ABSTRACT
When I began comparing John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s Essays to the original, I asked myself a very simple question: what doesn’t Florio translate? Now that I’ve come to the end of my enquiry, the question tends to become an exclamation: what doesn’t he translate! Not only is he at great pains to translate every word of the source text, including the quotations that Montaigne left in their original Latin (Greek, French or Italian), but he tends to overburden his translation rather than leave things out. In the eyes of several commentators, Florio’s desire to make Montaigne as comprehensible as possible to the English reader is counterproductive: by failing to do justice to his style, he exerts an albeit unwitting censorship upon an essential dimension of Montaigne’s writing. In his ‘Introduction’ to his own twentieth-century translation of the Essays, J.M. Cohen writes, ‘Though his version is considered one of the greatest Elizabethan translations, its virtues lie in the vigour of its English rather than in the truth of its rendering. Though repeatedly reprinted, Florio is far from Montaigne in the spirit, and not too accurate in the word’ (Cohen 1958, 21). Personally, I find that rather unfair, and even presumptuous, for Cohen’s translation is not without its flaws either. I’m rather of the opinion of Christophe Camard: ‘Montaigne’s style is limpid, but Florio densifies it somewhat, as if the arguments needed to be more clearly stated in English. As a result, what constitutes the charm of Montaigne’s style is often lost, even if the translation in all other respects is remarkably precise’ (2016, 94, my translation). 1 In fact, as we shall see, Florio is perfectly conscious of the losses and betrayals incident to translation, all translation. If this constitutes a form of censorship, then it is of a structural nature. The first part of this chapter will hence be devoted to Florio’s understanding of the pitfalls and inadequacies of translation.
