Homer in the Renaissance

In the wake of Petrarch, a translation of Homer into elegant Latin verse was a desideratum that continually evaded the grasp of quattrocento humanists. Nicholas V, a pope who was intimate with these circles, instigated a whirl of intellectual activity around the Roman Curia, partly to consolidate his recently and precariously centralised power; among the mass of Greek authors of which he commissioned translations, Homer was, significantly, the only poet.

François Hédelin (1604-1676), the abbé d’Aubignac, wrote the Conjectures académiques, ou, Dissertation sur l’Iliade sometime in the 1660s. He intended to shock. Homer, he was the first to argue, never existed. The Iliad was boring and much too long.

In the prologue to his 1444 work, the Omero romançado, Cordoban poet Juan de Mena, newly arrived at Juan II’s Castilian court, presents himself as the first to “translate and interpret that seraphic work, Homer’s Iliad, rendered first from Greek into Latin and then from Lati

It is common to dismiss Lodovico Dolce’s L’Ulisse (1573) as simply a rifacimento, not a “proper translation”; but new ways of thinking emerging from the field of translation studies now make this text good to think with.