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or the final project of my Rare Book Curatorship class, I have been given two imaginary budgets—one large budget of $50,000 to $100,000, and a small budget of $1,000 to $1,500—with which to create two useful and thematically-focused collections from rare books currently on the market. For my large budget, I decided to create a collection of books highlighting the history and reception of literary translations into English. For each book on my list, I will write a detailed explanation of how I think this book would be valuable to a collection like the one envisioned, and how the specific book I’ve chosen relates to the principles of book collecting discussed in John Carter’s 1948 book, Taste and Technique in Book Collecting.
Today’s post is about a 1613 2nd edition for sale of John Florio’s translation of Michel de Montaigne. This is the second installment in a multi-part series. Yesterday I talked about Pliny’s Historie of the World (1601) translated by Philemon Holland.
I find the following explanation of Montaigne’s importance from William Hazlitt—an essayist who worshipped him—to be concise, if a little pat:
His great merit was that he may be said to have been the first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man. … In taking up his pen, he did not set up for a philosopher, wit, orator, or moralist; but he became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed through his mind, in its naked simplicity and force, that he thought any way worth communicating.
In my own review of the first part of Montaigne’s essays (in the Donald Frame translation), I wrote:
Reading Montaigne is something like shooting the breeze with your favorite down-to-earth college professor, except in this case your professor happens to be an exceptionally erudite and (however-much he/she may represent herself otherwise) astonishingly well-read person who, in spite of his awareness of his own limitations, hilariously (by his own admission) tries to out-Seneca Seneca on a regular basis. You walk into Montaigne’s office going, “Yo, Professor M, did you hear about A, B, and C?” And Montaigne’s response, really the core of his worldview, is to say, “Well, but there’s also X, Y, Z, and so many more things, so many that I don’t think we can even name them all; but hey, isn’t life grand? Aren’t people fascinating?”
Montaigne, at least as the scrupulously faithful Donald Frame has rendered him, is calm, contemplative, (at times) endearingly vulnerable, and (as we shall see) not at all like John Florio.
John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne is famous partly for being first and partly for being contemporary with Shakespeare. (“Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, Ralegh, and Burton all read Florio,” Robert Cummings states in his chapter of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 2) but Florio was himself an important figure beyond just being the first English translator of Montaigne. Born of an aristocratic English family that lived in exile in Italy for the first part of his life, Florio came back to England with the goal of bringing Italian manners to (what he considered) barbaric English society.
Something of his braggadocio can be savored in the title of his first book, First Fruits (1578) which yeelde familiar speech, merie prouerbes, wittie sentences, and golden sayings. Also a perfect induction to the Italian, and English tongues, as in the table appeareth. The like heretofore, neuer by any man published. This was followed by a second book of Italian proverbs, Second Fruits (1591), followed by an English-Italian dictionary, A World of Words (1598), of some 46,000 words, which was expanded to 76,000 words in the second edition of 1611. Florio often makes translation errors, but in his chapter on “Montaigne and Florio” in The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500-1640, Peter Mack outlines the “paradoxical consensus,” that “this is regrettable, but it doesn’t matter a great deal”:
Montaigne is so rich, he says so many different things, that it is impossible for a reader to respond to and remember every aspect of a twenty-page segment, never mind of the whole. If Florio fluffs some of the lines, he conveys enough of the others with vitality and expressiveness to justify any reader’s attention.
A perusal of John Florio’s dedicatory epistle to Lucy Bedford, in whose house he was employed as a tutor, shows Florio’s own prose style to be as word-mad (almost Joycean) and rhyme-happy as Philemon Holland’s language is stately and imperturbable. But Florio’s experimental style yielded a number of new words to our language. (In fact, he is one of the most frequently-cited authors for the first appearance of a word in the Oxford English Dictionary after Shakespeare, who he in all likelihood was acquainted with due to a number of parallel circumstances in their careers.) Robert Cummings notes that Florio takes many of Montaigne’s homely idiosyncrasies and “makes a show of them,” only half apologetically including French words in his translation, some of which have come into common use (entraine, conscientious, endeare, tarnish, comporte, efface, facilitate, ammusing, debauching, regret, effort, emotion), while others which Florio introduced (‘attediate’, ‘availfully’, ‘awkwardish’) have not. Florio does not merely clarify his source author as Holland does, but rather transforms Montaigne into a writer, as Cummings puts it, “characterized everywhere by excesses, alliterations and assonances, doublings and treblings of Montaigne’s ‘simple et naïf’ expressions to draw attention to them, adding epithets, proverbs, rhymes.” (That is, more like Florio.)
But outside of the importance of Florio’s translation itself, it is his preface “To the Reader,” which makes this book an essential artifact in the history of translation, containing an impassioned defense of translation that starts:
Shall I apologize translation? Why but some hold (as for their free-hold) that such conversion is the subversion of Universities. God holde with them, and withholde them from impeach or empair. It were an ill turne, the turning of Bookes should be the overturning of Libraries. Yea but my old fellow Nolano told me, and taught publikely, that from translation all Science had it’s of-spring.
He enumerates all the sciences enabled by translation, then engages in an argumentative dialogue with those who argue that learned works shouldn’t be translated.
Why but Learning would not be made common. Yea but Learning cannot be too common, and the commoner the better. Why but who is not jealous, his Mistresse should be so prostitute? Yea but this Mistress is like ayre, fire, water, the more breathed the clearer; the more extended the warmer; the more drawne the sweeter. It were inhumanitie to coop her up, and worthy forfeiture to conceal her. Why but Schollers should have some privilege of preheminence. So have they: they onely are worthy Translators. Why but the vulgar should not knowe all. No, they can not for all this; nor even Schollers for much more: I would, both could and knew much more than either doth or can. Why but all would not be knowne of all. No nor can: much more we know not than we know: all know something, none know all: would all know all? they must breake ere they be so bigge.
…
Why but let men write for the most honour of the Writer. Nay, for most of the Reader: and so haply, most honour. If to write obscurely be perplexedly offensive, as Augustus well judged: for our owne not to write in our owne but unintelligible, is haply to fewer and more criticall, but surely without honor, without profit, if he goe not, or send not an interpreter, who else what is he but a Translator?
This preface is a classic statement of why translation is important and honorable, and why learning should be made available to all people—a strikingly egalitarian message for this time period. Having an original copy of a book with this profound preface at the beginning of Florio’s famous translation of Montaigne certainly makes this book a valuable and important book for a collection devoted to translation history to have.
Taste and Technique in this Book Selection
There was no 1603 first edition of Florio’s Montaigne on the market, so I had to choose between three less ideal copies of this text. One was a 1685 first edition of Charles Cotton’s revised translation, which at $1500 would have been cheapest but furthest removed from what we mean when we say “Florio’s Montaigne.” Next there were two 2nd editions of 1613, with no 1st editions available. I opted for the more expensive of the two due to its contemporary binding and my skepticism of the phrase “antique style binding” (and its appearance) with the cheaper listing.
BONUS: The 1603 First Edition of Florio’s Montaigne at the Lilly Library:
While researching this selection, I had a look at the Lily Library’s first of Florio’s Montaigne. Here’s a gallery of some pictures I took!
Lilly Library | PQ1642 .E5 F6
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