Lehal Library

li Translator’s Note The original ‘mettere in considerazione’ (‘put in consider- ation’) is used only once in the whole of The Prince (having the text in electronic form is a huge help to the translator), hence the decision not to translate with a standard formula such as ‘submit for consideration’, but to give a more pre- cise sense to the words with the expression ‘bringing into the argument’: Machiavelli is advising us that for these particular examples he will have to fill in a different context. The idea of ‘parte’ I have understood as ‘in part’, and then for the sake of fluency rendered it with ‘some’: the author can’t bring in all the context, but some of it. One has no way of knowing whether this is exactly what Machiavelli meant, but the sentence now gives an internal cohesion to the passage that was lacking in other versions. And if we return to our ­word-­for-­word translation of the original – ‘and part I will put in consideration those things that are important to people who read the events of those times’ – ​we see that it can indeed be read in the way we have chosen to render it. One particularly pernicious problem a translator faces as he grapples with The Prince is the book’s reputation. Machi- avelli is a scandal, every schoolboy knows, because he puts the ends before the means to the point of condoning acts of violence, cruelty and betrayal, something Christian and modern western ethics consider unacceptable: we don’t condone a brutal killing just because it puts an end to a riot and we are no longer at ease with the idea of torture, lii