The editors Philippe Chométy and Michèle Rosellini explain that their aim was “to elucidate the process of reception of De rerum natura beginning from this tradition’s most tangible element, the French translation of the Latin text” (7). As such, Traduire Lucrèce is a powerful contribution geared toward a specialist audience on the reception and diffusion of the Lucretian text among pre-Enlightenment French philosophical, literary, and scientific circles.
The volume is divided into two parts. The first contains a useful extended essay by the editors describing strategies Renaissance authors employed to accommodate the De rerum natura (henceforth DRN) to French Christian audiences. Due to the hostility of these audiences to elements of Epicureanism the DRN was disseminated differently than other classical texts judged more compatible with Catholic orthodoxy. Alternate forms of dissemination included textual strategies that relied on the use of citations, paraphrase, and imitation. Chométy and Rosellini tell a compelling story about French fifteenth- and sixteenth-century editors and printers who aimed to transmit the most correct version of the DRN possible while professing to safeguard the Christian faith of its readers from the DRN’s dangerous Epicurean ideas. Editors and printers accomplished this by including warnings on the DRN’s potential dangers, suggestions to use the text merely to become acquainted with an influential ancient philosophy, and recommendations to approach the Latin verse as poetry, i.e., for its aesthetic value only.
The editors subdivide the volume’s second part into three sections. Section 1 of part 2 is composed of five articles that explore different strategies Renaissance and early modern authors employed to transmit the DRN in the time prior to the publication of a complete translation of the Lucretian text into French. Representative in this regard is Fanny Rouet’s “Volonté et Plaisir: Montaigne lecteur du clinamen de Lucrèce” (135–46). Rouet’s contribution argues that Montaigne is heavily indebted to Lucretius even when he expresses distrust of Epicureanism or mocks features of it like the clinamen. According to Rouet, the sheer volume of citations of the Latin poet found throughout Montaigne’s work undercuts the French author’s statements of distrust as well as his apparent rejection of the theory of the deviation of atoms. For instance, Montaigne’s essay on the verses of Virgil (“Sur des vers de Virgile”) is traversed by images borrowed from DRN discussions of the clinamen.
Five final articles compose the second section of part 2. These treatments explore how early French translators adapted Lucretius to the demands of a Christan reading public. Representative in this regard is the article by Florence Caigny, “Les commentaires de Marolles sur ses traductions de Lucrèce en prose: Vers une reception moderne orientée” (215–32). Caigny reconstructs the strategies deployed by the abbé Michel de Marolles to produce the first complete French translation of the DRN. Navigating between the need to establish his Christian credentials and to buffer the public reception of a heterodox text, de Marolles rendered the Latin verse into French in ways that spoke to the scientific and cultural climate of the day. Caigny shows how remarks of de Marolles in his 1659 defense of Lucretius signal his knowledge of the philosophical debates of the era—especially where this concerns Gassendi.
The third section of the second part closes the volume with a chronologically arranged anthology of fifteen translations of the famous “Hymn to Venus” from DRN book 1. Composed between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, these translations serve as a fascinating window onto French humanistic pre-Enlightenment culture that show the DRN was valued not only as a philosophical and scientific influence, but also as a poetic force.
With Traduire Lucrèce, Chométy and Rosellini make a solid contribution to the growing body of literature on the Renaissance redisovery of Lucretius that will be of particular interest to scholars investigating the dissemination of the DRN in pre-Enlightenment France.
