Back to my reading,

insofar as today's workflow allows. Now that I've finished Nigel Wilson's Scholars of Byzantium, I can finally move on to his From Byzantium to Italy, which follows the thread of Greek studies in the West during the Italian Renaissance. Some of this is familiar territory to me, as I began my work in the classical tradition (by means of a directed study at Boston University with my advisor Stephen Scully) with the Renaissance humanists. It is edifying however to return to such figures as Chrysoloras, Leonardo Bruni, and the great Lorenzo Valla with a broader and deeper context with which to frame them. My readings in the field this Fall have been serendipitously dovetailing with one another, as if I've been working my way through the syllabus of a readings course. Perhaps I should make this a reading list for a class of my own. I've been dying to teach a course at The Greek Institute on the classical tradition, and now I think I've reached a critical enough mass in my own knowledge that I could pull one off. As if I'd have any time to fit in another class! Oh, well.

Something that might merit a scholarly article is this issue of early word-for-word translations from Greek into Latin that keeps coming up in From Byzantium to Italy. Wilson is unreservedly dismissive of them, championing the ideal espoused by Bruni in the 15th Century that one should strive to reproduce the sense of the original language, but in the idiom of the target language. While this is all well and good for literary translations, an assumption is being made here by Wilson - a big assumption, in my opinion - that the first generation of Latin to Greek volumes in Italy were made in order to be read as literature. There is ample evidence to suggest that the earliest generation of Hellenists in the West, on account of the paucity of good teachers and the almost total absence of grammars or lexica, preferred to learn Greek through bilingual texts, using the Latin translation as their guide. Here the more literal a translation the better, and best of all would be one that was word-for-word, something that was actually possible (if a bit awkward in places) going from Greek to Latin owing to both languages being highly inflected and with a word order that was flexible.

I do understand Nigel Wilson's gut reaction here to the idea of shoehorning one language into another with no regard for aesthetics, however. Perhaps I'm a little more sympathetic to "grammarese" translations because that's the level that most of my Greek students are at. There is a danger in allowing a student to translate idiomatically too early, as it can encourage a kind of grammatical carelessness that is difficult to remedy, once it sets in. Of course as time goes on the challenge becomes one of moving beyond grammarese into good English - from the literal to the literary - but just as we don't expect first-year students to be Lattimores, Fagles, or Alexander Pope, we can hardly hold it against the early Italian humanists for learning to crawl before they could tried to walk.