Abstract
Translators have always made use of commentaries and still do today, whether silently absorbing exegetical information into the translated text or presenting it in translator’s notes and prefaces. It is well known that vernacular translators in the Middle Ages and early modern period habitually translated material from the Latin commentaries, incorporating it into their translated texts and furnishing them with translated glosses. The variety and complexity of the interactions of translation and commentary, from the ‘commentated translation’ to the ‘transmuted commentary’, have been extensively studied in the medieval context.1
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Notes
On the complex interrelation of translation and expositio/interpretatio in the Middle Ages, see Ralph Hanna et al., ‘Latin Commentary Tradition and Vernacular Literature’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 2: The Middle Ages, edited by Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 363–421 (pp. 363–4). The former term is used of Nicolas Oresme’s Aristotle translations, the latter of the Ovide moralisé.
On the hermeneutic dimension of translation in the classical tradition, see Frederick M. Rener, Interpretatio: Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler (Amsterdam, 1989), esp. p. 7.
On Erasmus see Rener, p. 35, and Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti, and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 133–4.
On Bruni see Valerie Worth-Stylianou, ‘Translatio and Translation in the Renaissance: From Italy to France’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 3: The Renaissance, edited by Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 127–35 (p. 128).
See also Glyn P. Norton, The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance Trance and their Humanist Antecedents (Geneva, 1984), p. 29.
Most notably in De la traduction comme commentaire au commentaire de traduction, edited by M. Boisseau (= Palimpsestes, 20 (2007)).
The Perugian scholar Marco Antonio Bonciario (1555–1616) expresses his resentment at this in his Epistolae (1604), reproduced in Philippe Renouard, Bibliographie des impressions et des œuvres de fosse Badius Ascensius: imprimeur et humaniste, 1462–1535, 3 vols (Paris, 1908), Vol. I, pp. 141–2.
Ludmilla Evdokimova, ‘Commentaires des comédies de Térence dans l’édition de Vérard et leurs sources’, Le Moyen Age, 54 (2004), 95–152.
As is suggested by Thomas Brückner, Die erste französische Aeneis: Untersuchungen zu Octovien de Saint-Gelais’ Übersetzung: mit einer kritischen Edition des VI. Buches (Düsseldorf, 1987), pp. 124–30.
For the term ‘textual culture’, see Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 15: each text is ‘interpreted as part of a system of other texts, genres, and discourses’.
See in particular La Philologie humaniste et ses représentations dans la théorie et dans la fiction, edited by Perrine Galand-Hallyn, Fernand Hallyn and Gilbert Tournoy 2 vols (Geneva, 2005).
Massimiliano Morini, Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice (Aldershot, 2006);
Paul Davis, Translation and the Poet’s Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646–1726 (Oxford, 2008).
E. R. Curtius, European literature and the latin Middle Ages, translated by Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953).
See Peter Burke, ‘The Renaissance Translator as Go-Between’, in Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, edited by Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels (Berlin, 2005), pp. 17–31.
See Michel Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots: banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance (Paris, 1987).
On Badius’ attempts to establish an ethical publishing practice grounded in humanitas and amicitia, see Isabelle Diu, ‘Medium typographicum et respublica literaria: le rôle de Josse Bade dans le monde de l’édition humaniste’, in Le livre et l’historien: études offertes en l’honneur du Professeur Henri-Jean Martin, edited by Frédéric Barbier et al. (Geneva, 1997), pp. 111–24.
See Robert Kendrick, ‘Lorenzo Valla’s Translation Theory and the Latin Imperium‘, Mediaevalia, 26 (2005), 133–54.
Economic metaphors figure more prominently in translation discourse from the seventeenth century. See Douglas Robinson, ‘Translation and the Repayment of Debt’, Delos, 7 (1997), 10–22.
Jerome, Hebrew Questions on Genesis, translated by C. T. R. Hayward (Oxford, 1995), p. 29: ‘let foreign merchandise come by boat only to those who desire it’.
See also Appendix B in Anthony Grafton, ‘On the Scholarship of Politian and its Context’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 40 (1977), 150–88, from where this translation is taken (p. 188).
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century Trance (Oxford, 2000), p. 77.
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White, P. (2015). From Commentary to Translation. In: Demetriou, T., Tomlinson, R. (eds) The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401496_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401496_5
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