Translating, reading, writing Petronius’ Satyricon in the Seicento

Abstract

The present article deals with a seventeenth-century manuscript (Ang) that contains the translation into Italian of Petronius’ Satyricon, a work from Antiquity renowned for its obscenity. The translation is anonymous and was probably composed in Northern Italy (Venice?). Ang is not an autograph and seems to represent a clandestine publication. The systematic comparison between Ang and the sixteenth and seventeenth-century printed editions of the Satyricon (in Latin) has shown how the author of the translation was not concerned with textual criticism. However, the latter conveniently mastered literary Italian. On the contrary, the scribe who materially wrote Ang, likely on commission, did not fully master the norm of written Italian. Ang’s punctuation and its textual organisation, as well as the peculiar use of catchwords, suggest that the manuscript may have been specifically produced to be read out loud. The text of the translation, as transmitted by Ang, displays a number of explicatory glosses intended to clarify Petronius’ text and, mostly, to clarify the Italian that was originally used by the translator, reformulating it in a less literary variety (sometimes even by the means of dialectal expressions – from the Perugian area). Such a complex textual stratification proves the actual circulation of the translation across Italy as well as its progressive adaptation to an undemanding public.