Niranjan Goswami
Translation as Transfer: Thomas Hoby’s The Book of the Courtier
Translation as ‘transactional reading’ has been conceptualized as a kind of transfer. Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier is not only a transfer of the ideal of the gentleman-courtier of the Italian court into the England of his time, but also a deconstruction of the Italian courtier into an English Lord. This remaking of the concept of the courtier is a deft use of ‘translatio’ – the courtier as a metaphor. Hoby achieved a freshness and vigour by his intuitive use of language, supplanting Castiglione’s refinement by his natural vitality. He succeeds in creating an English text by domesticating the Italian through the metaphorical ‘transubstantiation’, elevating the act of translation from its ‘secondary’ status. The purpose is to see how far Hoby reads Castiglione’s Intention, term, and ‘transplants the original into a more definitive linguistic realm.’
Fool. Prithee, Nuncle, tell me whether a madman be a gentleman or a yeoman? Lear. A King, a King! Fool. No; he’s a yeoman that sees his son a gentleman before him. Shakespeare, King Lear, III, VI, 9-14
Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier is universally acclaimed as a key text of the Renaissance. It was translated into Spanish (1534), French (1537), English (1561), German (1566) and into a tri-lingual edition of Latin, English and Italian in 1588. The book belongs to the genre of the advice book or conduct manual but Castiglione set his aim high and planned it after the model of Cicero’s De Oratore; Cicero’s work was on the ideal orator while Castiglione’s was on the ideal courtier. When Hoby’s translation was published in 1561 the book was already popular in Europe. Hoby knew he served his nation by providing a much-needed translation. The sense of his achievement rings in these words:
But now, though late in deede, yet for all that at length, beside the principall languages, in the which he hath a long time haunted all the Courtes of Christendom, he is become an Englishman (which many a long time have wished, but fewe attempted and none atchived) and willing to dwell in the Court of England, and in plight to tell his owne cause.1
1 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Thomas Hoby [1561] (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1974), p. 2. 252 Goswami
J.H. Whitfield, in his introduction to Hoby’s The Book of the Courtier perhaps rightly claims, ‘What Castiglione is offering is the pattern of the cultured man’.2 The assertion is, however, vague, and ‘cultured man’ may include the medieval knight, the Italian courtier and the English gentleman. Castiglione, it is true, does use the word ‘gentiluomo’ in his book, but his sense of the word does not reflect the English idea of the gentleman and is hardly distinguishable from the meaning of ‘cortegiano’ (‘courtier’). It is important to understand how the concepts of the ‘cortegiano’ and the ‘gentleman’, belonging to two different cultures, enter into a dialectic of exchange and transfer through the process of Hoby’s translation. That the two concepts are not synonymous was recognized in an early study by Ruth Kelso:
Thus Castiglione’s Courtier presented in Hoby’s English dress becomes to all appearance and intention an English book, and the recommended bible of the gentleman; and yet in many respects the ideal of the Italian courtier seems never to have become the ideal of the English gentleman. The ingredients, as may be seen, are greatly mixed.3
The court of Urbino depicted by Castiglione is an idealized representation of a Renaissance court. It was easy for him to idealize it, because Urbino was the most congenial court in Italy. In other towns, the courts were much more competitive and harsh.4 In general, in Italian courts the courtiers were supposed to personally attend to the prince, and some of them degraded themselves to the level of flatterers and triflers:
The courtier was both to emulate the knight of yore and be an esteemed counsellor. […] In the long run, a courtier was a minister. He could be a minister in the medieval sense, in a ceremonial household post, but already there was no genuine nearness to the ruler, his was the humdrum intimacy of the dogsbody, with small thanks attached.5
Most Italian writers distinguish between the courtier and other men at court who serve the office of the prince in the capacity of counsellors, secretaries, ambassadors, magistrates etc. In England, however, these very offices were 2 Castiglione trans. Hoby, p. xviii. 3 Ruth Kelso, Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 14:1-2 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1929), p. 13. 4 J. R. Woodhouse in Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Leonard Eckstein Opdycke [1903] (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2000), p. xi. 5 Sergio Bertelli et al., The Courts of the Italian Renaissance (Milan and New York: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1985 and Facts on File Publications, 1986), p. 193.