The Virgilian Tradition II by Craig Kallendorf

Author:Craig Kallendorf [Kallendorf, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781000460902
Google: yf0-EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-10-25T02:45:25+00:00

IV

As I mentioned at the outset, my argument is that content is related to form, and that this relationship can work on a deeper level than that which generally informs the work of book historians today. With Virgil, manuscripts direct us firmly toward a Christian reading of his poetry. The early printed texts retain their base in the schools but point toward a different way of reading. The computerization of our world in turn parallels another change in how Virgil’s poetry was read, from a text that supports the power structures of early modern culture to one that challenges those power structures from their margins. As part of an academic culture that regards most grands récits with suspicion, I am not going to argue that the relationship between physical form and intellectual content will work itself out in exactly the same way for other texts. But I am arguing that interrogating this relationship will often lead to insights that will otherwise escape us. Hardly anyone reads Virgil’s poetry today as a source of Christian truth or as a repository of moral and stylistic maxims, but people in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance did, and unless we read that poetry in the same format in which they read it, we risk projecting our contemporary interpretations that are bound to contemporary formats back onto the past.

Second, I have tried to show that good criticism indeed rests in good bibliography, even if the justification for this conclusion is not precisely what Bowers and Gaskell had in mind. For example, let us pause for a minute at an area we have not looked at before, the translations of Virgil into the vernacular languages. Of the 5,062 pre-1850 Virgilian editions described in my bibliography, 2,099, or 41%, contain a translation. Virgil’s poetry, at least in part, was translated into French 732 times, Italian 494 times, English 419 times, and German 188 times. There are 75 Spanish translations and 55 Dutch ones, with the other European languages being represented 35 or fewer times. What do these numbers mean? Well, for one thing, it is clear that Virgilian translation is going to play a relatively minor role in those cultures where the classics came late to the educational system or where Latin was not a natural base for the vernacular culture. We would expect this to be the case in the Slavic language areas, and in fact it is, for we see only a handful of translations into Polish and Russian and virtually none into the other Slavic languages. This is also true of the Scandinavian countries, where Greek and Latin always remained a somewhat artificial addition to the basic educational curriculum. Given this generalization, there is rather more translation into German than one might expect, especially given the relative popularity of Homer, and rather less than we might anticipate into Spanish and Portuguese, which are Romance cultures like France and Italy. This is probably due to the peculiarly restrictive publishing environment in the Iberian peninsula,

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