https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6346-8167
![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
What did it mean to “vulgarize” in Renaissance Italy? Was it simply a matter of translating into the vernacular, or did it mean making a text more accessible to the people – to in some sense popularize it? The answer is far from simple and certainly never one-sided; therefore, each individual case needs to be independently assessed on its own merits. This article seeks to shed some light at least on the major treatments of the theory of vulgarization by the likes of Ludovico Castelvetro, Faustus Longianus, Francesco Robortello, Alessandro Piccolomini, Orazio Toscanella and Girolamo Catena, which were central to the debate from the 1540s onwards.
Notes on contributor
Marco Sgarbi (Mantua, 1982) is associate professor of history of philosophy and vice-provost for communication and development at the Università Ca' Foscari, Venice. He has been the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant 2013 on “Aristotle in the Italian Vernacular: Rethinking Renaissance and Early-Modern Intellectual History (c. 1400–c. 1650)”. He has been a Jean-François Malle-Harvard I Tatti Fellow at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; Frances A. Yates Short-Term fellow at the Warburg Institute. He is the editor of Philosophical Readings, a four-monthly on-line journal, of the Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy and of the Bloomsbury Studies in the Aristotelian Tradition.
Notes
1 As late as the early 1900s, Remigio Sabbadini believed that the first to use the term tradurre (from the Latin traducere) with this new meaning was Leonardo Bruni in 1405; see Sabbadini, “Del tradurre i classici in Italia”. This is an opinion that has been upheld even in recent studies: see, for example, Norton, “Humanist Foundations of Translation Theory”; Trovato, Storia della lingua italiana, 149. Today we know of prior occurrences in the vernacular – for instance, Guido da Pisa in the Trecento – even though they were isolated cases; see Guido da Pisa, Fiore d’Italia, 7.
2 By the term “people [volgo]” I mean the class in a society that represents the greatest number of people and commands the greatest anonymity, but also occupies the lowest levels of culture, and hence also contains the least qualified and important individuals in respect of economic and political life. It may be synonymous with popolo in being the part of society that is juxtaposed to the upper classes; see Sgarbi, “Aristotle and the People”.
3 To make a text clearer does not necessarily mean to simplify or trivialize it. For example, Lodovico Castelvetro’s Poetica vulgarizzata et sposta (1570) clarifies the Aristotelian text without trivializing or simplifying it. On the other hand, Giovanni Antonio Roffeni’s Discorsi astrologici (1609–1645) both simplifies and trivializes Aristotle’s natural philosophy.
4 Steiner, After Babel, 449.
5 See Paris, “Translation and Creation”; De Campos, “De la traduction come création”; Hewson, “Vexed Question of Creativity”.
6 I refer here to the “public” rather than readers because it is now an accepted fact that reading in the Renaissance was not the only approach to a written text, as oral transmission was still very much an active phenomenon.
7 Segre, “I volgarizzamenti del Due e Trecento”; Contamine, Traductions et traducteurs; Guthmüller, “Die volgarizzamenti”; Folena, Volgarizzare e tradurre; Beer, Translation Theory and Practice; Beyers, Brams, and Sacré, Tradition et traduction; Hamesse, Les traducteurs au travail; Morlino, “Volgarizzare e trasporre”.
8 Cortesi, “La tecnica del tradurre”.
9 Norton, “Translation Theory in Renaissance France”; Norton, Ideology and Language; Worth, Practising Translation; Worth-Stylianou, “Translatio and Translation”.
10 Guthmüller, “Literaturgeschichte und Volgare”; Guthmüller, “Letteratura nazionale”; Guthmüller, “Antico-moderno, latino-volgare”.
11 Some examples include Guthmüller, Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare; Porro, “Volgarizzamenti e volgarizzatori”; Borsetto, L’“Eneida” tradotta; Borsetto, Il furto di Prometeo, 222–55.
12 Tesi, Aristotele in Italiano; Cotugno, “Piccolomini e Castelvetro traduttori della Poetica”.
13 Dionisotti, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, 175.
14 Cotugno, “Piccolomini e Castelvetro traduttori della Poetica”; Cotugno, “Osservazioni linguistiche”; Cotugno, “Le Annotationi di Piccolomini”.
15 Sgarbi, “Instatement of the Vernacular”.
16 Guthmüller, “Fausto da Longiano e il problema del tradurre”, 10–11; Toscanella, Discorsi cinque, 28.
17 Toscanella, Discorsi cinque, 28.
18 Guthmüller writes, correctly, that “around 1550, the fundamental problem of whether it is legitimate to translate or not becomes secondary to the question of how to translate” – but, unlike Cotugno, he does not make a distinction between the manner of translation and the technical results of vulgarization. Hence, whereas Cotugno is aware of a distinction between quid iuris and quid facti, Guthmüller appears to confuse the two levels; see Guthmüller, “Fausto da Longiano e il problema del tradurre”, 21.
19 Dionisotti, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, 167; Guthmüller, “Fausto da Longiano e il problema del tradurre”, 13.
20 Guthmüller, “Fausto da Longiano e il problema del tradurre”, 21.
21 Marassi, “Bruni e la teoria della traduzione”.
22 Some of the assertions by these writers and others may be found in: Guthmüller, “Fausto da Longiano e il problema del tradurre”, 21–23; Siekiera, “La Poetica vulgarizzata et sposta per Castelvetro”; Siekiera, “La questione della lingua di Piccolomini”; Siekiera, “Letteratura descrittiva in volgare”; Siekiera, “Riscrivere Aristotele”.
23 See McElduff, Roman Theories of Translation, 113–16.
24 Horace, Ad Pisones, 133; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, X, 5, 5.
25 Guthmüller, “Fausto da Longiano e il problema del tradurre”, 33.
26 Reiff, Interpretatio, imitatio, aemulatio; McLaughlin, Literary Imitation.
27 The greater the fidelity of the translation to the words of the source text, the more the vulgarization will be philological – yet this does not mean that a philological vulgarization will be the best outcome. As we will see, philological meticulousness and closeness to the source text are frequently viewed by the vulgarizers as an obstacle to achieving an effective vulgarization.
28 Cf. Cicero, De oratore, I, 32–33; Cicero, Orator, I, 70; Cicero, De inventione rhetorica, I, 5. See also Sgarbi, The Italian Mind, 23–31.
29 Aristotle, De interpretation 16a, 3–8. In this sense, almost all the theoreticians of vulgarization are Aristotelians.
30 Guthmüller, “Fausto da Longiano e il problema del tradurre”, 33.
31 On the new intellectual framework, see Vianello, Il letterato, l’Accademia e il libro.
32 I am using the latest edition by Enrico Garavelli in Castelvetro, Lettere Rime Carmina.
33 Cotugno, “Piccolomini e Castelvetro traduttori della Poetica”; Siekiera, “La Poetica vulgarizzata et sposta per Castelvetro”.
34 Romani, “Castelvetro e il problema del tradurre”.
35 Castelvetro was writing before the reassessment of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1548 with Francesco Robortello’s Explicationes.
36 Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele volgarizzata et sposta, 16v; Castelvetro, Lettere Rime Carmina, 134. On poetry as a vehicle of knowledge, see Sgarbi, “Il Socrate Veneziano”.
37 Speroni, Opere, vol. 4, 577–78.
38 Romani, “Castelvetro e il problema del tradurre”, 171.
39 Castelvetro, Lettere Rime Carmina, 123.
40 Of the same opinion are Romani, “Castelvetro e il problema del tradurre”, 156; Drusi, “Recensione”.
41 Castelvetro, Lettere Rime Carmina, 123–24.
42 Castelvetro, Lettere Rime Carmina, 125.
43 Castelvetro, Lettere Rime Carmina, 126; Gellius, Noctes Atticae IX, 1–2.
44 Romani, “Lodovico Castelvetro e il problema del tradurre”, 152–179.
45 See Guthmüller, “Literaturgeschichte und Volgare”.
46 I quote according Guthmüller’s edition in Guthmüller, “Fausto da Longiano e il problema del tradurre. Fausto da Longiano, Dialogo del modo de lo tradurre d’una in altra lingua segondo le regole mostrate da Cicerone”, 9–152. Longianus, Dialogo del modo de lo tradurre, 38.
47 I am not referring here to vulgarization because it is not necessarily in the vernacular and it does not necessarily make the content more suitable for the populace.
48 Longianus, Dialogo del modo de lo tradurre, 44.
49 Ibid., 45.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 156.
52 Ibid., 46.
53 Ibid., 47.
54 Ibid., 46.
55 Ibid., 49.
56 Ibid., 52.
57 Ibid., 51.
58 Ibid., 54.
59 Ibid., 115.
60 Ibid., 132.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 119.
63 Ibid., 85.
64 Drusi, “Recensione”, 474.
65 Ibid.
66 Longianus, Dialogo del modo de lo tradurre, 135.
67 For the history of this concept, see Rener, Interpretatio.
68 Longianus, Dialogo del modo de lo tradurre, 133.
69 Ibid., 122.
70 Ibid., 151–52.
71 Epistole famigliari di Cicerone.
72 Ibid., Aijv.
73 Ibid.
74 For a description of the manuscript, see Garavelli, “Un frammento di Francesco Robortello”.
75 Aristotle, Rhetorica I.2 1358 a.
76 Something similar can be found in Piccolomini, Copiosissima parafrase, 16.
77 Robortello, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, Venezia, Donà dalle Rose 447. misc. XVI–XVII, f. 28.
78 Ibid.
79 Virgil, Aeneid II, 1.
80 Horace, Odes IV.7.
81 Virgil, Georgic II, 113.
82 See Sgarbi, “Robortello on Popularizing Knowledge”.
83 Robortello, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, Venezia, Donà dalle Rose 447, 9r–v.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid., 13r.
86 Ibid., 15v.
87 Robortello, Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, V D 45, f. 70r.
88 Ibid.
89 See Sgarbi, “Robortello’s Rhetoric”.
90 The letter was republished with some editorial changes in 1575 in Piccolomini, Annotationi nel libro della Poetica d’Aristotele.
91 Piccolomini, Epistola ai lettori del modo del tradurre, 39. I am quoting here from the critical edition in Cotugno, “Piccolomini e Castelvetro traduttori della Poetica”.
92 Piccolomini, Epistola ai lettori del modo del tradurre, 39.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid., 9.
95 Ibid., 14.
96 Ibid., 17.
97 Ibid. 18.
98 Ibid., 19.
99 Cotugno, “Piccolomini e Castelvetro traduttori della Poetica”, 195.
100 Piccolomini, Epistola ai lettori del modo del tradurre, 22.
101 Cotugno, “Piccolomini e Castelvetro traduttori della Poetica”, 189.
102 Toscanella, Discorsi cinque, 28.
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid.
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid., 29.
109 Ibid.
110 Ibid.
111 Toscanella, Prontuario di voci volgari, 144.
112 Ibid.
113 Toscanella, Discorsi cinque, 33.
114 Ibid., 34.
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid., 30.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid.
119 Ibid.
120 Ibid., 29.
121 Ibid., 30.
122 Ibid., 29.
123 Ibid., 30.
124 Ibid., 34.
125 See Garcia, “Parola per parola”; Baldassari, “Il Discorso sopra la traduttione delle scienze”.
126 Catena, Delle lettere, 259–60.
127 Catena, Delle lettere, 260.
128 Catena, Discorso sopra la traduttione delle scienze, 2.
129 Ibid., 3.
130 Ibid., 1–2.
131 Ibid., 2.
132 Ibid., 3.
133 Ibid., 4.
134 Ibid. As we shall see later, with “moderni” Catena refers to the humanists.
135 Ibid., 38.
136 Ibid., 61.
137 Suffice it to recall the criticism leveled by Girolamo Ruscelli at the Trasformationi of Ludovico Dolce: “you and anyone else who translates does not make the poem, rather the poem belongs to the poet who recreates, discovers and explains the subject, and ultimately the poem belongs to the one who composes, not the one who translates”; Ruscelli, Tre discorsi, 261.
138 Catena, Discorso sopra la traduttione delle scienze, 61.
139 Ibid., 61–62.
140 Ibid., 63.
141 Ibid., 83.
142 Ibid.
143 Ibid., 51.
144 Ibid., 55.
145 Ibid.
146 Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance.
147 Catena, Discorso sopra la traduttione delle scienze, 56.
148 Ibid., 33.
149 Ibid., 44.
150 Ibid., 59.
151 Ibid.
152 Translated by James Hankins in Hankins, Plato in the Renaissance, 44–45, original in Bertalot, “Cincius Romanus und seine Briefe”, 210.
153 Sabbadini, “Del tradurre i classici in Italia”, 209.