"An Ancient Psalm, a Modern Song"

Italian Translations of Hebrew Literature in the Early Modern Period
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-90-04-51502-4
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 72, 318 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 673 g

Reihe: Studies in Jewish History and Culture

This volume presents the culmination of research on an almost ignored literary corpus: the translations into literary Italian of classical Hebrew texts made by Jews between 1550 and 1650. It includes poetry, philosophy and wisdom literature, as well as dictionaries and biblical translations produced in what their authors viewed as a national tongue, common to Christians and Jews. In so doing, the authors/translators explicitly left behind the so-called Judeo-Italian. These texts, many of them being published for the first time, are studied in the context of intellectual and literary history. The book is an original contribution showing that the linguistic acculturation of German Jews in the late 18th century occurred in Italy 150 years earlier.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Guetta, Alessandro

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien: Leben & Praxis, Soziale Aspekte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface

Introduction

1 Hebrew-Italian Dictionaries

1 The Dictionaries as Daily Tools for Didactic Purposes

2 An Encyclopedic Dictionary in Praise of “Jewish Civilization”: David de Pomi’s Tzema? David

2 Biblical Translations

1 Jewish-Italian Biblical Translations in the Age of Counter-Reformation

2 David de Pomi on Ecclesiastes: A “Jewish” Translation, a “Catholic” Commentary

3 Glossaries as Disguised Biblical Translations

4 “A Pure and Clean Language”: A Crypto-Protestant Translation and the Jewish Italian Versions of the Bible

5 Antonio Brucioli and His Italian Translation of the Bible

6 Jewish Translations Inspired by Brucioli

7 Leone Modena’s Galut Yehuda and the Call to Be No Longer “Alien Residents” of the Italian Language

8 The Venice Haggada of 1609

3 Philosophical Lexicons

4 Translations of Philosophical Books

1 “More Divine Than Plato”: Erudizione de’ confusi, by Yedidya Ben Moshe Recanati (Rimini), a Late Renaissance Italian Translation of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed

2 Il libro degli Articoli, an Anonymous Translation of Yosef Albo’s Sefer ha-‘iqqarim

5 From Poetry to Poetry

1 The Poetical Translation of the Psalms by Leone Sommo

2 A Spiritual and Aesthetic Need: Italian Liturgical Translations of the 16th and 17th Centuries as Examples of “Jewish Spiritual Poetry”

3 Translations as a Religious/Literary Task: The Work of Yehuda ?ayyim Carpi

4 Poetical Paraphrases of the Tale of Purim

5 A Translation of the Binding of Isaac?

6 Why Translate from Hebrew? For Whom?

7 “Let Us Cry in Deep Sorrow”: The Elegy on the “Martyrs” of Ancona, 1556

8 The Elegy on the Burning of the Talmud

6 An Italian Shabbath

1 “An Ancient Psalm, a Modern Song”: The Zemirot (Songs) for Shabbath

7 Jewish and Universal Wisdom in Translation

1 The Italian and Latin Versions of Pirqe avot

2 From Mantua to Paris: The Translations of Philippe d’ Aquin

3 Wisdom in Verses: The Rhymed Translation of the Sayings of Various Sages

Conclusion: Found in Translation

Bibliografia

Über Autor(innen)

Alessandro Guetta is Professor of Jewish Thought at the Institut National de Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris. Among his publications: Philosophy and Kabbalah (2009), Italian Jewry in Early Modern Era (2014), and Les Juifs d’Italie à la Renaissance (2017).