Lost in Translation: The Sixteenth Century Vernacular Lucretius

Abstract: In the Renaissance admiration for Lucretius was widespread, but it nevertheless
had to comply with a set of unwritten rules in order for the De Rerum
Natura to be read and allowed into humanist culture. Spared from the index of
forbidden books, humanists had to be particularly careful when handling this
epicurean, materialistic, soul’s-immortality-denying poem. The key factor was
probably the prohibition on translating the poem into the vernacular: the fate met
by Alessandro Marchetti’s belated attempt is usually proof enough of the perils
that awaited the transgressors. What became explicit in Marchetti’s case had implicitly
been the rule since the poem’s unearthing: this only partially discouraged
humanists enticed by the charm of Lucretius’ poetry. Not only did the DRN serve
as model for vernacular or neo-Latin poetry in general, but also literal translations
of Lucretian lines or groups of lines appear everywhere in Italian vernacular
poetry of the time.
Not surprisingly then, the scholarship keeps tenuous trace of not one but two
complete, unpublished sixteenth-century vernacular translations of the DRN:
one by Neapolitan aristocrat Giovan Francesco Muscettola, the other by professional
letterato and philosopher Tito Giovanni Ganzarini from Scandiano.
Nothing remains of either translation, but much can be inferred regarding
their quality, relevance and circulation from the two authors’ circumstances,
their epistolaries, their surviving writings. The aim of this paper is to outline this
neglected but all-important episode within the history of Lucretius’ Renaissance
reception.