Rizzi, A. 2017. Vernacular Translators in Quattrocento Italy: Scribal Culture, Authority, and Agency (Turnhout: Brepols): ISBN 978-2-503-56785-3 Rizzi Pre-primt AAM May 2017 Introduction: A New Era for Translators Fifteenth-century Italy has been described as the age of translation par excellence.1 This view was also strongly put forward by humanist Antonio Loschi (c. 1368–1441). In the preface to his vernacular translation of the pseudo-Quintilian Declamationes (1392), Loschi reflects on the cultural promise of his own era, and on the crucial role played by translators: ‘Sì come in cierti metalli ongni leggiere tocchamento fa muovere boce così la nostra novissima ethade ciaschuno diletto a adoperatione sollecita’ [‘just as some metals produce a sound when touched, our new era is turning all kinds of [cultural] delectations into production’].2 In Loschi’s time a broad public now had an unprecedented opportunity to learn from the past, thanks to the translation of myriad texts into vernacular languages they could understand. Yet this wonderfully productive literary age came with a danger, he notes: many of those who read translations of ‘useful and beautiful’ Latin texts into the Italian vernaculars are incapable of appreciating their significance: spessissimamente gli uomini del nostro tempo libri utilissimi e bellissimi di gramaticha ànno tracti in volghare solo per la fama di quegli libri e dietro non molti anni non chonosciuto e non saputo chogliere il fructo d’essi, i quali non sanza faticha e spesa e gratia avuti in tale lingua o sono serrati in tenebre o per fastidio d’ignoranza gienerato gittati come fangho tra vilissimi piedi.3 [men of our day often translate useful and beautiful texts from Latin into the vernacular only because these Latin sources are famous and have been neglected or misunderstood for several years. Their translations are the result of much labour, sacrifice, and grace. And yet, because these versions are often hard to understand or because of sheer ignorance, these texts have been thrown around like mud on ordinary feet]. 1 Hankins, ‘Translation Practice’, p. 162. 2 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Martelli 4, fol. 1r. On Loschi see Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, ‘Loschi, Antonio’. This translation has been attributed to Loschi by Marchesi, Scritti minori di filologia e letteratura, II, pp. 447–72. 3 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Martelli 4, fol. 1v. 1 Rizzi Pre-primt AAM May 2017 Loschi’s words herald a period of intense interaction between Latin and the vernacular, and collaboration between translators and readers. A highly successful diplomat who worked for the Republic of Venice and the Papacy, and at the courts of Vicenza and Milan, Loschi promises wondrous riches, while scorning readers of ‘low condition’, who were ill-equipped to value these ‘new’ translations.4 Here, as Loschi celebrates the work of contemporary vernacular translators, he takes care to distance their work from the rustic and uneven vernacular translations—the volgarizzamenti—of the earlier Trecento. The sort of translation Loschi wished to praise was free of the ‘odour of vulgarity’ that supposedly clung to the common people, or ‘volgo’.5 Loschi was at pains to differentiate the coarse and often anonymous volgarizzamenti of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from the ‘new’ vernacular translations, which were not intended for people of ‘vile ingegnio e pronta mano et giovane senno’ [‘little intellect, quick hand, and inexpert mind’].6 The former were useful but ugly, whereas the latter were both useful and elegant. Loschi’s praise of this new era of vernacular translations piqued my interest in Quattrocento translators. Loschi’s preface described here tells a story that sits incongruously with the long- held idea that Latin humanists of the first half of the Quattrocento saw the vernacular as ‘unimportant or even […] as an ignoble competitor’.7 To be sure, humanists such as Guarino Guarini (1374–1460) and Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) did reject the vernacular as a literary 4 Here is the full passage from Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Martelli 4, fol. 1v: ‘temo che in simile modo questo per me volgharezzato non pervengha tra giente non dengna e di vilissima conditione non perché sua virtù ne manchi’. 5 See Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy, p. 4. 6 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Martelli 4, fol. 1v. 7 Baker, Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror, p. 27. See also: ‘The ennobling of the vernacular that began with Dante was largely ignored in humanist culture and would not gain strength again until the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent’ (Baker, Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror, p. 23), and McLaughlin, ‘Latin and Vernacular from Dante to the Age of Lorenzo’, II, pp. 612–25: 612: ‘The rivalry between the two languages was to continue for two centuries from the death of Dante’. 2 Rizzi Pre-primt AAM May 2017 language.8 Strikingly, Loschi makes no clear distinction between Latin and the vernacular: the only distinction he draws is between previous generations of volgarizzamenti and the ‘new’ era of vernacular and Latin translation. Loschi was connected with the most visible Latin authors and translators of his time. He also corresponded with the most influential Latin scholars of his day, from Niccolò Niccoli (1365–1437) to Guarini.9 And, most importantly, Loschi translated in both directions: he rendered the first novella of Boccaccio’s Decameron into Latin, following in the footsteps of Francesco Petrarca.10 Despite this strong Latin profile, Loschi is not apologetic or defensive about producing a vernacular translation of the Declamationes. His chief concern was his readers; whether they would misunderstand, undervalue, or simply ignore his labours. The concern of this book is not to verify the literary and cultural value claimed by fifteenth- century vernacular translators for their work. Instead, the focus is on the translators’ strategies of self-fashioning: the textual means they employed to convince readers of the translator’s unique role in the dissemination of knowledge—and to publicise the cultural capital represented by translation. Translators adopted self-fashioning rhetoric to defend their suitability as cultural agents. In this respect, the vernacular translators are no different from the Latin translators. In fact, as discussed in Chapter One, and supported in the Appendix of this book, often Quattrocento vernacular and Latin translators were the same person. This little considered fact 8 See Tavoni, ‘Il Quattrocento’, pp. 65–68. Well into the sixteenth century, several humanists felt the need to justify and defend the status of the vernacular as a literary language. 9 Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) dedicated to Loschi his Latin versions of Plutarch’s Sertorius (c. 1410), and Plato’s Phaedrus (1424). Bartolomeo Facio (c. 1405–57) includes him in his De Viris Illustribus (1456). The figure of Loschi features prominently in Poggio Bracciolini’s De varietate fortunae (1448). Loschi was also close to Salutati, who famously asked him about his project to translate Homer into Latin (see Salutati, Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, Letters VII, 23 and VIII, 7, written between July and September 1393). 10 The Latin translation by Loschi is in Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, C 141 inf. This manuscript is described in Ferrari and Navoni, Nuove ricerche su codici in scrittura latina dell’Ambrosiana, pp. 155–59. See also Albanese, ‘La Fabula Zapelleti di Antonio Loschi’, pp. 3–59. On Petrarca’s translation see Bessi, Umanesimo volgare, pp. 279–292, and Campbell, ‘Sexual Poetics and the Politics of Translation in the Tale of Griselda’, pp. 192–216. 3 Rizzi Pre-primt AAM May 2017 necessitates a recalibration of habitual claims about the relationship between Latin and vernacular literary cultures. Loschi—and several Quattrocento scholars after him—made it clear that the humanist ambition to rehabilitate ‘classical’ Latin as the language of the humanist intelligentsia was perfectly in line with the expectations of a wider circle of readers who were receptive to the usefulness and elegance of Latin texts.11 Latinisation and dissemination both involved translation: from Greek into Latin, and from Latin into the vernacular; now and then also from the vernacular into Latin. The promotion and refinement of ‘classical’ Latin became a defining feature of the most elite group of Quattrocento intellectuals, and the humanist movement they represented. To be sure, by the later Trecento, and for most of the Quattrocento, Latin was the leading linguistic means of achieving cultural recognition. Patrick Baker recently posited that the work of fifteenth-century Italian humanists consisted in ‘producing eloquent Latin literature, helping others to do so by teaching, and […] competing with others for distinction in these pursuits’.12 I wish to advance a more comprehensive view of Quattrocento scribal culture: a view according to which ‘humanism’—a cultural movement that included a charismatic elite of Latin-only literary scholars, translators from Greek into Latin, and supporters of the vernacular culture of the Trecento—was in constant flux. Notwithstanding traditional interpretations of ‘humanism’, the makers of this movement frequently crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries. Baker described what six humanists of diverse cachet (Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Biondo Flavio, Bartolomeo Facio, Giannozzo Manetti, Paolo Cortesi, and Marco Antonio Sabellico) wrote about themselves