Ne evagemur in verbis floridis

This term I’ve been running scholastic Latin reading classes at three difficulty levels, and at the highest level I offered to cover not only difficult authors but also “flowery prefaces”, i.e. passages in which authors stray beyond the confines of workaday scholastic prose. In the event, nobody was interested in flowery prefaces, so we stuck to ordinary material by Scotus and (since he is often called difficult) Wyclif. As if on cue, though, I’ve just noticed a good illustration of the way that scholastic authors can confuse historians of philosophy by adopting a higher literary register, and I’m writing it up here so I can point to it in future.

The passage in question is from Alberto Fantini’s 1499 edition of Buridan’s Consequentie, and specifically from Fantini’s dedicatory epistle to his brother Giustiniano, which begins:

Compulisti me assiduis vocibus … ut tibi non minus ac germano cuius consequentiis te familiariter accommodare debeas significarem.

You have urged me with persistent words … to indicate to you no less than (to) a brother whose Consequentie you should intimately devote yourself to.

The difficulty here is ‛non minus ac germano’, which complicates the ‛ut … significarem’ clause while also including a slightly unusual use of ‛ac’ (OLD s.v. atque 15). Even once its meaning is clear, there is still an ambiguity (perhaps deliberate, and clunkily preserved in my translation) as to whether it goes with ‛significarem’ or ‛te familiariter accommodare’.

And now here’s what Stephen Read made of it in his 2015 translation of Buridan:

You have supported me with assiduous words … so that I would signify to you no less as a brother whose needs you are bound to meet as a kinsman.

I can’t see how ‛compulisti’ and ‛consequentiis’ came out as ‛supported’ and ‛needs’, but I’m sure the sentence would have fared better if Fantini had written it in a less fancy way, e.g. ‛… ut tibi significarem cuius consequentiis te familiariter accommodare debeas.’

The moral of the story? Even if you’re only interested in texts with simple syntax, you will occasionally be confronted with more complex prose, so you need to be able to handle it. Historians of philosophy sometimes deal with this by quietly ignoring difficult passages – Michael Loux’s 1974 translation of Part I of the Summa logice gives the impression that Ockham omitted to write a preface altogether! – but this is evidently not the wisest policy.

Traduttore traditore: a plea for intellectual history

Working on a medieval Latin dictionary confronts me with material for which my training in intellectual history is little help – financial accounts, legal charters, historical chronicles, etc.  Rest assured, though, that when I'm out of my depth I ask an expert.  This post amounts to a plea for strangers to intellectual history to do the same.

The prestigious Oxford Medieval Texts series of critical editions with facing-page translations mostly steers clear of intellectual history, but occasional contact is inevitable.  One such occasion is the appearance in Thomas Walsingham's Chronica majora of John Wyclif's Declarationes (1378), which contains the following sentence:

Sicut enim omne verum est necessarium [ex suppositione], sic omne falsum est impossibile ex suppositione, ut patet testimonio scripturae et sanctorum doctorum loquentium de necessitate futurorum.

This is more or less bread-and-butter stuff for anyone with the faintest acquaintance with scholastic philosophy:

For just as every truth is [hypothetically] necessary, so every falsehood is hypothetically impossible, as is clear from the testimony of scripture and of the holy doctors who speak of the necessity of the future.

But here's the OMT translation by Leslie Watkiss, praised by Antonia Gransden as ‘good’ and by Geoffrey Martin as of a ‘high standard’:

Just as all that is true is necessary, so all that is false is of its nature impossible, as is made clear by the testimony of Scripture and the learned saints when they speak of future sufferings.

Now, although scholastics are more interested in doctors than saints, ‘learned saints’ is a possible translation of ‘sanctorum doctorum’ (as if formed from the nonce-phrase ‘sancti docti’ rather than from the common phrase ‘sancti doctores’).  But the other two mistakes are howlers that make a nonsense of what Wyclif was trying to say.

Impossibility ex suppositione – that is, hypothetical or conditional impossibility – was often called per accidens precisely because it is not intrinsic.  It is not ‘of its nature’ impossible that Bush won the 2008 election; it is, however, impossible given the current facts.

And as for the surreal intrusion of ‘future sufferings’, one can only wonder how anyone could have missed the connection between the ‘necessitate’ here and the ‘necessarium’ in the first clause.

As it happens, these particular howlers (like so many others) could have been avoided by spending 5 minutes with Google.  Generally, though, the best way of spotting such mistakes would be to have the translation read by someone who does have the relevant background – ideally, in this case, a Wyclif expert, but certainly someone with a serious interest in medieval intellectual history – but apparently neither the editors of this OMT volume nor the general editors of the series saw fit to take this elementary precaution.  Thanks, guys.

Kaye on Auriol on the Semantics of Prophecy

Sharon Kaye's article ‘Some Philosophical Reflections on the Coming of the Antichrist’ (2000) makes more depressing reading than its title might suggest. She erroneously ascribes to Auriol the thesis that what a prophet means in uttering a prophecy is contingent on what happens in the future – and the translation on which she bases this interpretation is the worst that I have ever seen in a learned journal.

Propositiones propheticae aliud significant ex institutione et ex natura propositionum, aliud vero dant intelligere ex intentione prophetae. … secundum autem intentionem prophetae, verae sunt, quia dant intelligere quod in divina notitia est quaedam veritas ineffabilis et quaedam determinatio illius materiae de qua formantur. (Auriol, Scriptum I.38.iii, 1166–71)

Roughly: ‘Prophetic statements signify one thing by convention and by the nature of statements, and give <us> to understand another by the intention of the prophet. … according to the intention of the prophet they are true, for they give <us> to understand that in the divine cognition there is a certain ineffable truth and a certain determination of the matter about which they are formed.’

Kaye's translation: ‘In one way, prophetic statements signify by convention and by the nature of the statement, but in another way, they express the intention of the prophet. … according to the intention of the prophet, they are true. For they express what is in the divine cognition, namely, a certain ineffable truth and a certain determination of the matter about which they are formed.’

This doubly misidentifies what is signified by prophetic utterances as (1) the prophet's intention and (2) something (or rather two things, one of which was supposed to be ineffable) in the divine cognition.

What is most striking here is how straightforward the Latin is. I can understand her immediately subsequent mistranslation of ‘quod a Deo praedicitur ut in pluribus evenit’ as ‘what is predicted by God happens in many ways’, because the correct translation (‘usually happens’) requires some knowledge of the subject-matter. But there is no such excuse for the flagrant errors identified above. O tempora!