Taking life philosophically.
5 June 2010
Niccolò Machiavelli seems to be in fashion. Great new material is appearing on the web, and two works are particularly worthy of mention: one is a translation of Machiavelli’s most famous play, and the other is a graphic novel about Machiavelli’s life.
Particularly outside Machiavelli’s native Italy, not everyone knows that the author of The Prince also wrote plays and poems in addition to political and historical works. Yet in his lifetime Machiavelli found success above all in the world of theater, as a playwright.
I have long been aware of a need for an online English translation of La mandragola (sometimes translated as The Mandrake, or The Mandrake Root), Machiavelli’s finest and best-known comedy. Apparently all the translations so far have been relatively recent and only available in book form, or whatever translation may have been freely available has not found its way to the web.
This changed when Emeritus Professor Nerida Newbigin of the University of Sydney made available her new translation of the work. It is based on Pasquale Stoppelli’s recent critical edition, and renders quite nicely even the colloquialisms of Messer Nicia and in general keeps the lively spirit of the original text.
The translation has already been useful to me personally, and I believe others will find it valuable both as a work of literature and as a research tool. For the original Italian text, please see my Machiavelli webliography.
I do not follow many web feeds myself, but this is something that I read religiously: one page at a time, Don MacDonald is posting his Machiavelli graphic novel. The complete story is around 170 pages long according to the author. Now at 29 pages, there are still lots of updates to come, and new pages are posted frequently.
Apart from the qualities of MacDonald’s beautiful watercolors, the story is also admirably well researched. Events in Renaissance history and Machiavelli’s life are seamlessly linked, and they are filtered through the relevant passages in the Florentine author’s works, including The Prince and the Discourses on Livy. And obviously the important historical characters, from the Medici to Cesare Borgia and Savonarola, appear as well.
The journal of Timo Laine (contact information). Cultural commentary from the perspective of a philosophy student in Helsinki.