Anacreon Redivivus: A Study of Anacreontic Translation in Mid-Sixteenth Century France.As the title states, this work deals with the philosophy of translation and its practice applied to translations of the Pseudo-Anacreon by Henri Estienne For the Henri Estienne, printer, father of Robert Estienne and grandfather of this Henri Estienne, see . Henri Estienne, also known as Henricus Stephanus or Henry Stephens, was a 16th-century Parisian printer. , Elie Andre (Greek to Latin), and Pierre Ronsard and Remy Belleau Remy (or Rémi) Belleau (1528 Nogent-le-Rotrou - 1577 Paris), was a poet of the French Renaissance. He is most known for his paradoxical poems of praise for simple things and his poems about precious stones. (Neo-Latin to French). The author agrees with modern editors of the Anacreontea that, although Etienne claimed to have used two manuscripts for his edition (with a partial Latin translation and commentary) there is no evidence of a second manuscript. The original is a tenth-century manuscript divided into two parts: one containing the Greek Anthology Greek Anthology, a collection of short epigrammatic poems representing Greek literature from the 7th cent. B.C. to the 10th cent. A.D. It contains more than 6,000 poems on a variety of subjects by some 320 authors. (now in Heidelberg) and the second the Anacreontea (now in Paris). Etienne explains in his 1560 edition that he has added the notes he made while translating only those odes that appear to be without error and interesting in order to justify his translations which differ from those made by Elie Andre in 1556. O'Brien analyzes both translations in detail, indicating that in some cases the translations are as much imitations as translations. When he analyzes Ronsard's translations, he points out that these are harder to identify because Ronsard mixed his imitations along with his translations and did not respect Etienne's order (an arrangement that is not followed by any of the modern editors of the Pseudo-Anacreon). Our author notes that on occasion both Etienne and Andre have expanded on the original Greek while Belleau often depends on Ronsard for his transpositions. It is contended that while the Neo-Latin translators can rely on borrowing from classical Latin Noun 1. classical Latin - the language of educated people in ancient Rome; "Latin is a language as dead as dead can be. It killed the ancient Romans--and now it's killing me" Latin - any dialect of the language of ancient Rome writers to nourish their translations, this device is unavailable for the vernacular translators. Much is made of Belleau's "ubiquitous diminutives and present participles whose superabundance su·per·a·bun·dant adj. Abundant to excess. su  per·a·bun dance n. Weber describes caustically as 'la deformation mignarde'" (244). In the conclusion it is pointed out that although in principle a distinction is made between translation and imitation, in practice French Renaissance This article is about the cultural movement known as the French Renaissance. For more general historical information about France in this period (including demographics, language, economy and geography), see Early Modern France. writers seldom draw a line between them. O'Brien, realizing that his readers might have difficulty with the original Greek as well as the Neo-Latin texts, has chosen to provide English translations of both. He has also supplied, in an appendix, the incipits of the Greek odes in the order in which they appear in Etienne's Editio Princeps In classical scholarship, editio princeps is a term of art. It means, roughly, the first printed edition of a work, that previously had existed only in manuscripts, which were therefore circulated only after being copied by hand. of 1554, along with the corresponding numbers in the Teubner and Loeb editions. For anyone interested in French Pleiade poetics, this careful work will be a valuable asset. JOSEPH L. ALLAIRE Florida State University Florida State University, at Tallahassee; coeducational; chartered 1851, opened 1857. Present name was adopted in 1947. Special research facilities include those in nuclear science and oceanography. |
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