The First Translations of Machiavelli’s “Prince” from the Sixteenth to the First Half of the Nineteenth Century ed. by Roberto De Pol (review)

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 In her essay on the first unpublished French translation, Nella Bianchi Bensimon shows how Jacques de Vintimille avoided moralizing comments and instead focused on stylistic ones, worrying that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...