The First Translations of Machiavelli's “Prince” from the Sixteenth to the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Roberto De Pol has assembled a collection of essays on the early translations of Machiavelli's Prince with the aim of exploring how editors and translators shape the understanding of and response to primary texts. The volume includes essays on the first French translations, the Reformation context and ideological work of the Telius Latin translation, four early English manuscript translations, the first Dutch translation for the “newborn” Dutch republic, the first Spanish translations in the context of Golden Age Spain, the first German translation, the first Scandinavian translation, and the first Arabic translation. For De Pol, these early translations of Machiavelli serve as a case study of cultural transmission, that is, of how “knowledge spreads from the elites to the rest of society” (21). While the learned could read Machiavelli in either the Italian or the Latin, those who could only read the vernacular needed to wait for translations that were inevitably also interpretations. Specific word choices, silent emendations or elaborations, along with prefaces and marginal comments, all played a part in making Machiavelli accessible to a wider audience.The portrait that emerges from these essays is a familiar one: from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, Machiavelli's Prince was read both as a manual for tyrants and as a republican critique of tyranny. At times translators expanded Machiavelli's text by interweaving more conventional moral positions into the text, apparently without any sense of strain. Marginal comments by translators or editors were sometimes moralizing, especially at the outset of the text, but often became more sympathetic or at least nonjudgmental. Yet most translators, perhaps not surprisingly, were primarily concerned with the difficulties of translation. In her essay on the first unpublished French translation, Nella Bianchi Bensimon shows how Jacques de Vintimille avoided moralizing comments and instead focused on stylistic ones, worrying that Machiavelli's clipped style might offend the more Asiatic sensibilities of the French. Other contributors focus on how individual translators struggled to translate the opening of chapter 1 (“tutti li stati ...”) or to find a proper equivalent for Machiavelli's “republica” or “principe,” given the different meanings of the term “republic” in their own countries. As Francesca Terrenato notes, “In Machiavelli's Prince, the term republica indicates a form of government alternative to princely or monarchic authority. But in the Low Countries' political context, monarchic and oligarchic trends co-existed inside the borders of the country, which nevertheless defined itself [as] a ‘republic’” (200). Alessandra Petrina also discusses the difficulties English translators encountered when confronted by what she aptly describes as the “crystalline ambiguity” of Machiavelli's text.Three translations stand out as having especially influenced later translators and therefore as having been especially responsible for the transmission of Machiavelli's political thought: Gaspard d'Auvergne's French translation of 1553, the Telius Latin translation of 1560, and the 1683 French translation of Amelot de la Houssaye. The Dutch translation was probably done from Auvergne's French translation; English translators consulted the Telius translation to make sense of corrupt passages in the Wolfe Italian edition; the unpublished German translation was done from Amelot's translation, as was the first Scandinavian translation into Swedish in 1757, the German translation of 1714, and Dacres's English translation of 1640.The translators' motives for choosing Machiavelli are often hard to determine. Sometimes the translation was commissioned, as was the case in the first Arabic translation. According to Arap El Ma'ani, Mohammed Ali, the viceroy of Egypt from 1805 to 1849, commissioned the translation after having heard about the text from the French ambassador. Once he read it, however, he declared it was “completely useless,” since he already knew everything it contained. Sometimes Machiavelli was translated in hopes of securing preferment at court, as in the case of Albrecht von Lenz who translated The Prince into German in 1692. Adam Van Nyevelt translated Machiavelli into Dutch to provide the new Dutch republic with “a useful repertory of examples (good and bad), based upon recent history,” rather than as “an apology of unfaithfulness and opportunism” (177). Carl von Klingenberg translated Machiavelli into Swedish, which was appended Frederick II's “analysis” (the Anti-Machiavel), and dedicated the volume to Gustaf, the eleven-year-old crown prince. Klingenberg, an Enlightenment intellectual who seems to have thought of himself as a “cultural mediator” of controversial texts, wrote in his dedication that “the heir to the throne shall not take Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli's prince, as his model, but the wise and virtuous Marcus Aurelius.” As Paolo Marelli comments (paraphrasing Amelot's observation about many of Machiavelli's readers), Klingenberg either “didn't appreciate Machiavelli's treatise, or he misunderstood it” (258).Although some details here are new, the overall picture is not. Some of the essays are primarily descriptive (and include tables comparing renditions of a single phrase by different translators), with comparatively little analysis of the implications of their observations. This may be due to the fact that it is hard to draw sharp conclusions from individual word choice or to know for certain the motives that prompted a given individual to translate Machiavelli's text. In his short introduction to the volume, Jacob Soll argues suggestively that “The Prince did not become a popular book until the Reformations and the Wars of Religion, when instability, religious strife and war called for a new statecraft based on Machiavelli's new theory of purely pragmatic political prudence” (11). This seems true of the Telius translation and the Dutch translation. Other translators, such as d'Auvergne, tried to reconcile Catholic ethics with political prudence, and still others claimed to translate Machiavelli to warn against him or showed no particular interest in Machiavellian prudence at all. But it is certainly true, as Soll writes, that by “banning The Prince in 1559 and recognizing its subversive, secularizing potential, the Church in effect made the clandestine manuscript into an internationally recognized book, and a desirable one” (11). Unfortunately, De Pol's volume of essays is marred by many typos and infelicities of expression by authors whose native language is not English. The reader interested in the translation and reception of Machiavelli would do better to begin with Sydney Anglo's Machiavelli: The First Century or older works by figures such as Adolph Gerber and Gennaro Sasso

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