ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

«Duris agrestibus arma»: Agricultural Instruments in Translations of Virgil’s Georgics

• In Event: Practitioners, Artisans and Instruments in the Making of Premodern Science, I

English Abstract

Far from being regarded merely as a poem, Virgil’s Georgics has long been also considered a repository of practical knowledge on agriculture and animal husbandry, bridging literary culture and the expertise of farmers and breeders. Owing to this composite nature, the poem began to be translated into Italian verse as early as the Renaissance, often accompanied by exegetical notes intended to clarify learned allusions or agricultural notions.
Presenting the initial findings of a recently launched project devoted to Italian vernacular translations of the Georgics this paper examines how translators between the late fifteenth and the sixteenth century mediated the encounter between scholarly learning and practical agricultural knowledge. Particular attention is devoted to the three very first verse translations, produced by Bastiano Foresi (1485), Antonio Nigrisoli (1543), and Bernardino Daniello (1545, with extensive commentary), as well as to the widely influential prose edition annotated by Giovanni Fabrini, Carlo Malatesta, and Filippo Venuti, which circulated broadly from the late Sixteenth through the Seventeenth century.
By comparing how the well-known catalogue of farming tools in Georgics, I, 160-175, as well as all other references to agricultural implements in the poem, are rendered across these prints, the paper investigates how translators adapted or updated the Latin technical lexicon. In order to contextualize these translational choices and assess their degree of technical precision, the analysis also takes into account contemporary agronomic treatises, showing that vernacular translations could function not only as passive mediations of Virgil’s text, but as active sites where literary scholarship and practical knowledge intersected.

Author

• Francesco Davoli, Ca' Foscari University of Venice