The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 142 to 297, 1501 to 1514 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 225 The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 142 to 297, 1501 to 1514. Translated by R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson. Annotated by Wallace K. Ferguson. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975. Pp. xiv + 374. $25.00) One cannot but admire the fortitude of anyone who sets out to translate such a vast body of material as the letters of Erasmus. With two volumes now published, and eighteen more to appear in the future (concurrently with the translations of Erasmus's other writings), we can look forward to possessing within the next generation both a definitivescholarly apparatus for all of Erasmus's works and a readable English version into the bargain. Erasmus must surely be uniquely fortunate among Renaissance Latin authors in this respect, and one would earnestly hope that the praise which this enterprise has already aroused might encourage other scholars to work on editions and translations of some less easily available (though no less significant) writers of the period--Erasmus's own favorite, Lorenzo Valla, to name only one. It has always been a clich~ of sixteenth-century scholarship that Erasmus's correspondence is no mere source of "laundry-list"data but rather is a literary oeuvre in itself. Certainly what strikes the reader most forcibly in Volume 2 is the closeness of Erasmus's style and mode of thought to that of the Adagia, which he was revising during the period covered by these letters. It becomes abundantly clear that Erasmus's mind was permeated by the proverbs, maxims and metaphors drawn from the Classics (and increasingly, in this period, from the Greek authors whom he was so proud to have mastered). Although professing in theory a critical rather than slavish attitude to the ancients (in Ep. 182, for instance), he was thoroughly imbued with the commonplaces of Classical culture and could not help but formulate his thoughts through them. Whether in arguing a central moral issue, such as the condemnation of war in Ep. 288 (later to reappear as the comment on Dulce bellum inexpertis in the Adagia), or in complimentinga friend or patron with his favorite figure of the "sow teaching Minerva," Erasmus's thought naturally gravitates to what he sees as the forms, moral and literary, of classical thinking. Only by reading his letters in conjunction with his other works can we fully realize how constantly Erasmus sought to fulfill one of the ideals of humanism--to recapture the ancient modes of thinking in their entirety, and make them second nature. In this context it is impossible to praise too highly the work of Wallace Ferguson in preparing the annotations to this volume. Erasmus's highly allusive style is often baffling to the less thoroughly educated reader of our day; both the Classical references, and those to Erasmus's friends, patrons and other contemporaries who figure in the extraordinarily busy and complex life revealed in the correspondence, are provided with thorough, clear and always helpful explanation. Moveover, the introductory annotations to each letter form in themselves virtually a self-contained biographical and bibliographical study and are invaluable to anyone not thoroughly familiar with all the details of Erasmus's life. The translation itself is rather less of an achievement than the annotations. One could aptly quote one of Erasmus's own letters referring to his translation of a Greek text into Latin: "I have preferred," he says in Ep. 177, "to err on the side of accuracy rather than of boldness." No doubt we all prefer an accurate and literal rendering to the fanciful and unreliable versions which we associate with earlier times; yet one would wish for a little more of Erasmus's own grace and liveliness, and especially for a better rendering of the marked changes in style and tone from one letter to the next, than appears in this translation. For example, surely the translators could have done better in this passage from Ep. 152: However for my part I have preferred to dedicate the fruits, not of hard work in my case but of leisure--although they are by no means fruits of idleness--to our own friendship, kind and scholarly Voogd; and as I reckoned...