The Kallierges “Pindar”: A Study in Renaissance Greek Scholarship and Printing. Staffan Fogelmark. 2 vols. Cologne: Dinter, 2015. xvii + 788 pp. €180.
on a problem encountered by modern scholars (including the reviewer) who have worked closely on Manetti’s texts, namely that the humanist practices what looks to modern eyes like plagiarism. In the fifth and final book of theDefense, for instance, for which Manetti composed a discursive treatment of translation theory, a considerable portion was lifted from a treatise by Bruni,On the CorrectWay to Translate. To be sure,Manetti used authors selectively, and the contemporary author from whom he took the most, here as elsewhere, without attribution was Bruni, his late teacher. There was a personal rapport between them that no doubt prompted many of these borrowings. But notably in the Defense, as in the Psalms translation that his book defends, Manetti treats a formal text not as a production anchored absolutely in a single author, but rather as an improvable referent to an idealized text that exists as something like a Platonic form. The text thus approaches its ideal thanks to the processes of addition, subtraction, and correction— the three categories of revision he discusses and applies in books 3 and 4 in his comparison of the Septuagintal and Hebraic Psalms in their Latin translations. Manetti’s translation theory, explored ably in recent years by Paul Botley and Stefano Baldassarri, differentiates the kinds of translation appropriate to the literary genres and to philosophical and religious texts. Manetti also understands that there may be historical reasons or specific uses that result in the privileging of certain translations over others. While Manetti’s discussions of the Septuagint, of Jerome’s translation, of his patron Alfonso, and of the art of translation are thoughtful and lively, it is striking that his treatment of the Psalms remains remarkably sterile, owing possibly to a desire to avoid controversy, or possibly to an obsessive focus on textual precision to the exclusion of other factors—or to both. Nowhere does Manetti suggest that his textual corrections have interpretive consequences beyond the verse level. Liturgical and devotional familiarity—one thinks for instance of the seven penitential psalms—does not appear to have resulted on his part in any greater or lesser attention to the texts. Manetti’s newly Englished Defense, which includes a facing Latin text reprinted from Alfonso De Petris’s fine critical edition of 1981, renders accessible a valuable document that testifies to the ambition and the breadth of learning of a major Florentine humanist.