxic segments of the text from which he reconstructs meaning. As we shall see later on, constructio would play a vital role in notions of French Renaissance translation. The idea was to work back from the vernacular clause in order to analyze and deconstruct the ordo artificialis of Latin speech, thus giving rise to the practice of construing identified elsewhere by Ascham as an exercise inseparable from grammar study. So while classroom translation could, in one sense, be thought of as an act of building up and reconstructing meaning, in another more profound sense, it implied just the opposite, a breaking apart of the text’s component structures. Indeed, one of the age’s great theorists of bilingual constructio, Jean Pellisson, would not flinch from calling the process an act of «destruction» clarified, in turn, by the concepts of ordo, resolutio, and declaratio” Constructio, it could be assumed, had everything to do with a work of dismantling, reordering, unra- veling, and, ultimately, interpretation. Roger Ascham summarizes a notion of translation that Renaissance France had done much to articulate and put into practice. His reference to a 2 «Qui autem orationem pueris declarat non construit, sed ab alio constructam resolvit aut destruit aut ordinat, ut a pueris intelligatur. Quocirca rectius dixeris ordinem aut destruc- tionem aut resolutionem aut declarationem.» Contextus Despauterianae grammaticae (1549). The passage is cited by Remigio Sabbadini in 1! Metodo degli umanisti (Florence, Felice Le Monnier, 1922), pp. 14-15. The earliest edition of this work appears to be that cited by Buis- son (ROP, 497), Paris, Nicol. du Chemia, 1549. A copy is located at the Bibliotheque Sainte- Genevieve.—27-— procedure initiated in the «hard congruities of grammar» draws on a line of speculation that places translation and grammar study in exactly concentric spheres. This fact is supported overwhelmingly by the evidence of bilingual grammars and treatises on Latin grammar appearing in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Jacques Lefévre d’Etaples in his Grammato- graphia (1529) goes so far as to use the term «grammatography» by analogy with «cosmography» to describe the universal congruence of French and English with the Latin source grammar. Just as the cosmos, for Renaissance man, appears harmonized by a series of transcending relationships and laws, so also do the various linguistic systems in which man expresses himself? Examples of these tabulated comparisons between grammars are legion and represented most forcefully by the manuals of Robert Estienne to be dis- cussed later in this study. Such earlier anonymous tracts as the Principia grammaticalia and Principes en francoys simply underscore the point that the principles of Latin are frequently explained either directly by the verna- cular or in conjunction with vernacular grammar“ But by far the most important reference to the concurrent assimilation of grammar and transla- tion is contained in the Exercitium Grammaticale puerorum per Dietas distri- butum printed at Antwerp in 1485. Although not French in origin, in the Prologue to the Second Tract the work takes explicitly as its model certain practices then in use at the University of Paris. Doubtless inspired by the highly popular Doctrinale of Alexander of Villedieu, the work not only ex- hibits Villedieu’s intense interest in grammatical constructio, but seeks to tai- lor all of Latin morphology and syntax to a sequence of logical steps ap- portioned over a fortnight span. Significantly, the entire regimen is conditio- nal on the scholar’s having mastered the art of double translation. The anonymous author thus entitles the first chapter of the Second Tract, «De modo traducendi latinum in vulgare nostrum: & econtrario»’ And in a highly unusual move, at least for this period, he goes on to balance his > See the preface to Grammatographia ad prompte citoque discendam grammaticen, tabulas tum generales, tum speciales continens (Paris, Sim. Colinaeus, 1533), p. 2 1; BN X.2094. I have not seen the 1529 edition located at the BN. Buisson lists this as an anonymous work (ROP, 699). * ‘The Principia grammaticalia follows the Liber qui compotus inscribitur, una cum Jiguris et manibus necessariis tam in suis locis quam in fine libri positis (Lyons, Mich. Niger, 1494), BN Rés. V.1270, Buisson (ROP, 703). The Principes en francoys (Paris, Nicolle de la Barre, n.d.) is a cursory outline of Latin grammar written in French; BN Rés. X.1526, Buis- son (ROP, 703). Both works probably date from early in the sixteenth century. * Exercitium Grammaticale puerorum per Dietas distributum (n.p., 1506), sig, i21; BN Rés. p. X.248, Buisson (ROP, 696-97). I was unable to consult the 1485 edition also housed at the BN Rés. X.1391. Some measure of the popularity of Villedieu’s Doctrinale is indicated by the late fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century editions listed in Buisson (ROP, 666-69).— 28 — remarks with five cautionary rules on rhetorical inequivalencies between Latin and the vernacular, in this case German (sig. /3 r-v). The obligatory dependency of grammar on notions of translation may well have developed from the early association of grammar itself with func- tions of literary interpretation. Quintilian (I, iv, 2), for example, defines grammar as «the art of speaking correctly and the interpretation of the poets» («recte loquendi scientiam et poetarum enarrationem»). By the end of the fifteenth century, this definition remains largely intact, but with added emphasis given to the art of composition. The author of the Exercitium Grammaticale ascribes to grammar the practice of writing correctly («recte seribere»), understanding correctly («recte intelligere»), and composing cor- rectly («recte componere»).* In his Rudimenta Ascensiana (1523), Josse Bade adopts in place of Quintilian’s enarratio the more ambiguous term, interpretatio, defining grammar as «the art of speaking, writing, interpret- ing, and thinking correctly». In this, he follows the Florentine humanist, Bartolomeo della Fonte, who in the year prior to the Exercitium Grammati- cale had described a four-part summary of grammar in which the interpreta- tion of words («interpretatio verborum») was separated entirely from know- ledge of the poets («cognitio poetarum») The axiom underlying these various definitions has to do with the inseparability of articulation and inter- pretation. In order to assimilate fully Latin morphology and syntax, the scholar must come to see the repertory of case endings and declensions as a point of access to the encyclopedia of human thought and meaning. His mas- tery of these grammatical forms, moreover, remains a function of his ability to view meaning as a dynamic commodity transmissible between languages. ‘As he moves away from a Latin structure into a translated vernacular equiva- lent, he is initiating a pattern of thought that makes the source structure at once more resonant in his mind, at the same time that it interprets the struc- ture’s function. The journey back to Latin is even more dramatic however. In the reverse motion, the combination of vernacular forms becomes mo- mentarily a source text from which a second Latin text is constructed and interpreted. The degrees of modification existing between the initial Latin source text and the second Latin target text are a forceful reminder to the * Did., sig. B v. 1 @Est ars recte loquendi, recte scribendi & recte interpretandi ac censendi.» Rudi- menta Ascensiana, cum Prima parte Doctrinalis, diligenter recognita & explanata (Paris, 5. Bade, 1523), sig. Aij r. BN Rés. p.X.414 (1); Buisson (ROP, 41). See the Oratio in bonas artis, dated 8 November 1484, Wolfenbiittel manuscript (43 ‘Aug. Fol.), f° 154, The passage in question is cited by Charles Trinkaus, «A Humanist’ s Image of Humanism: the Inaugural Orations of Bartolomeo della Fonte», Studies in the Renaissance, 7 (1960), p. 112. Della Fonte identifies the other interests of grammar as scientia loquendi and cognitio historiarum.—2— scholar that a labour of synthesis has taken place. He has reconstructed (in Pellisson’s terms, «destroyed» the source text so as to better interpret it and engage simultaneously in the exercise of composition. As a consequence, grammar, interpretation, translation, and writing emerge fully as sister arts in the Renaissance classroom. In fact, we are describing here perhaps the most basic of humanist attitu- des toward the status of translation in the curriculum. In this view, transla~ tion is a function bound up intricately in the way the scholar assimilates the morphological and syntaxic building-blocks of language. But more than that, it refers to the articulation of a process whose advancement can never be completely closed or delimited. In other words, unlike that autonomous, revealed moment in which the Septuagint produced their inspired text, this process is defined largely by its open complexity, its immunity from a reduc- tive technique or terminal development. No point is ever reached when the translator can assert with conviction that his work is truly finished. The moment he makes the decision to translate, to ask from his own particular social and historical vantage point the question «what does this text mean», he commits himself to an act of reading which is bound to be the sum of all the other readings that have preceded it. Or to put it another way, his ques- tion about the what of the text’s meaning can only be assessed accurately when he realizes that no meaning he can ascribe is inseparable from the humus of other readings, glosses, footnotes, and commentaries in which his own understanding has been nurtured. If translation, in the humanist pers- pective, refers to a process, so also does signification, the question of what more accurately phrased as a question of how? Defined in this way and fashioned in the environments of grammar and interpretation, humanist translation could not really distinguish itself from that most basic of humanist disciplines, philology. In 1533, Guillaume Budé describes philology as both «restorer and interpolator» («instauratrix atque interpolatrix»).” Similarly, humanist translation hinges on a double motiva- tion: first, of homage to the source text, a desire to restore its vitality, and second, of interpolation, the necessity to account for certain structures through an act of explication and, hence, transformation. In the most rudi- mentary way, double translation serves to depict this binary movement > One is reminded here of I.A. Richards’s remarks: «it is important... to realize how far back into the past all our meanings go, how they grow out of one another much as an orga- nism grows, and how inseparable they are from one another.» The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York and London, Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), p. 30. 16... nostra utique Philologia, quae eius olim ornatrix fuisse, hodie instauratrix atque interpolatrix esse merito existimatur...» De Philologia, in Omnia opera, | (Basle, Nic. Episco- pius, 1557), p. 83. The work was first published at Basle in 1533.— 30 — because it seeks not only to inculcate grammatical functions, but to make the source text more accessible and show, at the same time, how that text can be rewritten. The cycle away from the source text into a vernacular equivalent and back to a transformed source text could only serve to sharpen the scho- lar’s sense of semantic instability. Meaning simply does not stand still and every act of translation, though based in a gesture of piety towards the source, seems to push irresistibly towards iconoclasm or, as Pellisson hints, destruction." Present-day writing on translation has done much to investigate these opposing stresses, but as a rule, has tended not to relate them in any system- atic way to an ideological past.” On the other hand, we have recently begun. to witness a keen, more specialized interest in situating the practice of Renaissance translation in the context of humanist culture." In the particular case of Renaissance France, this has meant a renewed attention to the quan- titative evidence of humanist vernacular translations between 1475 and 1540." The significance of these dates is crucial, for it must also be recalled that they fall exactly within the span during which the bilingual orientation of grammar study is taking place in France and elsewhere. As far as theo- "This concept has been related explicitly to the French Renaissance in a recent article by Luce Guillerm, «L’auteur, les modéles, et le pouvoir ou la topique de la traduction au XVIF siéclen, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 52 (1980), p. 6. "2 It would be impossible to present an exhaustive list of such works here, but among the most compelling and representative are: Haroldo de Campos, «De la traduction comme création et comme critique», in Transformer Traduire, N° 14 of Change (Paris, Seghers / Laffont, 1973); Jean Paris, «Translation and Creation», in The Craft and Context of Trans- lation, ed. William Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck (Austin, Univ. of Texas Press, 1961), pp. 57-67; George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (New York and London, Oxford Univ. Press, 1975); Paolo Valesio, «The Virtues of Traducement: Sketch of a Theory of Translation», Semiotica, 18:1 (1976), 1-96; Eugene Nida, «A Framework for the Analysis and Evaluation of Theories of Translation», in Translation, ed. Richard W. Brislin (New York, Gardner Press, 1976), 47-91. Louis Kelly’s The True Interpreter, op. cit., is a noteworthy attempt to explain modern theory as a culminating point in the history of thought about translation. Kelly does not deal with humanist theory as such however. Most of these works were helpful in working out a theoretical structure for the present study. I am especially indebted to Nida (pp. 67-69) and Valesio (pp. 46 ff) for descriptions of philological transla- tion, 12 Sec the special issue of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (vol. 8, 1981) on «Translation in the Renaissance». Especially useful are the studies of Eugene Vance, «Chaucer, Spenser, and the Ideology of Translation», (pp. 217-38), and William Melczer, «Towards the Dignification of the Vulgar Tongues: Humanistic Translations into Italian and Spanish in the Renaissance» (pp. 256-71). In a forthcoming study entitled «Translators and Translation in, the Iberian Peninsula, 1400-1550», Peter Russell discusses Spain’s role in humanist translation. See Paul Chavy, «Les Traductions humanistes au début de la Renaissance francaise: traductions médiévales, traductions modernes», Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 8 (1981), 284-306.ol retical writing on translation is concerned, it is also true that no important texts exist in France prior to 1540 when Etienne Dolet’s Maniere de bien tra- duire d’une langue en autre and Joachim Périon’s De optimo genere inter- pretandi Commentarii are published in Paris. One might reasonably con- clude from this that an articulated philosophy of translation is little more than a tardy response to conditions existing long before on the level of prac- tice. In some measure, this is undoubtedly the case, given the extent to which these two works summarize a long-established humanist tradition in both the classroom and professional contexts of translation. Less evident perhaps is the fact that they are more than philosophical responses to practice, but sub- sume a continued humanist fascination with ideological issues going back to the late fourteenth century. It would be easy, of course, to assume such con- nexions as axiomatic or even to credit them, as scholars have done recently for Dolet, to a vague unspecified past.!* Nonetheless, the point remains that such assertions have never been fully supported despite the existence of a body of important humanist texts on translation theory. And while there is little evidence to suggest that these texts are the source materials for French Renaissance theorists, any understanding of the process of synthesis and innovation taking place in the vocabulary of these later thinkers is funda- mentally enriched by their correlation with the benchmarks of humanist writing. 2. Textual and Lexical Placement Perhaps the only fifteenth-century work on translation widely available to early sixteenth-century readers is the Comento de Eusebio by the Spanish humanist, Alfonso de Madrigal. His own translation of Eusebius’ Chronici canones along with a vernacular and Latin commentary on St. Jerome’s translation were printed at Salamanca in 1506-07 and, thus, roughly contem- porary with the Estienne editions of Jerome’s translation appearing at Paris in 1512 and later. This work is important for the way it articulates the inverse stresses described above, connecting translation clearly to a problem of phi- lology. In the vernacular preface to his translation, completed in the late 1450s, Madrigal speaks of two ways of translating, one called word-for-word «interpretacion», the other «exposicion, 0 comento o glosa» which sets + Paul Chavy, for example, suggests without further comment that Dolet’s rules «plon- gent de longues racines dans le passé», ibid., p. 291. George Steiner is more specific, but lar- gely content with speculation: «Dolet’s five rules for the translator may themselves go back to Italian grammarians and rhetoricians of the early sixteenth century and perhaps to Leonardo Bruni.» After Babel, op. cit., p. 262.i down the «sentencia» in more words than the original text.* The latter pro- cess, undertaken by the «glosador», depends on a transformation of the text by means of additions and changes. In his Latin commentary, Madrigal explains how this movement into philological expansion leads to the forma- tion of an entirely new text, a commentary or exposition standing in for an original whose presence has somehow receded.” What Madrigal appears to be suggesting is that translation responds to a sense of placement and relative proximities not only with respect to words, but to the textual space occupied by those same words. Sentencia, if it is to materialize at all, is calculated on the creation of a new autonomous work, whereas genuine interpretacion implies the will to replenish in as miany words what Madrigal calls elsewhere the «antigua autoridad» of the original. Much in the Comento de Eusebio, as we shall see later on, bears striking similarities to the rules of Etienne Dolet. But its interest here is in the clues it provides to the dual message contained in humanist writing on translation: on the one hand, the notion that translation begins as a dialogue between two texts labouring side by side, physically proximate to each other; on the other, the illusion of departing movement as the new text (the translation) starts to slip irreversibly into a pattern of incongruity with its source. The more the translator seeks to express the latent sententia of the original, the more he finds himself engaged in a search for new rhetorical structures and means of expression. The end of that search, however, is conditional on his having been able to chronicle the philological history of the source. From all the «hard congruities of grammar», discovered in the close ‘physical place- ment of the two texts, the translator appears destined to move inevitably into the somewhat more elastic inflexions of rhetoric to which he has been led by philology. It is the entire arc of these motions that we characterize here as philological translation. At least initially, philological translation depends on what Paolo Valesio describes as «the explicit preservation of the original text alongside its trans- lation (facing it if possible)»."* In one sense perhaps, Valesio is stating here the obvious, for it is difficult, indeed, to imagine any meaningful translation taking place without the coexisting authority of a source text constantly ‘« «Dos son las maneras de trasladar: una es de palabra a palabra, et llamase interpreta- cion; otra es poniendo la sentencia sin seguir las palabras, la qual se faze comunmente por mas Juengas palabras, et esta se lama exposicion 0 comento o glosa... Enla segunda se fazen muchas adiciones et mudamientos, por lo qual non es obra del autor, mas del glosador.» Text cited by R.G. Keightley in «Alfonso de Madrigal and the Chronici canones of Eusebius», The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 7 (1977), p. 246. ‘7 «... etiam non videtur manere opus principale, sed aliud nouum opus conditur, quod prioris comentum vel expositio est.» Cited by Keightley, ibid. ‘* Valesio, «The Virtues of Traducement», p. 46.33 accessible to the translator’s attention. Yet in a deeper sense, his remarks touch on the very problem that Alfonso de Madrigal was alluding to in his Latin commentary: how can one guarantee the consubstantial presence of the original work in the face of a process bent on forming a novum opus? In confronting this dilemma, Madrigal’s Italian contemporaries would tend to see the problem as an extension not only of their sense of space, but of the way language can be thought of as a presence continually and physic- ally emitted into our world of being.” Such notions appear inspired, in part, by the visualist-spatialist rhetoric of Patristic commentary. In this tradition, summarized by Claudius of Turin, there is a mutually enforcing bond be- tween the letter of the text and living flesh: «Nam sicut ibi carnis ita hic litte- rae velamine tegitur: ut litera quidem aspicitur tanquam caro, latens vero spiritalis intrinsecus sensus tanquam divinitas sentitur»2? A similar sense of the word’s physical and visual authority underlies much of Western thought and is dramatically present throughout the rhetorical and pedagogical tradi- tions?’ Quintilian, for instance, reminds us that a truth may require «not merely to be told, but to some extent obtruded» (IV, ii, 64). Yet another thetor, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, proposed that words «should be like columns firmly planted and placed in strong positions so that each word should be seen on every side» 2? In pedagogical practice, this language of rhe- torical obtrusion is recreated on the graphic plane of the text. The bilingual school manuals, known as the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana, contain, for instance, a columnar layout of Greek words side by side with their Latin equivalents, an arrangement frequently adopted in Medieval and Renais- sance grammars.® Accordingly, translation in humanist school programs comes to serve the empirical purposes of grammar, deriving the forms of classical language from the concrete observable functions of the vernacular * 18 Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton, Prince- ton Univ. Press, 1948), p. 21. 20 In Libros Informationum Litterae et Spiritus super Leviticum, in PL, ed. J.-P. Migne, vol. 104 (Turnhout, Brepols, 1844), civ. 617. See also Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, Blackwell, 1952), pp. 1 ff. 2 On the visualist tradition in Western thought, see Walter J. Ong, «From Allegory to Diagram in the Renaissance Mind: A Study in the Significance of the Allegorical Tableau’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 17 (1959), 423-40; and his perceptive The Pre- sence of the Word (New Haven and London, Yale Univ. Press, 1967), passim. 2 De compositione verborum, Chapt. XXII, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus. On Lite- rary Composition, ed, W. Rhys Roberts (London, Macmillan and Co., 1910), p. 211. 2 See H.I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. G. Lamb (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1956), pp. 263-64. 2 Remigio Sabbadini, I! Metodo degli Umanisti (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1922), pp. 7-9. For a detailed study of this shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, see Aldo— 34 — At the outset, therefore, philological translation posits a notion of the text in which each word populates a universe of solids and reliefs, structures no less permeable to analysis and transposition than any other material artifact of man’s experience. The humanist belief in a transcendent world of essence sustained by these word-objects naturally finds itself at home with the relat- ed view that they are subject to semantic shifts and displacements, quite lite- rally, acts of translatio. 3. Salutati and the «More Pleasant Texture» The new speculative efforts of humanist translation theorists no doubt have their origin in the rediscovery of pedagogical principles long practiced in ancient school programs. In the Greek schools of the third and second centuries, pupils engage in two compositive exercises not unrelated to inter- lingual translation: (1) a literal, word-for-word paraphrase of the poem into everyday language; (2) a free, rhetorical equivalent based on oratorical rather than spoken style2* Roman schools later adopt these exercises, assimilating them explicitly into rhetorical practice. Their familiarity to humanist circles was, of course, due to their elaboration in rhetorical theory, notably by Cicero and Quintilian* In the humanist schools of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, these features of rhetorical translation are refi- ned through contact with the practice of philology. The new empirical approaches to grammar are thus predicated on the immanence, in the flesh, of the two texts. Bonds of deduction and resemblance issue from the associa- tion between two grammatically analogous systems. In a word, grammatical analogy becomes a preliminary but vital step in the quest for translative equi- valency, both impulses issuing from the spatial proximity of texts. The task of reasserting these basic philological principles to Renaissance humanists fell to Manuel Chrysoloras, a Byzantine scholar who arrived in Florence in 1398 and who was largely responsible for the renewal of Greek studies in fifteenth-century Italy. For Chrysoloras, translation formed the basis of his pedagogical method. The principal evidence of his impact con- Scaglione, The Classical Theory of Composition from its Origins to the Present: A Historical ‘Survey (Chapel Hill, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1972), pp. 126 ff. 25 Cf. H.D. Jocelyn, ed., The Tragedies of Ennius (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 25-28; Giuseppe Giangrande, «On the Origins of the Greek Romance: the Birth of a Literary Form», Eranos, 60 (1962), 132-59; and H.1. Marrou, A History of Educa- tion, pp. 255; 263-64. 2 For a more detailed discussion of these exercises and their rhetorical articulation, see G.P. Norton, «Translation Theory in Renaissance France: Etienne Dolet and the Rhetorical Tradition», Renaissance and Reformation, 10 (1974), 1-13.— 35 — sists, therefore, of the many translations from Greek appearing throughout the fifteenth century. The little that we know of Chrysoloras’ principles of translation is contained in a letter of his student, Cincius Romanus. The «Divine» Chrysoloras, we are told, eschewed the extremes. Word-for-word conversio can lead only to a perversion of the Greek thought; on the other hand, transmission of this thought must not be allowed to subvert the pro- prietas of the Greek language; otherwise the translator forsakes his primary role for that of exegete less bound to the rhetorical integrity of the original («eum non interpretis, sed exponentis officio uti»)2" Prefiguring Madrigal’s later distinction between interpretacion and exposicion, Chrysoloras places total translation in a zone of neutrality, a narrow middle ground charted be- tween the dual hazards of conversio and the neglected proprietas of the origi- nal language. Consciousness of the feasibility of translation begins, as we have pointed out, at the level of juxtaposed texts. Chrysoloras supports this principle in the context of humanism by introducing in the school program a pedagogical manual analogous to the ancient Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana, These texts, known as the Erotemata, present the empirical approaches to Greek grammar through a series of bilingual repartees of question and answer be- tween student and master.* The pupil’s attention is constantly shifted back and forth between Latin forms and their derived morphological equivalents in Greek. Bilingual grammatical analysis thereby acts to imitate the initial translative impulse by affirming that the word alone, as a component unit of thought, permits entry to the radical structures of the source language. There now begins to emerge a complementary association between morphology and meaning, function and translation. What this means for the humanist translator is that there can be no translation without the prior apprehension of a grammatical system. Word-for-word translation and philological analy- sis thus assume a focal,-propaedeutic place in recreating that vitality which is the source text? In 1392, some five years prior to Chrysoloras’ arrival in Florence, Coluc- cio Salutati writes to his friend, Antonio Loschi, encouraging him to conti- » For the complete text of the letter, see Giuseppe Cammelli, Dotti Bizantini e le ori- gini dell’Umanesimo, I: Manuele Crisolora (Florence, Vallecchi Editore, 1941). p. 91. * Cammelli, J Dotti Bizantini, ibid., p. 83. + Gn the functional role of translation in humanist pedagogy, see ibid., pp..85-91; and Sabbadini, 1! Metodo, op. cit., pp. 20-22; and the two basic works of William H. Woodward, Studies in’ Education’ During the Age of the Renaissance, 1400-1600, ed. Lawrence Stone (New York, Teachers College Press, 1967); and Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Edu- cators (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1912).36 nue his revision of a mediocre, word-for-word version of the Iliad.” True to the rhetorical dichotomy of res / verbum, Salutati calls on his friend to con- sider things, not words («res velim, non verba consideres»), From what follows, however, it is clear that the Florentine humanist is scarcely adducing concepts of mutual exclusivity. Res, he implies, is primarily a function of its containment and replenishment in language. What Salutati is stating is a truth to be developed later with far greater sophistication by Giannozzo Manetti: if we translate mere words, we will never, as translators, traverse the zone between the initial lexical attentions of philological translation and the coalition of meaning and style elicited in translation proper. Salutati’s solution, then, to the impediment of word is to create what one might des- cribe as a new verbal surface, a dismantling of the verbal arrangements in the source text so as to create a different chemistry of rhetorical effects. The translator is thereby called on to «adorn and decorate» the res, to use words in both changed and unaltered forms, to restore through the splendour of style, the qualities of the Homeric epic.’ Homeric power, however, rests on a broad distillation of invention, thoughts («sententiis»), and words («verbis»). In admonishing the translator to consider things, not words, Salutati must not be misunderstood.” The word is deeply embedded in the expressive structures of the source text and, as such, can hardly be overlooked. Salutati’s concern is with the /evels on which translation occurs. As a human- ist, he is, of course, committed to the word as substance, an empirical building-block of speech, but as a rhetorician, he also believes in its affective energies, its powers to combine with other words to form a texture of style and meaning. To consider words alone is to risk a protracted deferral of sense and style. To consider things, on the other hand, is to understand that words, acting together, have an incandescence all their own, thus establish- ing translation proper as an art of pyrotechnics («quasi quibusdam accendes igniculis»). So conceived, translative fidelity commits us to transcribing this incandescence of the source text into an equivalent incandescence of the tar- get text. % The complete text is contained in Epistolaria di Coluccio Salutati, ed. Francesco Novati (Rome, Forzani, 1893), II, 354-58 (Letter # 23). All further citations will be taken from this edition. % _aillas oportet extollas et ornes et tum propriis, tum novatis verbis comas talemque vocabulorum splendorem adicias, quod non inventione solu, nonque sententiis, sed verbis etiam Homericum illud, quod omnes cogitamus, exhibeas atque sones.» Ibid., pp. 356-57. % J. Seigel makes a similar caution: «To ‘consider things, not words’ meant to strive more for style than for meaning.» Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism (Prin- ceton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), p. 117.oy Only by investing the target text with a new rhetoric do we reignite Homeric style. The initial adherence to things over words leads back ultim- ately in the target text to a new lexical opulence, the translation exacting an inflation of language in the form of added or changed conjunctions, excla- mations, and interrogations: Salutati’s description of this process is impor- tant for the way it reveals a new vigour in the theoretical vocabulary of trans- lation, He first calls on the translator «to produce a more pleasant texture» («si denique poteris... seriem efficere gratiorem»). The rhetorical idiom aseriem efficere» recalls a similar use in Ars Poetica, 46 where C.O. Brink has called attention throughout this section to Horace’s «searching and curiously moving appraisal of words as living things».* In this context, averba serere» not only depicts the joining of words, but more vividly, their implantation like so many germinating seedlings on the surface of the text.* For Salutati, the «more pleasant texture» he ascribes to the translation is not a transplantation of direct verbal equivalencies, but the sowing of an entirely new field, a network of omissions and additions which may, of necessity, strike at the heart of the «invented» matetial.* As a humanist, Salutati, no less than Horace, appraises words as living things, enjoining his translator to transcribe the animizing magic of words, their powers to reveal and affect: «et demum si primo nitaris tum magis propria, tum mage splendentia vel sonora vocabula.» Salutati’s contribution to humanist theories of translation is a seminal one if only because it is the earliest known attempt in the Renaissance to arti- culate a creative formula for translation. In its higher form, translation goes beyond the level of juxtaposed texts, so familiar as a pedagogical exercise, in order to involve the translator in an act of creative discovery and restoration. But even more crucially, neither is Salutati condemning the initial level of translation, for he knows that both as exercise and as poetic art, translation draws together the collateral phases of a single event. The one is the prelude to the other. Significantly, then, to support his views on translation, he igno- res the more formal pedagogical programs of Cicero and Quintilian, seeking in their place @ spokesman for the poem as an expression of imitative and imaginative drives. This spokesman is Horace. % «Denique cunctis debitam tribues maiestatem, si soluta mutatis vel additis coniunc- tionibus nectes, si frigidiuscula tum exclamationibus, tum interrogando, quasi quibusdam accendes igniculis...» Salutati, p. 357. % C.0, Brink, Horace on Poetry (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), p. 137. ae i ee ke 36 «si denique poteris, inventa commutans, vel omittens aliquid aut addens, seriem effi- cere gratiorem.» Salutati, p. 357.— 38 — The Horatian spirit of Salutati’s proposals, alluded to above, is confirmed in his use of a /ocus greatly exploited by later Renaissance theorists of trans- lation: «non etiam verbo verbum, sicut inquit Flaccus, curabis reddere fidus / Interpres...» Taken from Ars Poetica, 133-34, these counsels have a long critical history in Renaissance thought and will be studied at length in subse- quent chapters. What it is important to keep in mind is that Horace is not adducing here a credo for correct translation, but a point of comparison to show how the Horatian poet, assimilating his Homeric sources, should not proceed.” Even more to the point, however, Horace is by no means con- demning the ideology of literalism, the quest for one-for-one lexical balance between two linguistic systems, because he is well aware that such translation plays a practical role in certain areas of human communication. It is preci- sely this unstated — and too often ignored — proviso that is present in the Horatian use of fidus interpres. For while there appears to be no instance of this topos in the sense of «literal translator» before Horace, it is used earlier by Sallust (Jugurtha, 109.4) to describe intermediaries whose delicate job it is to translate the language of negotiation for two parties speaking different idioms. In such social contexts, translation aims not at the stylistic turn of phrase, but at unadorned, plainly stated meaning and as close an approxima- tion as possible to the source’s verborum ordo.* The qualifier «fidus» thus characterizes the personal reliability of the go-between — his mutual trust- worthiness in the eyes of both parties — rather than a quality inherent in his translation. Horace’s «faithful translator» seems, then, to retain a metapho- tical nuance of «trustworthy intermediary» which later rhetoricians no doubt comprehend. In short, Horace is simply elaborating another level of textual transference, different in kind from that of the «trustworthy inter- mediary». His is an imitative project, even beyond the constraints of rerum ordo, much less the verborum ordo. From what we have stated above about Salutati’s concept of translation, one cannot escape the implicit eloquence of these lines for the humanist’s argument. Philological translation demands the creative participation of the translator himself: if, on a pedagogical level, he could be considered the «trustworthy intermediary», shifting tirelessly between two adjacent texts and grammars, there comes a time when he must abandon the neutrality of arbitration and, in the case of Homer, embark on a conscious reordering of the poetic text. In this respect, Salutati is decidedly more pragmatic that * Brink, Horace on Poetry, op. cit., pp. 210-11. Professor Brink has been kind enough to have guided me in the interpretation of these lines whose influence on the evolution of a rhetoric of literalism during the Renaissance is impressive. % Lam deeply indebted to Professor Brink for having called my attention to this earlier, otherwise obscure, use of fidus interpres.— 39 — Chrysoloras, for in the real world, he implies, all good translation rests on a creative policy which simply builds on the foundation of lexical analysis. 4. Leonardo Bruni: Translation as Illusion With the rediscovery of Cicero’s De Oratore, the Brutus, and the Orator, made in 1421 in northern Italy, the lines of theoretical speculation inaugurat- ed separately by Salutati and Chrysoloras receive a new stimulus. As a disci- ple of Chrysoloras, as well as a professional rhetorician, Leonardo Bruni res- ponds to this rediscovery by attempting to systematize the relationship be- tween rhetoric and philological translation. The result is the first formal trea- tise on translation in the Renaissance, De Interpretatione Recta (c. 1426). Bruni’s definition of translation is a deceptively simple yet eloquent one: translative power (vis), he tells us, consists of transferring correctly into one language whatever is written in another. In light of our preceding remarks, however, two words in this definition are especially meaningful: the terms «vis» and «traducatur», the one denoting the power of translation, the other its portative force. In its accepted sense, «traducere» had always described an act of physical transference, the displacement of objects from one point in space to another; but with Bruni, the word becomes more richly metapho- rical by its association with the art of philological translation“ To translate, in humanist figurative terms, is hence to dislocate and retrieve. The word «vis» (power; force), in turn, enriches the spatial eloquence of «traducere» by investing the action with a notion of dynamism. Together, the two terms articulate that sense of energic displacement which present-day thought ascribes to the translative act? Bruni’s treatise, as a consequence, is an assessment of philological translation as an inquiry into the affective «plea- sures» of rhetoric. % On this treatise, see Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Prince- ton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1955), I, 356; Il, 615-16, 618; and Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 114-15. All references to De Interpretatione Recta will be taken from ‘Leonardo Bruni Aretino Humanistisch-Philosophische Schriften mit einer Chronologie seiner Werke und Briefe, ed. Hans Baron (rpt. Wiesbaden, M. Sandig, 1969), pp. 81-96. The page number will occasionally be carried parenthetically in the text. “© «Dico igitur omnem interpretationis vim in eo consistere, ut, quod in altera lingua scriptum sit, id in alteram recte traducatur» (p. 83). “1 Remigio Sabbadini was the first to call attention to its new humanistic use, «Del tra- durre i classici in Italian, Atene e Roma, 3, N° 19-20 (1900), col. 202-03. It is peripherally noteworthy that its French derivative, traduire, does not occur before the sixteenth century. “See Steiner, After Babel, op. cit., passim.— 40 — The way to these expressive heights lies, however, along an apprentice- ship of pedagogical effort. Philological translation in its higher form would be unthinkable without the initial labour of linguistic analysis set down in humanist school programs. In his critique of particularly clumsy translations of Aristotle, he derides those translators who, instead of rhetorical exercise and oil, adopt a deplorable roughness." His use of «palaestra» appears to underscore the propaedeutic role of the schools in developing skills of trans- lation. With pedagogical practice comes, more vitally, an accrued know- ledge of the source and target languages, a principle to be restated again and again throughout the history of translation theory. From what we have observed of Bruni’s mentor, Chrysoloras, this could only mean the use of empirical grammatical analysis in assimilating the foreign idiom. Bruni’s first rule of correct translation calls, therefore, for the thorough mastery of both languages.“ This emphasis on the dual apprehension of both linguistic systems may, in fact, be construed as a restatement of the humanist belief in the comparative bilingual approach to source and target grammars. Neither, Bruni continues, is this to be a weak and common knowledge, but a deep and practiced grasp obtained only through the reading of the philosophers, ora- tors, poets and other writers.’ No one who has not unraveled, studied, hence Possessed great literature can ever lay claim to the power and meaning of the words. The study of language through a program of great authors grants access, then, not only to the meaning, but to the expressive power (vis) of words. Without these dual attributes, philological translation, Bruni appears to sug- gest, could not be realized in its highest form. As a companion term to signi- Jicatio, vis associates itself with those latent irregularities between what words appear to mean and the particular normative stresses under which they have been placed by everyday speech. Bruni crams his treatise with the examples of such verbal power. The meaning of certain tropes and figures, for instance, is emitted on both the literal surface of the words and on the shifting levels of linguistic habit” To the unschooled, the idiom «gero tibi morem» encompasses three semantically viable structures, the sum of which © «et pro palaestra et oleo lacrimabilem suscipiunt rusticitatem» (p. 96). + «Recte autem id facere nemo potest, qui non multam ac magnam habeat utriusque linguae peritiam» (pp. 83-84), “ «... nec ea parva neque vulgaris, sed magna et trita et accurata et multa ac diuturna philosophorum et oratorum et poetarum et ceterorum scriptorum omnium lectione quaesitay (p. 84). 4 «Nemo enim, qui hos omnes non legerit, evolverit, versarit undique atque tenuerit, vim significataque verborum intelligere potest...» (p. 84). « «... et incidant frequenter tropi figuraeque loquendi, quae aliud verbis, aliud ex con- suetudine praeiudicata significent» (p. 84).—41— is not equal to their underlying force. Only through the humanist application of correct linguistic knowledge does interpretation succeed in breaking the code of resistance and revealing the normative message, «I comply with your wishes». The philological translator thus labours under the constant risk of rhetorical deception-* To diminish that risk, he must enter into a condition of empathy with his source and be «seized [rapitur] by the power of his sub- ject’s style» No intelligent reading can ever take place without the transla- tor’s willingness to be enthralled by the aggressive appeal of the original text. In sixteenth-century pedagogical theory, this belief in the text’s preemp- tive authority over a subservient reader would be connected directly with the ancient Greek paronyms, energeia / enargeia, and developed as a parallel concept in the philosophy of translation. These terms refer to two separate, yet complementary ideas about how language and texts actuate a reader res- ponse. In the first, energeia describes a metaphorical process, the power of language to shape, animize, and displace an imagined event into something compellingly real. Hence, in Bruni’s remarks on translation, the need to breach the unitary meaning of certain words in order to assess what I.A. Richards once called their «interinanimation», their capacity to yield a signi- ficance somehow greater than their parts.° The second of the above terms, enargeia, alludes less to the actualizing than to the visualizing power of words, but comes nonetheless to play a crucial role in the vocabulary of Renaissance translation. Enargeia dramatizes the illusion of concepts made picturally immanent through rhetoric and likewise fills an important place in Bruni’s treatise. So conceived, translation is, as it were, a transplantation of verbal pigment. Like the artist copying another picture, the translator seeks to appropriate the outline, stat2, movement, the entire form of the body, incorporating not what he might have done himself, but a repetition of his model’s «pictural» integrity.. Thus, the highest form of translator converts with the whole understanding, mind, and will, transforming, in turn, the outline, state, movement, and colours of the style (oratio) so as to express all the features of the original." Bruni’s use of the verb ¢ransformare makes it clear once «.,. et alicquin crebrae interseruntur figurae, ut, nisi quis in multa ac varia lectione omnis generis scriptorum versatus fuerit, perfacile decipiatur ac male capiat, quod est transfe- rendum» (p. 85). © «Rapitur enim interpres vi ipsa in genus dicendi illius, de quo transfert, nec aliter ser- vare sensum commode poterit...» (p. 87). 8 The Philosophy of Rhetoric, op. cit., p. 49. + qUt enimii, qui ad exemplum picturae picturam aliam pingunt, figuram et statum et ingressum et totius corporis formam inde assumunt nec, quid ipsi facerent, sed, quid alter ille fecerit, meditantur: sic in traductionibus interpres quidem optimus sese in primum scribendi auctorem tota merit et animo et voluntate convertet et quodammodo transformabit eiusque—2— again that philological translation, as defined by Renaissance humanists, is frequently unable to map exact boundaries between translation proper and the articulation of a novum opus. Paradoxically, the interests of literalism («lineamenta cuncta exprimere meditabitur») seem best served by an act of transformation rather than one of absolute replication. He translates most faithfully who uses all his intellectual faculties to explore the relative resour- ces of the source and target languages, and then to transform the resources of the one into the expressive fabric of the other. Such translation is not only an inquiry into the actualizing vis of lan- guage, but perhaps just as urgently, its capacity to obtrude on the graphic plane of the text; in short, its enargeia. Enargic words, Bruni argues, are therefore words which merge in an illusionistic texture not unlike a miracu- lous pavement of mosaics inlaid with life-like worm tracks.? The precedent for this analogy seems to lie in theories of historical narrative. Qualities of pictural profusion, as one scholar has recently suggested, migrate to the dis- course of humanist narrative, transmuting words into particles of picture space, producing an illusion of vibrant, cohering life.* Rhetorical enargeia thus issues not from the unitary presence of words in confrontation, but is distilled from a total narrative effect of words subordinately and coordina- tely linked. Both disciplines, historiography and translation, relay in human- ist thought a similar intuition: a belief in the illusionism of textual transfe- rence. Words, in either case, form a conjunctive pact which transcends their Presence as autonomous lexical units («haec omnia verba inter se festive coniuncta...»). For Bruni, total translation becomes a pursuit of internal coherence, that same incarnative texture depicted in Salutati’s «seriem effi- cere» and developed concurrently in historiographic theory. Consequently, when he goes on to assert that «a disconnected and inelegant translation immediately drives out all the glory and grace of the original author», he refers to a dimension of equivalence in which words may either recreate or hopelessly blur the graphic presence of the source text. In the one case, we encounter the cohering textures of translation in its higher form, in the other, we scarcely progress beyond the lexical alignments, untextured and discontinuous, of two opposing texts. orationis figuram, statum, ingressum coloremque et lineamenta cuncta exprimere meditabi- tur» (p. 86). * «haec omnia verba inter se festive coniuncta, tamquam in pavimento ac emblemate vermiculato, summam habent venustatem» (p. 89). * See Nancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 76 ff. * «Dissipata namque et inconcinna traductio omnem protinus laudem et gratiam pri- mit auctoris exterminat» (p. 90).— 4 — The significance of Bruni’s remarks on the animizing / graphic function of correct translation brings us back, however, to the underlying premise of the philological method: a restored integrity of the source text deriving ini- tially from close lexical analysis. No transcription takes place without the prior conviction that sense responds to a deep and violent perforation of lan- guage, its habits, contexts, structures (syntaxic and semantic), its etymolo- gies and annotations, its strata of rhetorical, cultural, and historical sedi- mentation. These assumptions dictate, in turn, the manner in which we per- ceive the original text, no longer as the exclusive dominion of res, but as an interlocking structure of doctrina rerum and scribendi ornatus, of content and expression. Both of these, Bruni stresses, must be observed by the higher translator, above all in rendering the grave works of moral philosophy.* While this position will place him in open conflict with Alonzo of Carta- gena and the scholastic, anti-rhetorical approach to such works, Bruni remains resolute. Total translation seeks to retrieve an entire texture of meaning: words may not be sacrificed to sense, neither elegance nor embel- lishment to words.* The great systems of moral philosophy thus depend for their integrity on the expressive force of style. Their restitution through translation encompasses, for Bruni, a single interpretive motion based on the merger of rhetoric and philosophy, beginning and ending in the supremacy of the oratio:” At issue is the capacity of translation to engage the affective components of discourse: the sententiarum splendorem, the verborum deli- cias, and the orationis numerositatem.* There is consequently no meaning which has not first been grasped through rhetoric’s techne of illusion. Orna- ments of thought and word, figurative arid rhythmic expression are all adduced as points of access to the source text, «as if certain inserted stars illuminate the style».* In keeping with its visualizing function, philological translation becomes a theatre of optics radically committed to the humanist conviction that «rhetorically instead of logically oriented discourse leads one to reality through illusion». And in this case, reality is the recreated opu- lence of the source text. ++ «Cum enim in optimo quoque scriptore et praesertim in Platonis Aristotelisque libris et doctrina rerum sit et scribendi ornatus, ille demum probatus erit interpres, qui utrumque servabit» (p. 86). + qHaec est enim optima interpretandi ratio, si figura primae orationis quam optime conservetur, ut neque sensibus verba neque verbis ipsis nitor ornatusque deficiat» (p. 87). + On Bruni’s opposition to Alonzo of Cartagena, see Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 128 ff. + «Videtis in his omnibus sententiarum splendorem ac verborum delicias et orationis numerositatem...» (p. 89). + «,,. ac cetera huiusmodi translata verba quasi stellae quaedam interpositae orationem illuminant» (p. 89). “ Struever, The Language of History, op. cit., p. 77.— 44 — 5. Giannozzo Manetti and the « Via Media» Despite Leonardo Bruni’s conciliation of rhetoric and philosophy in the De Interpretatione Recta, there remains one vital sphere of translation about which he has nothing to say. His broad attention to humanistic studies and inquiry into the affective and signifying powers of language is only matched by his resounding silence on the translation of sacred texts. This omission probably conceals what Charles Trinkaus describes as Bruni’s fundamental conservatism on matters of scriptural and theological study, as well as tradi- tional suspicions on the layman’s interest in Hebrew studies." In this respect, an otherwise balanced account of the philological approach to translation has a serious deficiency which the first great humanist scholar of Hebrew, Giannozzo Manetti, will undertake to rectify. If Bruni appears to remain cautiously reserved about the broad applicability of the philological method, Manetti’s later De Interpretatione Recta — the title echoing that of its prede- cessor — proclaims the catholicity of philology as a means to retrieving all texts, both secular and sacred. Unlike Bruni, Manetti is far more concerned with the concrete inter- action of theory and practice, with fleshing out his topic in a sustaining pro- gram of textual corroboration and reality. De Interpretatione Recta is thus the fifth and summarizing book of a larger work on problems encountered in translating the Psalter: Apologeticus (Adversus suae novae Psalterii traduc- tionis obtrectatores apologetici libri V) In turn, the Apologeticus adjoins his own version of the Psalms, a project he had begun with the intention of translating the entire Old Testament, but which remained unfinished. In light of what we have revealed above about the binary levels of philological translation, however, the graphic layout of Manetti’s version is highly signi- ficant. Next to his own translation of the Psalms, labelled paene ad verbum and made directly from the Hebrew, he places two versions of St. Jerome, © Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), Il, 581. The obscurity of the treatise has undoubtedly been assured by its place (as Book V) within the larger Apologeticus attached to three manuscripts of Manetti’s translation of the Psalter. The manuscripts, all in the Vatican, consist of Pal. lat. 40, 41, and Urb. lat. 5. Stei- ner, who refers to most of the important theoretical treatises on translation, overlooks Manetti's De Interpretatione Recta, as also does Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy. Charles Trinkaus discusses the De Interpretatione Recta in In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, op. cit., U1, 571-601. Seminal work on Manetti was done by Father Salvatore Garofalo, «Gli umanisti italiani del secolo XV e la Bibbia», La Bib- bia e il concilio di Trento, Scripti Pontifici Instituti Biblici: 96 (Rome, 1947), pp. 338-75.-The author wishes to acknowledge the kind assistance of Professor Trinkaus in selecting for the present discussion Pal. lat. 41, a copy of the Apologeticus dedicated to King Alfonso of Naples.45 the one entitled De Hebraica veritate, the other taken from the Greek of the Septuagint. Through this tricolumnar arrangement, Manetti is drawing his reader into a comparative analysis of three juxtaposed texts. As in the bi- lingual Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana and Erotemata, our attention embarks on a latitudinal shift from one columnar line to the other. We see the respective columns not as independent textual entities whose fullness emerges along points of vertical reference, but as so many partitions of phi- lological meaning assimilable only through a back and forth, line by line col- lation of language. We therefore apprehend the text as a grid of intersecting surfaces, the vertical disposition of the columns cutting through the philolo- gist’s horizontal impulse to dismantle those columns painstakingly line by line. This program of analysis having taken place, only then are we ready to approach the source text as a transmissible object with latent patterns of equivalency in the target grammar. Manetti’s purpose in encasing his own «almost literal» translation in this more rigid pedagogical structure is pro- bably to call attention to his own version as the best possible one and deci- dedly superior to Jerome’s two equivalents: The Apologeticus, appended to the tripartite version, affirms what is lar- gely implicit in the pedagogical structuring of texts: an underlying premise that philology establishes a program of empirical scrutiny. Translation is triggered by the overwhelming fact of the texts rather than any a priori spe- culation. In other words, the decision to translate is motivated, as it is for Manetti’s contemporary, Alfonso de Madrigal, by a wider inquiry into those patterns of reading, interpretation, and translation that have coalesced around the source text. Book I, for instance, consists of a ringing defense of Biblical criticism, especially as it attaches to the sacred text no less an accessi- bility than that of secular authors. And Manetti articulates this accessibility in terms of specific textual problems: the division of David’s Psalter; whe- ther it is poetry or prose; the precise number of psalms and whether David is, in fact, their sole author. Such questions of structure, style, and authorship are not incidental, but preliminary to the act of total translation, mecha- nisms rather than accessories to the process. In Book II, the argument moves from the integrity of the source text to its restitution by countless translators, principal among them the Septuagint. Manetti’s awareness of the deficien- cies in these various translations derives from his own practiced and thorough knowledge of Hebrew; for it is just such a mastery which permits access to the abundance of tropes and figures having no direct verbal equiva- lents in the target language. Within the recesses of these daily, rhetorical habits of language are hidden those divine mysteries which resist the mere © ‘Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness, op. cit., 11, 595.— 4 — act of verbal transference.“ Perception of these mysteries rests, in turn, on the philologist’s mastery of the source idiom. Failing such mastery, the trans- lator finds himself lured into outrages of addition and omission which form the detailed attentions of Book III. This circle of textual analysis continues to shrink until it ends, in Book IV, in a minute Psalm by Psalm tabulation of the faulty translations of the Septuagint. Upon this empirical base, Manetti is now able to construct his theoretical program. Perhaps the most revealing fact about Book V is its homage, both implied and stated, to a broad spectrum of textual authority extending from Classical to Patristic to humanistic sources. Not unexpectedly, the subject centres on the relative merits of ad sensum versus ad verbum translation. Like many of his successors, Manetti is taken in by the scholiastic misreading of Horace’s celebrated line 134, adopting its counsels against word-for-word translation as a philological precept’ In support of this view, he alludes briefly to the rhetorical sanctions set down by Cicero in De Optimo Genere Oratorum (IV, 14) where the translator / orator is called on to transcribe the figures of thought so as to preserve the style and force (vis) of the source lan- guage while still conforming to the usage of the target language. The inte- rests of orator take precedence over those of interpres. At the end of the same treatise (VII, 23), Cicero, he recalls, defines total translation as an appropriation of the text’s spirit (genus) through qualities of thought (sen- tentia), figure, and construction (rerum ordo). Words may be pursued only in so far as they are consistent with our usage.“ Furthermore, citing De Fini- bus (1, 3), Manetti goes on to acknowledge Cicero’s defense of Latin transla- tions of Greek philosophy, a sanction harbouring natural affiliations with the humanist’s broader interests in theological as well as philosophical trans- lation. The authority of classical rhetoric confirms, for Manetti, any text’s essential translatability. To further support this view, Manetti refers to a seminal statement on Patristic theories of translation, St. Jerome’s De Optimo Genere Interpre- tandi. As might be expected from a humanist, however, he pointedly omits all of Jerome’s antirhetorical arguments. No mention is made, for instance, of the crucial closing statement where the translator speaks of his desire to «Prima erat quedam troporum ac metaphorarum copia quibus ea lingua vel maxime abundabat, ubi nonnulla ingentia divinarum rerum mysteria interdum abstrusa latere vide- bantur, quae quidem in alienam linguam cum tanta ac tam propria illarum sententiarum expressione transferri non poterant» (f° 156 v). « @Oratius enim in arte poetica cum de recta interpretatione loqueretur ita canit. Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus interpres» (f° 178 r). “© For the reference to De opt. gen. orat., see f° 178 r and 179 r; the citation from De finibus (I, 3) is found at f° 178 v. }— 47 — write «commentaries on Holy Writ» rather than «Philippics in the style of Demosthenes and Cicero» And neither does Manetti share Jerome’s reve- rence for the spatial mystery of words («ubi et verborum ordo mysterium est», p. 59). After all, he is seeking a textual sanction which will support the empirical spirit of his first four books, while sustaining the legitimacy of theological and philosophical translation. He thus seizes on a passage in Jerome bearing directly not only on the philological commitment of the translator, but on the articulation of his , commitment in the spatialist / visualist terms of classical rhetoric. Citing his ‘own preface to Eusebius, Jerome in this passage depicts translation as a pil- grimage back through the topographic relief of a route already traveled by another, yet whose linear features can never be retraced in an authentic, one- for-one repetition. The road retaken is always longer, never precisely aligned with the original contours of word. It will always represent an accretion of distance and surface over the initial itinerary.” Along the way, progress is constantly deferred by detours into rhetorical language, into such obstacles to translative equivalency as hyperbaton («hyperbatorum anfractus»), dissi milarities of case («dissimilitudines casuum»), figurative variety («varietatis figurarum»), even the distinctive features of each idiom («vernaculum lin- guae genus»). Pursuit of word ends in dissonance of sound; pursuit of sense in modifications of construction and style, in a renunciation of the transla- tor’s own calling.” Word-for-word translation violates the very coherence of language, of that Jerome is certain, but neither is he any more convinced that ad sensum translation fully replenishes the original work. The appeal of the Patristic text to the humanist will clearly lie in this relativistic centring be- tween two extremes. Initially, Manetti’s theoretical debt would appear to be restricted to the rhetorical and Patristic tradition. Charles Trinkaus has, in fact, remarked on the absence of any reference to Manetti’s humanist precursor, Leonardo Bruni and the De Interpretatione Recta." A careful comparison of the two treatises, however, reveals that not only had Manetti read carefully Bruni’s work, but that he incorporated large unattributed segments of the earlier text into his own analysis with only minor stylistic revision. Manetti’s first © St. Jerome, Lettres, ed. and trans. J, Labourt (Paris, Belles Lettres, 1953), III, p. 73. All further references to Jerome will be taken from this edition. See f° 180 r. © GSignificatum est aliquid unius verbi proprietate: non habeo meum quo id efferam, et dum quaero implere sententiam longo ambitu vix brevis vie spatia consumo» (f° 180 1). % «si ad verbum interpretor absurde resonant, si ob necessitatem aliquid in ordine vel in sermone mutavero videbor ab interpretis officio recessisse» (f° 180 r). ‘Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness, op. cit., 11, 596.— 48 — principle of correct translation thus repeats Bruni’s call for the translator’s mastery of language, «not weak and common, but a minute, exacting, thorough knowledge of long duration», obtained only through the reading of «the poets, orators, historians, philosophers, and theologians».? The addition of theologians to this catalogue of authors underscores, once again, Manetti’s broader view of translation. Yet, he keeps close to Bruni’s main theme: without the diligent and accurate reading, unraveling, and study of all great authors, the translator cannot hope to grasp both the property and meaning of the words.” He then goes on to pose the ad verbum / ad sensum dilemma in precisely the same rhetorical terms as Bruni. Trope and figure are lattices of deception ill-equipped to transmit sense on a literal level; rather they begin to signify in response to our assimilation of the daily figurative habits of language.“ Manetti’s stock of supporting examples, beginning with the familiar «gero tibi morem», is lifted almost verbatim from Bruni’s trea- tise, each locution engaging the philological interest of the translator. No less revealing is the transcription of Bruni’s remarks on translative texture. Translation, Manetti asserts, is an act of total intellect and under- standing, an attempt to salvage not only the plenitude of sense, but its chan- nels of articulation, all the rhythms (numerus), ornaments of thought and word, woven into patterns of elegance and coherence.” Translation once again stands analogous to a pictural reconstruction through which values of figure, position, corporal form, lineament and colour each participate in a restoration of balance between source and target texts.”* % «Primo et enim habenda est illius linguae de qua transfertur cognitio. neque ea parva ac vulgaris. sed minuca et trita et accurata et multa ac diuturna poetarum oratorum historico- rum philosophorum etsi e sacris scripturis traducendum foret celebratorum doctorum lectione Quaesita» (f° 1771). Cf. Bruni’s text, n. 45. Manetti’s textual modifications are here indicated in italics. % «Siquidem qui hos omnes non legerit evolverit ac diligenter accurateque versarit is broprietatem significataque verborum probe tenere intelligereque non poterit...» (f° 177 1). Cf. Bruni, n. 46. ™ _«... omnes praesertim elegantes scriptores tropis figurisque dicendi frequenter utun- tur, quae si ut sonant verba ita interpretarentur: non modo ridicula et stulta: sed quandoque falsa redderetur conversio. Qualia sunt apud nos: Gero tibi morem...» (f° 1771). Cf. Bruni, n. 47 and also p. 84 for full text. This transcription consists of a freer paraphrase of Bruni, but Manetti’s debt is no less obvious. ’* «Nam si aut male capiunt. quod interpretantur aut male reddunt: aut si id quod apte humeroseque dictum fuerit: ipsi ita convertant: ut ineptum et inconcinnum et dissipatum effi- ciatur: vitiosi interpretes non iniuria appellabuntur. Si duo praeterea usitata et nota exorna- tionum hoc est verborum et sententiarum ornamenta... non ita expresserit... nequaquam boni interpretes habendi sunt» (f° 177 v). Cf. Bruni, p. 87; p. 90. * «... quemadmodum enim illi qui ad exemplar picturae aliam picturam effingere conantur: nisi figuram et statum et ingressum ac totius corporis formam et lineamenta colo- esque ex inde probe apteque assumpserint...» (f° 177 v). Cf. Bruni, n. 51.— 49 — Manetti’s unattributed debt to Bruni is dramatic evidence of the broad applicability of the humanist credo on translation. Sacred, no less than secu- lar, texts are permeable to philological analysis. Divine mastery is not, for the most part, a truth whose premise is somehow autonomous from the func- tions of language, but is incorporated into the text’s process of expression. But beyond that, Manetti is making a concerted attempt to improve on Bruni by formulating a doctrine of critical good sense not unrelated to St. Jerome’s quiet relativism. For while Bruni proclaimed a grand alliance between philo- sophy and rhetoric, the one made viable by the affective repertory of the other, Manetti splits his allegiance between two basic interests: a total reap- portionment of the rhetorical impedimenta and a narrower, more restrained adherence to the action of individual words. Manetti’s more limited approach first surfaces in his definition of correct translation: such translation implies, optimally, absolute replication, but is nonetheless satisfied by approximation, a version close to the subject matter.” In the real world, Manetti seems to suggest, there are only equiva- lencies of meaning, bodies of translated essence which can never hope to give anything but an illusion of the original textual fullness. Proximity to that essence recedes or advances in direct proportion to the translator’s command of his own idiom, so that when he translates word-for-word, his native lan- guage may not seem like a foreign tongue.” The crucial clause here is «cum par verbum verbo reddendum fuerit», for not only is it an apparent recasting of Ars Poetica, 134, but clearly sanctions word-for-word translation if con- ducted within certain proprieties. In fact, the setting gives a curiously posi- tive twist to a phrase which, almost without exception during the early Renaissance, had the force of negative caveat. Does Manetti mean that word-for-word translation is possibly a legiti- mate interest of the translator? From the evidence, it would appear so, espe- cially in light of the rubric paene ad verbum placed with his own version of the Psalms. The sense of this clause begins to emerge, however, as he pro- ceeds to explain that «one must observe subtly and exactly the power and nature of words, in order not to translate modicum for parvum, fortitudi- nem for robore, bellum for prelio, and urbem for civitate.” For this reason, % «Est ergo interpretatio recta idonea quaedam et commoda de quacunque celebrata ac praeceptis et regulis instituta lingua in aliam pariter vel paene similem juxta subiectam de qua tractatur...» (f° 176 v). 1% «Nam quicunque recte interpretari volverit propositum suum nequaquam assequi poterit: nisi linguam eam in quam traducere proposuerit, sic tenuerit: ut in ipsa quodammodo dominetur: et totam ut ita dixerim: ita in potestate habeat: ut cum par verbum verbo redden- dum fuerit: quod plerunque accidit: vel id nullatenus mendicare cogatur: uel in aliena lingua ob crassam ejus ignorantiam peregrinum extraneumque relinquat» (f° 177 1). % «Vimque ac naturam verborum subtiliter et exacte noscat oportet ne modicum pro— 50 — a mere knowledge of the target idiom is insufficient. To pay heed to the «power and nature of words» is therefore to comply with their modalities of custom and figurative expression." It is the translator’s minute attention to these energies of statement that places him, as we shall see, in the best possi- ble position to enact a higher kind of fidelity, an ad verbum method in which the dull servility of letter accedes to the word’s place in a wider structure of meaning. . Manetti’s minimal principle of correct translation summarizes concisely the humanist conviction, expounded by Bruni, that words are repositories of latent energy. Unless the translator observes the power and property of words, the gravity of thought, the worthy ornaments of both languages, and the dignity and grace of the original author, no translation can be considered correct. It therefore falls to the translator to purvey these energies through the integrity of a new text, approaching his task in any of three ways. First is the traditional servility to word, ad verbum translation, which can never be correct. Second is translation ad sensum, observing only the thought (senten- tia), omitting the words and figures of speech.” We can detect in these two methods the traditional humanist option between verbum and res, with the significant proviso, in the latter case, that certain figurative elements of the source language must be suppressed. Yet for the philologist, Manetti seems to suggest, the choice can hardly be this clear-cut. He thus devises a third alternative in which words, according to the translator’s will and judgement and for the sake of embellishment, are either added or omitted.” To clarify this point, we might refer once again to Salutati’s implied distinction be- tween verba serere and verba reddere, words sown and words rendered. For Manetti, words rendered violate the essential coherence of the source text, strewing in their path jumbled patterns of utterance“ Words sown, on the parvo ne fortitudinem pro robore ne bellum pro praelio ne urbem denique pro civitate inter- transferendum exprimat» (f° 177 r-v). © qConsuetudines etiam figurasque loquendi calleat necesse est: quibus optimi scripto- res crebro utuntur» (f° 177 v). " @... nisi idem primo vim proprietatemque verborum: nisi deinde sententiarum gravi- tatem: nisi etiam digna utrorumque ornamenta: nisi insuper maiestatem dignitatemque primi auctoris suis interpretationibus bene: eleganterque expresserint: nullatenus de recta interpre- tatione merito laudari poterunt» (f° 177 v). © «Ad verbum interpretatio est ubi verbum verbo redditur. Ad sensum vero ubi verbis tropisque dicendi omissis sententia tantum modo servatur» (f° 178 r). © qTertia ubi aliqua interdum ornatus gratia omittuntur. nonnulla pro arbitrio volun- tateque interpretis super adduntury’ (f° 177 v-178 1). * «De hac nostra circa interpretationem rectam opinione siquis forte dubitaret traduc- tiones ad verbum factas in manus sumat... verba enim inepta peregrina et ambigua: sententias obscuras intercisas et interdum alienas: falsasque reperiet...»> (f° 178 r-v). jsi other hand, aim at the restored integrity of the original work, reinvesting it with an interlocking texture of meaning and affective force. Doubts are immediately raised, however, as to the universality of this third method. Close philological scrutiny of the translation of the Septuagint reveals patterns of omission, amplification, and falsification which encroach on the very integrity of the sacred text. But the real danger, for Manetti, appears to lie not so much in the fact of these textual transgressions (indeed, no translation is a total replica) as in the authoritative way they have been tendered to the reader as valid extensions of the sacred text. Such a method is contrasted unfavourably with that of the «ancient doctors» whose network of textual signals, asterisks for additions, obelisks for omissions, is an honest avowal to the reader that he holds in front of him a created substitute for the source text, a work which is an aggregate of transformations, reducing and augmenting the model.’ These annotations are textual precisions with an engaging rigour to the critical eye of the philologist: they profess his commit- ment to the problematic nature of translation and its reduction to a program of technical obstacles bodying forth from language. A further example of such philological honesty is Origen’s Hexaplorum, a columnar layout of five ancient translations placed side by side with the Septuagint version and the original Hebrew.* Through this alignment of parallel columns, there emer- ges a «new, useful, and admired work» dispelling «all the ambiguity and antithesis which seems to spring from so many different translations».” For Manetti, whose reference to the production of a novum opus closely parallels that of Madrigal, the premise on which any act of philological translation takes place issues from the adjacency of the source text alongside all avail- able translative variants. It is here that the originality of Manetti’s position becomes most evident, for he attempts to construct around these statements of empirical awareness a fourth option unaccounted for in the first two types of translation (ad ver- bum, ad sensum) and tangential to his third, exclusively rhetorical alterna- tive. To grasp this new development, we must once again recall Leonardo Bruni’s belief in the rhetorical accessibility of philosophical works. Although "© «Nam quae addita erant signis quibusdam in stellarum modum factis ad capita ver- suum notabant: et huiusmodi signa graece astericos vocabant. Ea vero quae omissa fuerant ad capita eorundem versuum iacentibus virgulis quasi verubus signabant. quae ille obelos: vel cum diminutione obeliscos appellabant» (f° 180 v). ‘««... per hunc ut diximus modum singulare operis composuisse et compilasse traditur per singulas quippe columnellas separatim operis unius cuiusque interpretis ita accurate des- cripsit...» (f° 180 v). © «,,. novum quoddam et utile atque admirandum opus ad tollendam omnem quae ex multis tam diversis interpretationibus oriri videbatur ambiguitatem ac contentionem in hunc modum composuit: (£° 180 v).—2— quite willing to adapt entire segments of Bruni’s treatise to his own state- ment, Manetti, however, sees philological translation as encompassing two distinct, yet related, spheres of legitimacy. Unlike Bruni, he discriminates between works dependent on the affective sources of rhetoric (those of poets, orators, and historians) and those whose rhetorical strategies are inci- dental to the articulation of truth (works of philosophers and Holy Writ). In the first, meaning (sententia) is emitted through illumination and ornamen- tation, in the second, through a weightier, more compressed form of transla- tion!" Specifically, this means that translations of philosophy and theology demand a less copious, diffuse, and full style, more attentive to the gravity and expression of the meanings «so that they are rendered in neither more nor fewer words» except as the necessity of figurative language and clarity of sense may dictate.” What is significant in this latter notion is the way it seeks to reconcile the interests of rhetoric and literalism. Manetti, it may be recall- ed, describes his own translation as paene ad verbum. Within the qualifying term «paene» lies the empirical certainty that two grammatical systems are never the mirror images of each other, but rather are vested with relative equivalencies, points of merger between their respective cultural traditions and their own inimitable articulation of that culture through language. Giannozzo Manetti’s two spheres of legitimacy are both commentaries on the philologist’s empirically tested belief in rhetoric. Significantly, he rejects the simplistic rubrics of ad sensum and ad verbum translation, laid down by Jerome and perpetuated in the humanist split of verbum and res. In their place, he sees total translation as a network of intersecting strategies be- tween word and essence, a texturing, so to speak, of the affective and signifying energies of language. In keeping with the Patristic topography of translation mapped out earlier by St. Jerome, Manetti in typically humanist fashion goes on to summarize his theory in what we have described as the enargic terms of space and motion: For it is licit for these first converters of poels, or orators or historians to amplify the arid, meagre and thin for the sake of elegance and ornateness, and to omit the obscure and to translate more lucidly according to their will. But faith- ful translators of philosophers and theologians should not run about and wander around so freely and widely as their fancy chooses as though through a wide open field. But pressed within certain narrower laws of translating, and con- stricted within certain barriers, they are compelled to move and proceed more «Tria enim illa antea posita in qua vis conversione talia esse convenit ut sententia quodammodo servata: cuncta alia secundum evidentem primorum auctorum diversitatem varietatemque ornata et illustrata fuisse ostendantur» (f°* 178 v-179 r). % «Quippe ad grauitatem expressionemque sententiarum quibus utraque commemorata facultas vel maxime abundat in primis requiritur ut nec plura neque pauciora interdum verba reddantur nisi quantum certa troporum et figurarum ac metaphorarum necessitas atque nonunquam nimia intelligentiae obscuritas exigere et postulare videatur...» (£* 179 r-).— 53 — modestly and seriously according to the certain severe norm of their profession, and not to wander too far away from their assumed purpose in translating. Nor adhering even to the first authors, but holding to a middle and safe road, as itis said, they should conduct themselves so modestly that they will seem to decline and bend in neither direction” He is depicting here two theatres of translative space, the one boundless, its lines of transit roving and freely drawn, the other straight and narrow, its radius of pursuit charted along a median of restraint and security. While the first dramatizes the translator’s commitment to a total restitution through rhetoric, omission and amplification notwithstanding, the second refers to a neutral itinerary with rhetoric compliant, insofar as possible, to the meaning and order of words. Literalness, in Manetti’s higher form, implies no less a withdrawal from a mindless servility to word than the philologist’s reasoned attention to verbal parallels between the two texts. The new integrity of sense emerging within the translation paene ad verbum thus carries with it a balanced infusion of rhetorical grace?! No idea, no matter how divine, takes form independently of an affective structuring within language. Hence, Manetti’s parting homage to the sonority and harmony of the Septuagint version”? In a sense, Manetti’s description of a relatively neutral via media returns us to a theoretical dogma phrased in far less cautious terms by his predeces- sor, Chrysoloras. For the earlier humanist, we may recall, all translation aims at a fusion of extremes, a reconciliation between two seemingly diver- gent interests: a belief in the power of words to reallocate other words spa- tially and sequentially, versus a corresponding confidence in the portability of meaning, a flight of essence from source to target idiom. All humanist speculation on translation theory tends, in fact, to be a commentary on this dual impulse, the aim being one of balance, of a restored neutrality between juxtaposed texts, In turn, philological translation becomes a quest, based in the empirical examination of opposing grammars, for points of minimal lin- guistic conflict between those same texts. Precisely where these zones of immunity lie is perpetually open to question, never traceable along absolu- tely contiguous boundaries. Giannozzo Manetti’s De Interpretatione Recta is thus the culminating statement of humanist relativistic theories of translation. By its broad com- mitment to the translative violability of all texts, both sacred and secular, it represents a crucial advance over other contemporary treatises. Yet, in its *° Ibid., f° 181 r-v. The translation is that of Trinkaus, op. cit., I, 598-99. * «,., quandoque ita a verbo recedit ut non solum sacer sensus ad unguem servetur. sed etiam dilucidior reddatur ac denique ornatior et illustrior habeatur» (f° 182 r). % «Ultimo propter carminum sonoritatem versuumque concinnitatem» (f° 182 r).— 54 — recourse to both iconic and energic rhetoric to actualize the translation pro- cess, it remains very much a part of the humanist tradition. As with Salutati and Bruni, Manetti establishes translation as an incarnative act based in the illusion that the word possesses a resilient, transposable surface as well as its own dynamic structures of revelation; not only does it inhabit a quantified, pictural space, but evokes power, returning us to that primitive sonic moment when thought begets utterance. In this respect, humanist theories of translation emerge around two broad concepts of poetic discourse, the one articulating a discreet affinity between word and thing, verbum and res, the other affirming the power of language to transcend ordinary experience and fashion another order of being”* In the framework of translation proper, the first notion funnels our attention within the discontinuous lexical unit, the second infuses words with the force of utterance. Humanist theories of translation thereby express an axiom which the theoretical vocabulary of French Renaissance writers will seek to exploit: namely, the view that the text imitates life and is sustained by an agglomeration of structures which respond to the changing textures of human experience. As translators, we are forever doomed to approach but not secure the Orphic clarity of the original text, forever enjoined to trans- mute its reality through those lattices of cultural deformation which make our perception of that text unique. The debt of French Renaissance thinkers to these early theorists of translation will derive from an implicit conviction in the immanence and mobility of the printed word, ina dynamism from which there is no reprieve. * These concepts, termed Structuralist and Phenomenological, are discussed at length by Gerald Bruns, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1974); see esp. pp. 261-62.PART ONE Horace and the Rhetoric of Faith «1 think it not unnecessary to insert some- thing in this place to shew the Erroneous- ness of that Opinion, and undeceive those : who are heedlessly drawn away from truly understanding the Mind of Horace.» Edward Sherburne «A Brief Discourse concerning Translation» (1702)CHAPTER II Fidus Interpres: Readings and Misreadings «ll n’y eut plus que des scholiastes.» Joseph Joubert Carnets (1814) In his probing meditation on the dynamics of the translative process, Valery Larbaud has called attention to a fallacy as ancient as the written word itself: the immobilizing of the printed text through the objectivity of language.' In this view, the blank page is comparable to a pictural enclosure made static by the component elements of writing, the author’s stock of word-objects. Once penned the word remains; once spoken it flies away: verba volant, scripta manent. Words are to the text what pigment is to can- vas, delegated, as it were, to stand in for an absent essence or experience? Through its language of verbal displacement expressed in such Latin terms as reddere, vertere, transferre, transponere and translatio; translation theory has played no small part in conspiring to advance this age-old illusion. Optimally, translation aims at a dislocation of meaning between two ver- bal surfaces so as to preserve, insofar as possible, an image of the source text, its network of morphological, syntaxic, and semantic structures. The radical revision of this concept brought about by humanist theoreticians of fifteenth-century Italy and their appraisal of the dynamic potential of trans- lation sets the stage for a later attempt in Renaissance France to redefine the deeper interests of the vernacular translator. The patterns of philological translation having long since been formalized by such humanists as Salutati, Bruni, and Manetti, French theoreticians will define their craft similarly as a + «L'immobilité du texte imprimé est une illusion d’optique. Sil est immobile, c’est ‘comme nous dans ces moments oti, absorbés par la recherche de l’équilibre des plateaux, nous demeurons sans bouger tandis qu’en nous les mouvements infiniment rapides et compliqués de la vie continuent. C’est du vivant que nous pesons...» Valery Larbaud, Sous l’invocation de Saint Jéréme (Paris, Gallimard, 1946), pp. 84-85. 2 Cf. LA. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, op..cit., p. 32. + On this terminology, see the seminal work of Hans Eberhard Richter, Uebersetzen und Uebersetzungen in der rémischen Literatur, Diss. Universitat KéIn, 1959.— 58 — dialogue between the portative and actualizing functions of language, objec- tivity placed in tandem with expressivity. The role of Horatian criticism in this new awareness is a vital one, as yet unstudied, and revealing a farrago of textual readings and misreadings, all bent on ascribing to the printed word qualities of substance and penetrability. The Horatian lines «nec verbo verbum curabis reddere fidus / interpres» purport to address the problem of translation. Or do they? If they do, then their vigour as a theoretical canon seems, against all good sense, to warrant their separation from the rest of the Horatian poem. If they do not, how is it that they have become a kind of epicentre for a constant process of reread- ing, all of it directed at the meaning and function of translation? The text, in fact, appears to force on us an equivocation best illustrated by Sir Edward Sherburne in the preface to his translation of Seneca’s Tragedies (London, 1702). Citing the passage in its full context («publica materies privati iuris erit, si / non circa vilem patulumque moraberis orbem, / nec verbo verbum reddere fidus / interpres...»), Sherburne declares these lines to be «so far from admitting the Sense these Men would put upon them, that they clearly infer a quite different and contrary Meaning» He goes on to support this view with a key passage from Pierre-Daniel Huet’s De interpretatione (1661), perhaps the most ambitious treatise on translation written during the seven- teenth century. Alluding to lines 130-34, Huet proposes the following read- ing, translated by Sherburne: The Mind of which place is this, As to the Matter already assumed and published by others, a Poet may justly yet make the Subject his own, if he fall not so upon it, as to render it word for word, by executing the part of a faithful Interpreter; but endeavour to adorn the Argument with new Imbellishments of fresh Inven- tion, and pass by the Words of the first Writer! In other words, Horace’s erstwhile canon on translation is here embedded in a negation subordinate, in turn, to a statement on the creative transference of another text. As readers, our awareness of the statement’s negativity increases in proportion to the more forceful appeal of its context. Conver- sely, the less we are willing to acknowledge that appeal, the more lines 133-34 become invested with their own assertive autonomy. As a consequence, Sher- burne ends up with two irreconcilables: «First, that Horace gave no Rules «Sir Edward Sherburne, trans., The Tragedies of L. Annaeus Seneca the Philosopher (London, for 8. Smith and B, Watford, 1702), p. xxxvii. * Ibid., pp. xxxvii-xxxviii, Huet’s text reads: «Cujus loci ea mens est, in materiam ab aliis jam occupatam, & publici juris, non ita esse involandum, ut verbum pro verbo reddatur, quasi fidi interpretis officium exequatur poéta; sed ut argumentum, & rerum descriptionem exprimat, tum insignia delibet ornamenta, verba praetermittat.» De interpretatione libri duo (Hagae-Comitis, Arnoldus Leers, 1683), p. 59. Quotations are from this later edition.— 59 — for Translation, and therefore cannot be said (as some have stil’d him to be) Of that Art the great Law-giver... Next, that according to the Judgment of Horace himself, ’tis the duty of a faithful Interpreter to translate what he undertakes word for word» Sherburne takes this two-edged statement, and rightly so, to be a direct consequence of philological speculation beginning with the editio princeps (Acron and Porphyrion) down to Huet’s own scho- lia. What he fails to grasp, however, is the way in which philology motivates ever new excursions into meaning. And more pointedly, he seems not to notice here the existence of a textual prism, for it is the cumulative philologi- cal study of the Horatian text that illustrates the problem to which the text itself is labouring to articulate a response. Horace’s text on the creative transformation of another text initiates, in turn, its own inquiry into the issue of translative commitment or fides. 1, An Early Misreading of Horace ‘The translative dilemma consistently posed in the context of Ars Poetica (133-34) is that of allegiance to letter. The problem is summarized effectively in the celebrated complaint brought by the Sorbonne theologians on January 10, 1534 against the newly created Royal Readers. Appointed by Francis I in 1530 at the encouragement of Guillaume Budé, the «lecteurs royaux» were authorized to «multiplier les lettres humaines»’ through instruction in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. But as they began to engage more and more in the prac- tice of textual interpretation along with translation proper, it became clear that their interests placed them on a collision course with those of the Sor- bonne theologians, if only because of the inherent ambiguity between the acts of interpretation and translation. This ambiguity, alluded to by Law- rence Humphrey in 1559, may indeed explain the consternation of the Sor- bonne plaintiffs when they read the posted course announcements of the Royal Readers: A typical bulletin used as evidence against the defendants in an injunction of the Parlement early in 1533 refers, as a consequence, to © Sherburne, op. cit., p. 200.viii 7 César Egasse Du Boulay, Historia Universitatis parisiensis, VI (Paris, Petrus de Bres- che, 1673), p. 240. On the entire proceedings, see Abel Lefranc, Histoire du College de France depuis ses origines jusqu’é la fin du premier empire (Paris, Hachette, 1893), pp. 144-48. * «Hacc Interpretatio dicta est, Graecis epunvela: estque hoc nomen Interpretis ambi- guum, et in varios sensus trahi potest: nos hoc quidem loco & tempore eum vocamus, qui Dia lectum seu idioma minus multis notum, linguae notioris & familiaris interpretatione illustrat, & aliquid ex peregrina lingua convertit in aliam celebratam magis & pervagatam.» Humphrey, Interpretatio Linguarum, op. cit., p. 3.= 60 Franciscus Vatablus’s continued «interpretationem Psalmorum»? Interlin- gual transfer or textual commentary: quite clearly both domains of analysis are blurred in the charges against the defendants. Political and moral issues aside, the charges leveled at the Royal Readers and delivered under the sanction of Ars Poetica (133-34) suggest that transla, tion and interpretation belong to identical spheres of concer Car il ne suffit a bien interpreter, & traduire d’avoir la simple langue & interpre- tation en mots; mais il faut Prendre, sensum medullarem & mysticum, & non reddere verbum verbo, seu adhaerere cortici verborum ut faciunt Iudaei, inquit Gloss. in 1. fi. ff. de Exhib, Et ‘pulchre Horatius, Nec verbum verbo curabit red- dere fidus Interpres.” While our particular interest here lies in the Horatian /ocus of the last Phrase, a careful analysis of the entire statement serves to focus not only on the rhetoric of literalism as understood in early sixteenth-century France, but on the deeper eloquence of the Horatian text as a dimension of that same thetoric, The statement is a seminal one. Deriving as it does from an environment of political and juridical strategy, it is a sobering reminder to the Renaissance mind that translation operates under the force and franchise of law. Indeed, Renaissance prefaces are full of Pseudo-legal homages to the «law of transla. tion» and to its «law-givers», prominent among them Horace." In no way, then, do these words merely embody a literary commitment, a pact between translator and text, but rather an injunction formalized juridically in Justi- nian’s Digest. What the spokesman for the King (De Montholon) seems to refer to here is a well-known rule of law that «magis sensus quam verba spec- tatur» and «melius est sensum magis quam verba amplecti».? The passage from Justinian, however, is adducing something more than a principle of legal exegesis. The admonition to transmit the «sensum medulla- rem & mysticum» and not to «adhaerere cortici verborum ut faciunt Iudaei» The text of this affiche is contained in Félibien’s Histoire de la Ville de Paris, 1V (Paris, G. Desprez et J. Desessariz, 1725), p. 682: «Franciscus Vatablus, hebraicorane littera- tum professor regius, die lune hora prima pomeridiana interpretationem Pyalmoran prose- quetur.» In the register of Parlement accompanying this and other depositions, the fefer: dants are enjoined «de ne lire, ne interpreter aucuns livres de la Saincte Escripture en langue hebraicque...» “Du Boulay, Historia Universitatis parisiensis, op. cit., VI, p. 243. ) wines for instance, George Chapman in the preface to his translation of Homer «. J611) where he refers to «Horace and other best lawgivers to translators», The lied of Homer, ed. R. Hooper (London, John Russell Smith, 1865), I, p. Ixxxix, BCL Dig., 17.6; 28.3.1; and 34.4.3, 5. The basic principle and others related to it gppear at: Stephanus de Federicis, De Interpretatione Legum, Pt. Ill, in e.g. Franciscus Zilettus, Tractatus Universi Juris (Venice, F. Zilettus, 1584-86), 1, and at Concranticn Roge- tius, De Juris Interpretatione, ibid.—61— refers undoubtedly to an ancient theological view based partly in ethnic slan- der, partly in interpretive practice. A brief summary of this position serves, in fact, to enrich the eloquence of the Horatian lines as well as to validate their evidential use by a Court lawyer. In a curious juridical gloss of the Latin cliché ad litteram, Durantis recalls (in startlingly similar terms to those of De Montholon’s source) that to «judaize» is to cling more to words than to sense.” In this, he simply echoes a Patristic prejudice which opposes the sensus mysticus to the sensus Judai- cus." To appropriate the Jewish letter is to don the shroud of mortality, to remain blind to Old Testament figurative truths rich in latent christological meaning and anticipating the victory of spirit over death. In the Contra Cel- sum, Origen states flatly (recalling Paul, 2 Cor. 3:6) that «‘the letter kills’, which is equivalent to the literal interpretation».'"Beyond strictly exegetical literature, the prejudice is also sustained by certain secular dialogues of the Middle Ages such as the tenth-century Altercatio Aecclesie contra Synago- gam and Crispin’s late eleventh-century Disputatio Iudei et Christiani.* Through this ethnic slander, however, we come upon a glimpse of exege- tical truth with clear implications for the conflict between the Sorbonne and the Royal Readers. This truth has its origins in an interpretive method and terminology developed by Jewish rabbis of the first centuries of the Com- mon Era and pursued with particular interest in the medieval rabbinical schools of northern France.” Any sacred text, according to this method, is susceptible to two levels of analysis, peshat and derash, the literal and the homiletical. Without first breaching the plain linguistic truths derived in pes- hat, the exegete’s venture into derash becomes little more than a flight of imaginative fancy. There thus emerges, asserts E.I.J. Rosenthal, a basic her- meneutic principle: «‘No verse in Scripture can lose its literal (plain, simple) » Gulielmus Durantis, Speculum Juris (Venice, Gasparus Bindoni, 1576), IV.iv. De judeis, 5: «ludei legem moysi ad literam servare dicuntur. Gloss: ad literam. inde venit in usum quod inherentes plus literae quam sensui dicimus iudaizare.» “* On this issue, see Erwin I.J. Rosenthal, «The Study of the Bible in Medieval Judaism, in The Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. G.W.H. Lampe, II (Cambridge, Cam- bridge Univ. Press, 1969), p. 256. “Contra Celsum, VIL, 20, ed. and trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1953), p. 411. The Patristic slander is perpetuated by: Saint Ambrose (PL, XIV, 1007-08); Saint Gregory, «lle gentilis populus praecepta tenet in mente, quae Judaicus popu- lus habere non potuit, dum solam in eis litteram attendit» (PL, LXXVI, 830A); and Saint Jerome, «Si enim litteram judaice sequaris, quid tibi prodest legere, etc? Sin autem spiritaliter intelligas...» (In Marc. An. Mar., II, ii, 348). Cf. Henri de Lubac, Exégése Médiévale. Les quatre sens de l’Ecriture, Premitre Partie, II (Paris, Aubier, 1959), pp. 439-41. «Fora discussion of these works, see Rosenthal, «The Study of the Bible», op. cit., p. 265; and Lubac, Exégése Médiévale, Seconde Partie, I (Paris, Aubier, 1961), pp. 150-51. "See Rosenthal, ibid., pp. 256 ff.a6. meaning’. This peshat or literal meaning must not be explained away by an allegorical or mystical interpretation; it always remains basic. »'* As a conse- quence, the potential significance of peshat lies in the degree to which the literal meaning is wrung from the text by an attentive probing of word. A later Hebrew scholar, Abraham ibn Ezra (d. 1167), especially influential in northern France, goes so far as to reject the derash, proposing in its place a rigid adherence to the laws of language, to the plainly penned evidence of lin- guistic fact.” Sacred texts are thus penetrable not through allegorical read- ings, such as countless Christian interpreters have practiced, but to the gram- marian’s attention to the objective integrity of the written word. More signi- ficantly for our present purposes, however, we have reformulated here the philological postulate on which all theories of humanist translation are based: the notion that one gains entry to any text only by first broaching the lexical obstacle. Behind the Patristic bias and its incorporation in juridical code and commentary, the claims of letter, validated by centuries of rabbin- ical interpretation, are reaffirmed more urgently than ever in the humanist tradition. Theories of humanist translation rest, no less than rabbinical analysis, on the axiomatic principle of peshat. The resonant charges of De Montholon accusing the Royal Readers of having committed the literalist heresy now begin to emerge in a new light. He presents in his attack not a single instance of textual transgression, no viola- tion of sacred truth, no translative or interpretive distortion, such as will later condemn Etienne Dolet to the stake. This lack of specificity is eloquent, for the Sorbonne stands here in opposition to an entire critical legacy of which the Readers are but the beneficiaries. To the theologians, the humanist philological position, represented by Franciscus Vatablus and his colleagues, presupposes that no text is linguistically sacred, immune from grammatical inquiry or accessible only to the doctrinal knowledge of an elite. De Montholon seems, in fact, intent on disavowing the primacy of lin- guistic authority affirmed earlier in fifteenth-century humanism and to be restated in Etienne Dolet’s second principle of translation («c’est que le tra- ducteur ait parfaicte congnoissance de la langue de l’autheur qu’il tra- duict»)2° The lawyer’s disclaimer thus seeks in no uncertain terms to subvert this authority: «Car il ne suffit 4 bien interpreter, & traduire d’avoir la sim- ple langue & interpretation en mots.» It is a statement, of course, with which few philologists would quarrel: linguistic knowledge alone is insuffi- “ Dbid., p. 253. © Ibid., pp. 266-68. 2 La Maniere de bien traduire d’une langue en autre (1540; rpt. 1830, Techener, Paris), p. 14, All further references will be to this edition.| — 68 — cient. Yet behind it lies a simplistic distortion: the notion that the philolo- gists have not known how to traverse the cortex of word («non... adhaerere cortici verborum») in order to break into the expressive centres of thought. In this familiar Patristic commonplace, the word erects an opaque barrier against violation, a superficies verborum bent on deflecting all strategies of entry to the interna mysteriorum medulla." Letter shades homily, just as his- toria screens allegory. In his exhaustive Exégese Médiévale, Henri de Lubac stresses, in fact, the interchangeability of historia and littera in Patristic thought, both terms depicting the surface features of language.” Yet more significantly, both terms also engage the interpreter in a commitment of faith (fides) which, not surprisingly, comes to codify during the Renaissance the higher notions of both translation and history Each discipline deals, at least initially, in the plain meaning of utterance or event; neither can sum- mon truths, whether linguistic or narrative, that are not present and discer- nible from surface data. A component of both disciplines, fides informs the interlingual transfer of texts as well as the transposition of event into chroni- cle. In his assault on the new literalism of the philologists, De Montholon seeks to validate the Patristic / juridical injunctions against letter by citing the most ancient link between fides and translation, Ars Poetica (133-34). From the context, its prescriptive force is clear: Horace condemns all literal translation; the humanists, in turn, stand rebuked by one of their own. Or at least, so it would seem. There is ample critical precedent for De Montholon’s recourse to Horace. Earliest evidence appears in a Patristic setting. In his well-known letter to Pammachius, Saint Jerome is the first to underscore the preceptive force of Horace’s words: «Sed et Horatius, vir acutus et doctus, hoc idem in Arte poetica eruditio interpreti praecipit: ‘nec verbum verbo curabis reddere See Othloh, Vita s, Wolfeangi epise., c. III (PL, CXLVI, 397 A); and Othloh, L. de cursu sp., c. III (PL, CXLVI D). Of particular interest for the judaizing allusion is a passage in John of Salisbury, referring to the «superficies historiae secundum Hebraeos»; Polycr., Book VII, c. XXIl, in PL, CXCIX, 697 B. The idea of a literal cortex was also present in the vernacular, as witnessed by Robert Estienne in his Dictionaire Frangoislatin (rpt. Slatkine, 1972; Paris, R. Estienne, 1549), p. 347: «Prendre les choses a lescorce, ou a la lettre, & a toute rigueur de droict.» 2 Exégese Médiévale, Il, ptie. 1, pp. 425-39. See the above reference to the superficies historiae by John of Salisbury, and also Augustine, In.ps. CVI, n. 2 (PL, CCL, 40, 1584). 2 On the topos fides historiae, see Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Histori- cal Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York and Lon- don, Columbia Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 22 and passim; and Myron P. Gilmore, Humanists and Jurists (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), p. 91 and pp. 111-13. A Patristic locus is found in John Scotus, Comment. in Evang. Sec. Joan., Fragmentum II (PL, CXXII, 332 B): «juxta fidem rerum gestarum.»— 64 — fidus interpres’»* Speaking of the series, or stylistic texture of his transla- tion of Porphyry, Boethius later adapts the lines to his own self-censure for having «approached the fault of the faithful translator» 2* Not unaware of Jerome’s early treatise, humanist theoreticians like Salutati, Bruni, and Manetti each remind the would-be translator of the Horatian caveat against word-for-word translation2* Along with Cicero’s counsels on rhetorical translation (De opt. gen. orat., 14), the lines are transmitted to the French Renaissance as the most authoritative classical injunction against literal translation. They speak no longer in their rich poetic context, but as a tersely phrased imperative severed from all organic ties to the Ars Poetica. De Mon- tholon, compounding the irreverence, transforms Horace’s curabis to cura- bit and thereby recoins the meaning so as to disjoin the originally analogous elements, fidus interpres and verbo verbum. Revised, the lines now read, «it is the faithful translator who disclaims any commitment to letter». In order to further pursue this interpretive vagary and its connexion with French Renaissance literalist thought, two questions must be raised: namely, what do the Horatian lines mean in their contextual setting; and more pointedly, what do the Renaissance scholiasts think they mean? We have already alluded to the first question in our remarks on Salutati’s letter to Antonio Loschi where it was suggested that Horace’s counsels are by no means an attack on translative literalism. Rather they are part of a broa- der sequence of restraints directed at the Horatian Poet as he sets out to steer perilously between imaginative excess and servility to tradition. As Arno Reiff has suggested, these lines derive their eloquence from a contextual tela- tionship with other parts of the Horatian poem.” The choice Put to the poet in the crucial-line 119 is to «either follow tradition or invent what is self- consistent» («Aut famam sequere aut sibi convenientia finge»). From this abrupt choice, the poem recoils in line 128 into a treacherous ambiguity, the evolution of which is paraphrased concisely by C.O. Brink: «Either follow tradition or create new subjects. If you follow tradition do this; if you ven- ture to create new subjects do that. (But [128]) creation of new subjects is % Saint Jerome, Lettres, op. cit., Il, p. 60. % Boethius, In Isagogen Porphyrii commentorum, ed. Brandt (Vindobonae, F. Tempsky; Lipsiae, G. Freytag, 1906), pp. 135, 6-8: «Secundus hic arreptae expositionis labor nostrae seriem translationis expediet, in qua quidem yereor ne subierim fidi interpretis cul. Pam, cum verbum verbo expressum comparatumque reddiderim,» * See Coluccio Salutati, Epistolaria di Coluccio Salutati, op. cit., Il, p. 357; Leonardo Bruni Aretino Humanistisch-Philosophische Schriften mit einer Chronoiogie seiner Werke und Brief, op. cit., p. 85; and Giannozzo Manetti, De interpretatione recta nonnulla memo. ratu digna, op. cit., {9 178 r, % Amo Reiff, Interpretatio, imitatio, aemulatio: Begriff und Vorstellung literarischer Abhdngigkeit bei den Romern, Diss. Kéln, 1959 (Diisseldort, 1959), pp. 69-73,— 65 — hard and (therefore) the method of dramatizing a traditional subject is pre- ferable to that of free creation.»** Originality unchecked is out of the ques- tion. Horatian balance thus demands a revitalizing of traditional material (fama) by making it one’s own («publica materies priuati iuris erit», 131). Yet, certain pitfalls must be avoided in order to effect a coalition of tradi- tion with personal creativity. Each of these four pitfalls are constructed around metaphors descriptive of literary risk: don’t linger along the well- trodden road (132); don’t render word-for-word like the faithful translator (133-34); don’t jump into the narrow hole (134-35); and don’t write proems pregnant with possibility but abortive in result (136-39). From this contextual analysis, several points of interpretive unity now begin to emerge. The injunctive force attributed to these lines in the Patristic and humanist mis- readings, in fact, recedes in favour of the metaphorical contrastive element. It is thus the poet, not the translator, who is being addressed; it is the revita- lizing of old poetic subjects rather than the translative migration of words between two texts which is under discussion. Assimilation of these subjects is a labour of total restructuring, not simply one of style. Not only words (ver- borum ordo), but the artistic structure assembled by those words (rerum ordo) are open to poetic deviation. The contrast contained in 133-34 implies, then, no value judgement against the ad verbum translator no more than it adduces a credo for correct translation. Indeed, the focal position of word-for-word rendering in ancient pedagogical practice makes it improbable that Horace would attack what he knows to have a valid raison d’étre, external to his own concept of poetic imitation. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of fidus with interpres is here far more significant than the hackneyed topos «faithful translator / translation» would lead us to believe. Far from a cliché, Horace’s use of fidus with interpres, at least in the sense of «faithful translator», ap; ‘s to have no classical precedent. As we have already suggested, the possibility does exist that he recalls the sound pattern of the two words from a passage in Sallust’s Jugurtha where inter- pres is used in its original sense of «go-between», semantically not unlike the French term «truchement» defined by Robert Estienne as «entremetteur & moyenneur, Mediateur & moyen en quelque affaire, Interpres, Internun- cius».” Fidelity, as an associated feature of interpres, may thus be seen to characterize, at least originally, the person rather than his work, his reliabi- 2 C.O, Brink, Horace on Poetry, op. cit., p. 204. * [bid., pp. 488-89. %© Dictionaire Frangoislatin, p. 636, Sallust’s text reads: « fidi interpretes adhibentur.» ab utroque tantum modo— 6 — lity as negotiating agent rather than a property of his utterance, the latter trait being present only by inference." By extension, when French Renais- sance theorists use the term «truchement» to denote the «translator», they are restoring to the more conventional «interpréte» some of the original metaphorical ambiguity it enjoys in its Horatian setting and alluded to in Estienne’s definition? Du Cange, moreover, attests to the medieval conti- nuity of this primary meaning when he ascribes to interpres the synonyms of «intercessor, internuntius».? From all this, it seems highly likely, given Horace’s unconventional fusion of fidus with interpres, that the French vernacular analogue, «fidéle interpréte / traducteur» derives from the Horatian setting, albeit long since worn down into commonplace. Of even greater interest, however, is the ver- nacular fate of fidus. Robert Estienne traces French «fidéle» to Latin «fide- lis», a word which seems initially synonymous with «fidus».* Servius, how- ever, in his commentary on Aeneid (I, 113), makes the subtle distinction be- tween fidus attributed to a friend and fidelis to a slave, a nuance also hinted at by Du Cange-* French, not having in this particular case the suppleness of Latin, is thereby obliged to derive a lexical equivalent with a built-in seman- tic polarity: on the one hand, a positive sense of «reliable, trustworthy trans- lator / translation», on the other a negative force denoting servility, a trans- lation too slavishly bonded to the verborum ordo of its original.* Clearly, then, the immediate dilemma for the reader of the French Renaissance text is to constantly be aware of this ambivalence and to detect the author’s posi- tion accordingly. To summarize, the seminal importance of the Horatian text as a classical locus for French Renaissance theorists of translation will thus issue from » Brink calls attention to TLL, VI.I.703 72 ff where fidus denotes a person «qui in certa condicione fidem praestat», as for example in re narranda. 3? See, for example, Denis Sauvage’s preface to his translation of Paolo Giovio, Le Second Tome des Histoires de Paolo Giovio (Lyons, G. Roville, 1555), £° 2 v. 2 Charles Du Fresne Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, 1V (Paris, Librairie des Sciences et des Arts, 1938), p. 395. % Dictionaire Francoislatin, p. 268. > «... quamvis quidam velint ‘fidum’ amicum, ‘fidelem’ servum dici.» Under fidelis, Du Cange (III, 486-87), suggests the feudal reference of «vassallus, qui fidem suam domino obstrinxit». 2 See Thomas Sebillet, Art poétique francoys, ed. Félix Gaiffe (Paris, Droz, 1932), pp. 189-90; Gabriel Chappuy’s preface to his translation of Doni, Les Mondes Celestes, Terrestres et Infernaux... (Lyons, Barthelemy Honorati, 1578); and the preface to an anonymous trans- lation of the Psalms, Pseaumes de David (P: Gilles Bey, 1587), sig. aiiij r. An unusual con- flation of the two Latin adjectives is contained in Denys Lambyn’s gloss of Ars (133-34): «.. si non te praebebis ita sedulum, ac fidelem interpretem...» Q. Horatius Flaccus.... opera Dionys. Lambini Monstroliensis emendatus... (Lyons, Joann. Tornaesius, 1561), p. 511.— 67 — three distinct but not entirely unrelated concerns: 1) an attempt to perform a philological rectification, placing the Horatian lines in their proper poetic context; 2) in light of the above Patristic / juridical bias, a reformulation of the relative sanctions of letter and sense along with their respective commit- ments to textual fides; and 3) a reassertion of the figurative rhetoric used by fifteenth-century humanists to describe the translative act. To understand how the Horatian text becomes the gathering point for these concerns, it will prove fruitful to first explore the major interpretive scholia available to theo- rists of translation during this «Golden Age» of Horatian criticism. 2. The Preceptive Tradition Horatian scholia from the editio princeps (c. 1470) down to the late six- teenth century, perhaps betraying the problematic nature of Ars Poetica (133-34), exhibit little interpretive unity over these lines. Their various points of speculation, however, may be synthesized under two broad categories, corrective and preceptive, each containing dual patterns of analysis. In the first, correction takes the form of either a conscious philologically grounded perception of interpretive flaw, or the more contextual impulse to see the lines as part of a wider poetic structure. Similarly, the second category too works on levels of explicitness and indirection: sometimes calling attention to the lines’ injunctive claims, sometimes to those deeper, more allusive signals through which a new theoretical system emerges in forms perhaps undreamed of by Horace. Preceptive scholia represent the more deeply entrenched and more ancient of these two categories. In the editio princeps (c. 1470), the glosses of the late classical commentators, Acron and Porphyrion, set the trend for the injunctive misreading of the lines, with fides, in the case of Acron, pro- posed as the contrasting alternative to verbo verbum. The Horatian union of the two attributes is thus breached and realigned as opposing values: to translate faithfully, one must avoid servility to word order2” For both scho- liasts, the subject quite clearly has to do with the methodology of translation rather than «faithful [that is, literal] translation» as a metaphorical contrast to Horatian imitation. Porphyrion’s later third-century commentary (roughly contemporary with Jerome’s letter to Pammachius) stresses what we have come to see as the Patristic / juridical bias against letter in favour of 27 qSensus est: Si quid transfers, non, inquit, fideliter est interpretandum, [id est, ver- bum ex verbo].» Scholia Horatiana Acronis et Porphyrionis, ed. Ferdinand Hauthal, I (Ber- lin, Sumptibus Jul. Springeri, 1864), p. 599.