The Prince (5 page)

Ugly though it may sound, then, I have sometimes been obliged to translate ‘
virtù
' as ‘positive qualities' or ‘strength of character', except of course on those occasions - because there are some - when Machiavelli does mean ‘virtues' in the moral sense: in which case he's usually talking about the importance of faking them even if you may not have them. Faking, of course, when cunningly deployed for an appropriate end, is another important
virtù
. The spin doctor was not a notion invented in the 1990s.

Related to both these particular problems - prince, virtue - is the more general difficulty that so many of the key words Machiavelli uses have English cognates through Latin -
fortuna, audace, circospetto, malignità, diligente
, etc. In some cases they are true cognates -
prudente
/prudent, for example - but even then to use the cognate pulls us back to a rather dusty, archaic style. Aren't the words ‘careful' or ‘cautious' or ‘considered' more often used now than the word ‘prudent'?

Something of the same difficulty can occur where there is no cognate in English but a traditional and consolidated dictionary equivalent for an old Italian term. Machiavelli frequently uses the word ‘
savio
', which has usually been translated ‘wise', but again this invites the English version 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 infinitely 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 - rather it has to do with a combination of extreme compression of thought, obsolete, sometimes erratic grammar, and, above all, a syntax where subordinate and pre-modifying clauses abound in ways that the modern reader is not used to.

We are not talking here about those complex but always elegant Ciceronian sentences so admired and frequently mimicked by the English Augustans. Machiavelli has a more spoken, flexible, persuading, sometimes brusque voice, and to get that tone in English one has to opt for a syntax that is quite different from the original Italian. In particular, the sequence with which information is delivered within the sentence frequently has to be reorganized. Here, to give the reader a sense of what he can expect, are three versions of the same paragraph, the last being my own. I haven't chosen anything especially complex; it's a fairly ordinary passage in which, as so often, Machiavelli poses a situation, then considers possible responses to it and the consequences of each response. The first translation is from W. K. Marriot and was published in 1908.

The second is from George Bull, published in 1961.

And here is my own.

A typically tricky moment in this passage comes when Machiavelli says of these neighbouring powers:

Literally:

Here Marriot gives:

And Bull:

Here it's clear that Bull is closer to modern prose, yet one still feels that nobody writing down this idea today in English would introduce the second part of Machiavelli's alternative as Bull does by tagging that ‘or they are not' on to the end of the sentence after the introduction of an ‘if' clause. If we follow Bull's general structure but move the alternative forward - thus, ‘either they are or they aren't such that if one of them conquers, you will be in danger' - the sentence gains in fluency. In the end, however, the simplest solution seemed to me to shift the alternative aspect towards the verb ‘fear' and away from a description of the two states; this leaves the sense of the sentence intact and allows us to get closer to the original's telegraphic delivery.

Let me say at this point that I have the greatest respect for both these earlier translations and indeed various others. I owe a lot to them, because, although I have always translated directly from the original, I have then gone to these and to the modern Italian translations to see where they disagree and to mull over what I can learn from them. The original text is such that on occasion all four of the translations I have been looking at, two English and two Italian, offer different interpretations. In these cases one really must attune oneself to Machiavelli's mental processes, his insistence on logic, reason and deduction, and remember that every clause, if not every word, is there for a purpose.

Here is a small example. Having stated that rulers must at all costs avoid being hated by their subjects, and that such hatred is almost always the cause of a leader's downfall, Machiavelli foresees that some people will object that this wasn't the case with many Roman emperors who either held on to power despite being hated by the people, or lost it despite being loved. ‘To meet these objections', he tells us, ‘I shall consider the qualities of some of these emperors, showing how the causes of their downfall are not at all out of line with my reasoning above.' So far so good, but this sentence then ends:

Translating word for word, this gives:

What is this about? Why did Machiavelli feel the need to add these words to a sentence that already seems clear enough. Bull offers:

This may sound sensible and vaguely academic, but it simply isn't accurate: the word ‘
parte
' has gone; to ‘submit for consideration' may be a standard English formula, but does it mean the same as Machiavelli's actually rather unusual ‘put in consideration'? ‘
Notabile
' doesn't so much mean ‘well known' as ‘worthy of note' or ‘important'. Marriot gives:

Again we have the standard ‘submit for consideration', while ‘at the same time' and ‘only' are both translator's additions. It now sounds as if Machiavelli is reassuring us that he will only look at examples that are relevant, but this sort of defen siveness is not the author's way. Why would the reader have suspected him of introducing irrelevant examples?

One modern Italian translation gives: ‘e in parte indicherò quei fatti che sono importanti per chi si interessa alla storia di quei tempi.' Literally: ‘and in part I will indicate those facts that are important for people interested in the history of those times.'

This is now extremely close to our literal translation of Machiavelli's original but still not particularly helpful. What is the author getting at? What does the phrase add to what has already been said?

Another Italian translation gives: ‘nello stesso tempo indicherò i fatti che devono essere messi in evidenza da chi si interessa alla storia di quei tempi.' Literally: ‘at the same time I will indicate the facts that must be put in evidence by people interested in the history of those times.'

Despite the fact that ‘
parte
' has once again been mysteriously transformed into ‘at the same time' - a classic filler when a translator is lost - an idea at last emerges: that there are facts that people interested in those times ‘must put in evidence', and the implication is that without these facts we won't understand what has to be understood if we are to be persuaded by the author's argument.

At this point the translator tries to enter Machiavelli's reasoning, reassured by the knowledge that here we have an author who
always
put sense and clarity before anything else. Machiavelli, remember, is facing objections from people who claim that the question of whether a ruler's people do or do not hate him is not the crucial criterion when it comes to considering whether that leader will survive. Those objections, what's more, are based on the lives of certain Roman emperors. What Machiavelli is going to show in the following paragraphs is that the nature of power and political institutions in the Roman empire was profoundly different from that in a modern (early sixteenth-century) state, the key difference being the existence, in Roman times, of a strong standing army that, for safety's sake, a leader had to satisfy
before
satisfying the people and that could often only be kept happy by allowing it to treat the people very harshly, stealing and raping at will. What this little clause appears to be doing, then, is preparing us for Machiavelli's approach to answering the objection that has been raised: it is a question, he is going to tell us, of understanding a different historical context.

The word ‘
parte
' could be short for ‘
a parte
' (apart, separately) or ‘
in parte
' (in part), as both the Italian translations take it. Now perhaps we can read the sentence as a whole thus:

The original ‘
mettere in considerazione
' (‘put in consideration') 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 precise 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.