Lehal Library

Translations have a way of gathering dust. This isn’t true of an original text. When we read Chaucer or Shakespeare we may need a gloss, or in the case of Chaucer a modern translation, but we only look at these things so that we can then enjoy the work as it was first written. And we’re struck by its immediacy and freshness, as if we had been able to learn a foreign language in a very short space of time with little effort and maximum reward. This is not the case with an old translation. If we read Pope’s translation of Homer today, we read it because we want to read Pope, not Homer. Linguistically, the transla- tion draws our attention more to the language and poetry of our eighteenth century than to Homer or ancient Greece. So to attempt a new translation of Machiavelli is not to dismiss previous translations as poor. We are just acknowl- edging that these older versions now draw attention to themselves as moments in the English language. My efforts of course will some day meet the same fate. Such distrac- tions are particularly unfortunate with Machiavelli, who insisted that he was only interested in style in so far as it could deliver content without frills or distraction. ‘I haven’t