Colloquia Maruliana ..., Vol. 8 , 1999.
Original scientific paper
Contributions to an Analysis of the Italian Translations of the De Institutione
Iva Grgić
Abstract
The Italian translation of Marulić’s Institutio, product of the pen of the Domini-can Remigio Nannini at the beginning of the second half of sixteenth century, has al-ready been the subject of study in Marulology. Within the imaginary corpus constituted by all the known translations of the De institutione into European languages, the Italian translation stands out for the number of editions it went through and for the fact that neither the first edition, printed in the year of the closure of the Council of Trent (1563) nor the next eleven, published after the public burning of the Latin original in Siena in 1564, weeded out those fifty lines from the fourth chapter of the fourth book, De veritate colenda mendacioque fugiendo, that were afterward, in 1612, to be subjected to censorship. The paper attempts to go a step further in the understanding of the Italian De institutione through an attentive reading of the translators dedication to his patron, the Florentine magnate Lorenzo Pitti, and through a direct counterpointing of the Italian translation with the Latin original. This comparison shows that the linguistic and stylistic features of the Italian version embody precisely those tendencies, and intentions, characterising a kind of spirituality that, in accord with its time, was cultivated by people implicated in various ways in the making and printing of this translation. They are mentioned in order by Remigio Nannini in the dedication. The most important of these intentions is care for the nurture of piety in the people at large through contents the approachability of which would not be in opposition to the purity of religious enthusiasm but would be realised through the vivacity and picturesqueness of the exposition and the effectiveness of the interpolated exempla. Keeping the practical usefulness of his enterprise in mind, Remigio Nannini Fiorentino produced a prag-matically oriented translation, which in places neglects the rhetorical structure of the original. He retains the figurative expressions where he considers that they contribute to the revelatory effectiveness of the text, and changes the order of phrase structures, clarifies or amplifies them not only when driven to it by the incommensurability of the linguistic structures of Latin and Italian, but also when their distribution, syntheticness and abundance might, in his opinion, make it difficult to follow the course of the exposition. In this procedure, according to the standards of translating today, he goes too far to meet the needs of the less educated reading public postulated, but does not diverge from the dominant translating poetics of his time, which constantly recommended translators not to lose sight of what we would call today the horizon of expectations of the reader.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
9036
URI
Publication date:
22.4.1999.
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