Lehal Library

to drift towards that slightly stilted archaic style so often used to render great texts from the past; ‘sensible’ or on other occasions ‘shrewd’ are choices that, depending on the context, can combine accuracy with a prose that draws less attention to itself as a translation. So the constantly recurring question as one translates The Prince is: what words would we use today to describe the qualities and situations Machiavelli is talking about? Of course sometimes there are no modern words, because there are certain things – ​siege engines, cavalry attacks – ​that we don’t talk about any more. On the whole, though, Machiavelli is chiefly interested in psychology or, rather, in the interaction of different personalities in crisis situations, and here, so long as the translator avoids the temptation to introduce misleading contemporary jargon, a great deal can be done to get The Prince into clear, contemporary English. However, the difficulty of these lexical choices is infin- itely compounded by Machiavelli’s wayward grammar and extremely flexible syntax. Written in 1513, The Prince is not easily comprehensible to Italians today. Recent editions of the work are usually parallel texts with a modern Italian translation printed beside the original. The obstacle for the Italian reader, however, is hardly lexical at all – ​in the end he can understand a good ninety per cent of the words Machiavelli is using – r​ ather it has to do with a combination of extreme compression of thought, obsolete, sometimes