The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library

THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY AND ITS PROGENY PROCEEDINGS OF THE FIRST JAMES LOEB BIENNIAL CONFERENCE MUNICH AND MURNAU, 18–20 MAY 2017 Edited by Jeffrey Henderson and Richard Thomas With James Hankins, Sheldon Pollock, and Jan M. Ziolkowski Department of the Classics, Harvard University Distributed by Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2020 Copyright © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All Rights Reserved Published by The Department of the Classics, Harvard University Distributed by Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England The Loeb Classical Library and Its Progeny Proceedings of the First James Loeb Biennial Conference Munich and Murnau, 18–20 May 2017 Loeb Classical Monographs 18 Library of Congress Control Number 2020914296 CIP data available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-674-24871-7 Composed in ZephGreek and ZephText Cover design by Joni Godlove Printed on acid-free paper and bound by Sheridan Books, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan CONTENTS Notes on Contributors Preface vii xiii Jeffrey Henderson and Richard Thomas Loebing: A Personal Account xvii Glenn W. Most I. THE HARVARD BILINGUAL LIBRARIES The Loeb Classical Library and the Process of Translation 1 Jeffrey Henderson The I Tatti Renaissance Library: A Personal Retrospect and Prospect 17 James Hankins The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 47 Jan M. Ziolkowski What Should a Classical Library of India Be? 63 Sheldon Pollock II. THE SACRED TRANSLATED Transmitting Texts, Changing the World, Moving Hearts: Translation in Buddhist Asia 89 Charles Hallisey The Challenges of Editing a Polemical Translation from the Thirteenth Century: The Extractiones de Talmud 107 Alexander Fidora Philology Goes Everywhere: Lorenzo Valla and the New Testament Christopher S. Celenza 123 III. THE CHALLENGES OF PREMODERN TRANSLATION Reading Classical Antiquity in Old English 155 Elizabeth M. Tyler Les amours de Catulle and The Adventures of Catullus 183 Julia Haig Gaisser Amateur Translators of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 209 Stuart Gillespie IV. THE CHALLENGES OF CONTEMPORARY TRANSLATION Translating the Odyssey: The Ethics of Translation 231 Emily Wilson Greek Constitutional Theory in the Italian Renaissance 257 James Hankins Translating Two Sufi Classics from South Asia 293 Christopher Shackle V. TEXTS AND SOCIAL TEXTS ACROSS TIME AND SPACE Classics in the Vernacular World: The Pañcatantra and Aesop in Translation in Colonial India 319 Indira Viswanathan Peterson Fringe Encounters: Translations of Antiquity and Negotiations of Scholarly Authority in the Margins of Byzantine Manuscripts of Ioannes Tzetzes and Manuel Moschopoulos 353 Niels Gaul Translation, Identity, and the History of Sexuality: Explorations in Burton and Smithers’ Catullus Jennifer Ingleheart vi 395 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Christopher S. Celenza is Dean of Georgetown College at Georgetown University, where he is also Professor of History and Classics. He is the author of a number of books, most recently The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer (Reaktion, 2017). Alexander Fidora was born 1975 in Offenbach (Germany) and studied philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, obtaining his PhD in 2003. He is an ICREA Research Professor in the Department of Ancient and Medieval Studies of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His research focuses on medieval philosophy as well as the intercultural and interreligious dimensions of medieval thought, with more than forty books published and over 150 articles. He has directed the ERC Starting Grant “Latin into Hebrew” (2008–12) and the ERC Consolidator project “The Latin Talmud” (2014–19). He has served as Visiting Professor at Saint Louis University, Universidad Panamericana in Mexico, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the University of Pennsylvania, and as Vice President of the Sociedad de Filosofía Medieval and Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale. He is a Member of the Academia Europaea. Julia Haig Gaisser is Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emerita in the Humanities, Bryn Mawr College. She is principally interested in Latin poetry, Renaissance humanism, and the reception and transmission of classical texts. She is the author of the article on Catullus in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum 7 (1992). Her books include Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (1993), The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass (2008), and Catullus (2009). She is the editor and translator of Pierio Valeriano on the Ill Fortune of Learned Men (1999) and, for the I Tatti Renaissance Library, Giovanni Pontano’s Dialogues, Volume 1: Notes on Contributors Charon and Antonius (2012), Dialogues, Volume 2: Actius (2020), and Dialogues, Volume 3: Aegidius and Asinus (2020). Niels Gaul is A. G. Leventis Professor of Byzantine Studies in the University of Edinburgh and currently Principal Investigator of a European Research Council Consolidator Grant, “Classicizing Learning in Medieval Imperial Systems: Comparative Approaches to Byzantine Paideia and Tang/Song Xue” (2017–22). He is the author of Thomas Magistros und die spätbyzantinische Sophistik (2011) and has most recently, with Volker Menze and Csanád Bálint, edited Center, Province and Periphery in the Age of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos: From De Ceremoniis to De Administrando Imperio (2018). He serves on the editorial board of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, Byzantine Greek series. Stuart Gillespie (English Literature, University of Glasgow) is co-editor (with Philip Hardie) of The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius and (with Peter France) of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. His special interest in the English translation of ancient Greek and Latin literature is reflected in his monograph English Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and most recently in a large-scale edition of English translations taken from unprinted manuscripts: Newly Recovered English Classical Translations, 1600–1800 (Oxford University Press, 2018). He also edits the journal Translation and Literature (Edinburgh University Press). Charles Hallisey is Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures at Harvard Divinity School. He is the translator of the Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women that is part of the Murty Classical Library of India (Harvard University Press, 2015). His research centers on Buddhist literature in Pali and Sinhala, the interpretation of Buddhist scriptures, Buddhist ethics, and the Theravada Buddhist traditions of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. James Hankins is Professor of History at Harvard University and the founder and General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library. His latest book is Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Belknap Press, 2019). viii Notes on Contributors Jeffrey Henderson is William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of Greek Language and Literature, and former Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, at Boston University. He is best known for his pioneering work on the language and history of sexuality, on Greek drama (especially comedy) and politics, and for his editions and translations of Aristophanes. Since 1999 he has been General Editor of the Loeb Classical Library, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Jennifer Ingleheart is Professor of Latin at Durham University, where she has taught since 2004. She has published widely on Latin love poetry, and more recently on how Roman “homosexuality” has influenced modern ideas about sexuality. She is particularly interested in “underground” works which could not be published openly because of their sexual content, and in the role that classical translation plays in forming ideas about sexuality. She is the editor of Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities (2015); her most recent monograph, Masculine Plural: Queer Classics, Sex, and Education, was published in September 2018. Glenn W. Most is Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, a regular Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He has published books on Classics, on ancient philosophy, on the history and methodology of classical studies, on comparative literature, cultural studies, and the history of religion, on literary theory and on the history of art, and has published numerous articles, reviews, and translations in these fields and also on such others as modern philosophy and literature. Most recently he has published a co-edited comprehensive Loeb edition of the early Greek philosophers in nine volumes; a co-edited volume on scholarly methods in a variety of canonical written traditions; a co-edited volume of essays on a sentence of Kafka; and a collection of his essays in Italian on ancient and modern psychology. He is currently working on various projects involving both ancient Greek philology and the comparison of philological practices in different periods and cultures throughout the world. ix Notes on Contributors Indira Viswanathan Peterson is Professor of Asian Studies Emerita at Mount Holyoke College. She specializes in ancient and medieval Sanskrit and Tamil literature, and south Indian cultural history and performing arts. Peterson is the author of Poems to Śiva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints (1989), Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic: The Kirātārjunīya of Bhāravi (2003), and, with George Michell, The Great Temple at Thanjavur: A Thousand Years (2010). Her Arjuna and the Hunter: Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya (Murty Classical Library of India, 2016) is the first edition and complete English translation of a celebrated sixth-century Sanskrit court epic. Sheldon Pollock is Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University, and General Editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. He is author of, among other books, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Coomaraswamy Prize) and A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (Weller Prize). He received the Padma Shri and the Presidential Certificate of Honour for Sanskrit from the Government of India, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Christopher Shackle graduated in Persian and Turkish from Oxford in 1963. After a long academic career at SOAS, University of London, he retired as Emeritus Professor of Modern Languages of South Asia in 2007. He has written extensively on the languages, literatures, and religions of Pakistan and north-west India. Representative publications include The Siraiki Language of Pakistan (1976), A Guru Nanak Glossary (1981), Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa (with Stefan Sperl, 1996), The Teachings of the Sikh Gurus (with Arvind Mandair, 2005), and translations from Panjabi, Sindhi, and Siraiki of Pakistani Sufi poetry by Bullhe Shah (MCLI, 2015), Shah Abdul Latif (MCLI, 2018), and Khwaja Ghulam Farid (2018). Richard Thomas is George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics at Harvard University, where his teaching and research interests are focused on Hellenistic Greek and Roman literature, intertextuality, translation and translation theory, the reception of classical literature in all periods, and the works of Bob Dylan. Recent books include Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and two co-edited volumes, Classics and the Uses of Reception (Blackwell, 2006) and Bob Dylan’s Performance Artistry (Oral Tradition 22.1, 2007), x Notes on Contributors a commentary on Horace, Odes 4 and Carmen Saeculare (Cambridge University Press, 2011), a co-edited three-volume Virgil Encyclopedia (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), and Why Bob Dylan Matters (Dey St., 2017). Elizabeth Tyler is Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of York and co-director of the Centre for Medieval Literature, a Danish Centre of Excellence (Odense and York). She works on the literature of early and high medieval England within its European context. Her books include England in Europe: English Royal Women and Literary Patronage c. 1000 – c. 1150 (University of Toronto Press, 2017) and (as co-editor) Historical Writing in Britain and Ireland, 500–1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2019). She is currently working on a literary history of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and a project on the writing of vernacular languages in the Latin West from late antiquity to the twelfth century. Emily Wilson is Professor in the Department of Classical Studies and Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), The Death of Socrates (Profile, 2007), and The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (Oxford University Press, 2014). Since 2009 she has been the Classics editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature. She published a translation of selected tragedies by Seneca (Oxford World’s Classics, 2010); four translations of plays by Euripides in the Modern Library’s The Greek Plays (2016); and her verse translation of the Odyssey was published in November 2017. She recently completed a Norton Critical Edition with translation of Oedipus Tyrannos. She is currently working on a translation of the Iliad and a book about translation. Jan M. Ziolkowski is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard University. While Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (2007–20), he founded the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library and served as its General Editor (2010–20). His books combine critical editions and translations with literary history, such as Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry (1993) and Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (2012). He co-edited The Medieval Craft of Memory (with Mary Carruthers, 2002), The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred xi Notes on Contributors Years (with Michael C. J. Putnam, 2008), and The Virgil Encyclopedia (with Richard F. Thomas, 2014). He edited Dante and Islam (2015) and Dante and the Greeks (2017) and published The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity (2018). xii THE DUMBARTON OAKS MEDIEVAL LIBRARY Jan M. Ziolkowski T he Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (henceforth DOML, inau- gurated in 2010) occupies the third position in the sequence of four such groundbreaking dual-language book collections that have been initiated since the early twentieth century and that have abided without interruption under the aegis of Harvard University Press. The Loeb Classical Library (LCL, 1912) and I Tatti Renaissance Library (ITRL, 2001) preceded this one for the Middle Ages, while the Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI, 2015) followed it. The four facing-language series published by the Press aim to meet benchmarks that will satisfy both peers in our profession and individuals in the public at large. In other words, meriting solidarity from fellow academics must not rule out accessibility to those from outside our guilds. Ultimately, the libraries demand complex gambles about audiences as well as about texts and translations. Those of us guiding them make careful wagers at each step on the road. These days, the off-track betting necessitates fretting over the evolving natures and functions of English worldwide, since the language long ago grew global. Our projects also mandate hard decisions about what promise paper-and-ink books hold right now and crystal-gazing about what they may become in decades ahead as digital platforms develop. The tetrad of libraries adheres to a characteristically American framework of cultural philanthropy in which donors, dead or alive, play determinant roles. At the same time, the Americanism underlying these book series has nothing provincially nationalistic about it. All of them bear witness to the intensely international personal histories and viewpoints of their benefactors, which might once have been flagged as cosmopolitan but would likely now be labeled globalist. The perspective of these backers was initially Eurocentric, with the keywords Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance of the first three libraries presuming Europe, even if the ancient Roman Empire and the medieval prolongation of its eastern Jan M. Ziolkowski portion under the Byzantines involved bridges to supra-Saharan Africa, Asia Minor, and the westernmost reaches of Asia proper. Now the fourth has lengthened the geographical scope much farther eastward—or, to strike a fresh stance, has outfitted a different subcontinent with a beachhead in the Anglosphere. In all cases, the expansion across time and space has taken place in the name of humanistic inclusivity rather than of cultural imperialism. The four series fit loosely but comfortably under the umbrella of the Gilded Age in America that commenced in the late nineteenth century and the Second Gilded Age, its reprise in the early twenty-first century. A paradox worth pondering is that two of the three libraries that took wing in the later era are actually belated monuments to the charitable giving of the earlier one. Both periods have been marked by a concentration of pelf in family dynasties enabled by extraordinary income inequality. They have also been stamped by remarkable munificence, manifested in the earliest instance by such memorable magnificos as Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), Andrew Mellon (1855–1937), and the Rockefeller family. The humanitarianism of these magnates had its codicil in the libraries under discussion here. James Loeb (1867–1933) was a German-born American Jew, the banker-philanthropist son of a father with the same vocation and avocation, who returned to his native land for the final decades of his life. Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), born Jewish in the Baltic region that is now Lithuania, was educated at Harvard but based for most of his life in Italy. Although an art historian and not a millionaire himself, he amassed massively more than modest means through commissions in cash and kind that he levied while catering to parvenu collectors of his day from the United States. The married couple (and stepsiblings) Robert Woods Bliss (1875–1962) and Mildred Barnes Bliss (1879–1969), heirs to immense wealth that arose from the economic boom of the late nineteenth century, were U.S. citizens by birth, but their worldview was molded by long stints of service abroad in Latin America and Europe. Although both husband and wife died more than forty years before DOML surged into being, the bequests that they framed for Dumbarton Oaks enabled the creation of the series. Rohan Narayana Murty (1983–), although Indian and not American, received his higher education stateside at Cornell and Harvard. All four libraries give expression to a radically and readily distinguishable model, for better or worse, from the state-backed group endeavors that have long constituted the 48 The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library norm in Europe. None of us who oversee the libraries control sufficient discretionary funding to underwrite multiyear research pursued by teams, although most of us can dispense modest incentives that may tip marginally the choices made by individual researchers. The medieval initiative saw its three maiden volumes roll off the presses in 2010. In its chronological ambit, DOML spans the gap between European cultures covered by the series that flank it. This is not to insinuate that matters are entirely straightforward, when on the contrary they fall sadly short of that state. The periodization of the Middle Ages poses challenges at both extremes of the timeline. LCL, as originally dreamed in 1911, was to have integrated writings in the classical languages of Greek and Latin well beyond antiquity (and classicism), all the way up to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. That unduly hopeful ambition soon had to be curbed by shedding nearly a thousand years. On the Greek side, LCL stretched to engulf Procopius; on the Latin, Bede. But both of these writers now linger as odd men out in the authorial lineups and historical boundaries of the series. Since the advent of DOML, the unwritten agreement has been that LCL will embrace non-Christian writers but surrender Christian ones to DOML. This approach accords loosely with one tendency in delimiting Classical Latin: the definition that informs the Oxford Latin Dictionary extends to 200 CE, while rigorously excluding vocabulary pertaining to Christianity. LCL asserts dominion well beyond that date, but it is unlikely to lay claim to further Christian Latin authors beyond those who have already been incorporated. Poets and prose writers of late antiquity who were pagan or at least not demonstrably Christian form a gray area. An example would be the Platonist Calcidius, who translated from Greek the first section of the Timaeus and commented upon it: LCL ceded him happily to DOML. At the other terminus of the Middle Ages, ITRL has staked out Boccaccio, who arguably has as ample justification to be branded medieval as Renaissance or even humanist. If the Renaissance arrogates Boccaccio unto itself, it ought to take the Black Death as part of the package. Medievalists will happily throw in witch hunts at no charge, as a bonus. To confer upon DOML a backbone of weighty offerings across the first several publication seasons, I fixed upon the expedient of matching the Latin of the Bible with the English of the Douay Rheims. Someday transposing the accepted edition of the Vulgate into up-to-date English 49 Jan M. Ziolkowski would make sense, but it would call for greater resources than were forthcoming to us. Over the centuries, kings, popes, and religious orders have had the bottomless coffers and endless personnel for the multiyear immensity of editing and translating the Sacred Scriptures afresh, but such was not an option for DOML. Instead, we relied on two hardworking assistants, first Swift Edgar and then Angela M. Kinney, who coordinated the Latin and English.1 This process, although mostly a routine task of formatting, sometimes compelled editorial intervention to reconstruct the readings in the learned language that the late sixteenthand early seventeenth-century translators had selected from within the manuscripts at their disposal. Spatially, what is the circumference of DOML? For a long while, the Middle Ages were judged to be exclusively European. Later the quality of being medieval was sometimes made synonymous with a type of feudalism that has surfaced on other continents, so that the feudal culture of shogun Japan could be likened to that of medieval Europe. Similarly, Russia could be argued to have persisted until the nineteenth century where the West had been until the Renaissance. Not all regions or areas of scholarship have wanted to be absorbed within this ever more inclusive or expansionist image of the era. Daily I walk past a plaque, to the north of the main entrance to Dumbarton Oaks, that inscribes as mission statement “that the continuity of scholarship in the Byzantine and mediaeval humanities may remain unbroken to clarify an everchanging present and to inform the future with wisdom.” Even so, I grapple every so often with a few senior scholars of Byzantium who toggle between decrying inattention from medievalists to their area of studies and distrusting gestures of heartfelt welcome from these seeming siblings. Happily, Byzantinists at earlier stages in their development lack such ambivalence. It will be interesting to see how the current move toward the so-called global medieval will be greeted by all possible candidates for absorption into the ever more megalo Middle Ages—and 1 As what could be considered the heroic phase of the series progressed, Raquel Begleiter took on the responsibility as Assistant Managing Editor for drawing up guidelines, codifying policies, mediating with the editors and translators, and otherwise managing the workflow. She oversaw the construction of the DOML website. After she left her position for law and business school, Nicole Eddy stepped into the role of Managing Editor. 50 The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library how much of the globe outside western Europe wants and is willing to be medievalized. At the start, DOML was a trinity of Byzantine Greek, Medieval Latin, and Old English. As the third designation indicates, from the outset the Library has not been restricted to the afterlife of what were once upon a time classical languages: it has encompassed vernaculars. To coverage of literatures from the Middle Ages belonging to these three branches of Indo-European (Greek, Italic, and Germanic), it is poised to append a fourth offshoot in medieval Iberia, preliminarily restricted to the Romance languages but eventually perhaps expanded to subsume the Semitic ones of Arabic and Hebrew too. DOML today totals fifty-five volumes, a tenth of LCL. The younger emulator shares three goals with its elder exemplar: to make texts readily approachable in both content and price to a general readership of English speakers, while also meeting the standards of scholars; to equip non-specialist readers with the particulars needed to apprehend and appreciate the text; and to keep titles in print for a long time. How did DOML originate? In the 1990s and early 2000s, yours truly twice made unceremonious pitches to representatives of Harvard University Press for the establishment of a bilingual series that would serve functions for the Middle Ages equivalent to what LCL did for antiquity. In neither instance did the parleys proceed beyond sketching vaguely which languages and literatures would be countenanced or what the constitutional structure for the editorial process would be. Still more naïvely, I made no effort to ascertain where funding to undergird such an ambitious enterprise could be netted. Inexperienced and insouciant, I assumed overoptimistically that the venture would pay for itself. Both proposals, if casual oral presentations tendered over informal lunches can be glorified with that noun, made no headway. On 1 July 2007 my first five-year term began in the directorship of Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. By then I had deepened and heightened my sense of the resources that LCL had presupposed for its inauguration close to a century earlier and that it had sustained and even increased over the long interim. Simultaneously, I had gained familiarity with more of the ups and downs in its evolution since 1911. Thanks to having been embedded in Classics at Harvard as professor (assistant, associate, and full), I had heard tell that the operation had risked being sold off by the University Press while my 51 Jan M. Ziolkowski predecessor in Medieval Latin, Herbert Bloch (1911–2006), served as a Trustee (1964–73) and that in the same capacity (1973–2004) the chair who hired me into the Department of the Classics, Zeph Stewart (1921– 2007), had restored the Library to financial solvency (and then some). I had procured a rough understanding of the phases through which the series had passed to secure its present stature of scholarly credibility, when many classicists remote from Harvard Square voice respect and gratitude for its existence that would have been inconceivable a half century ago. Within my bailiwick of Medieval Latin, it did not escape me that German speakers had a small number of bilingual editions in orange mass-market paperbacks distributed by Reclam and Francophones, grander works of affordable scholarship put out in orange and green covers by Les Belles Lettres. In both cases, the written father tongue from the Middle Ages was printed on the left side and the spoken mother tongue from our own times on the right. In melancholy contrast, English-language retail outlets could stock nothing for the two languages equivalent in inexpensiveness or availability. The yellow-jacketed Oxford Medieval Texts, a continuation of a series formerly published by Nelson’s, have long purveyed top-notch texts and translations, but at top dollar (or pound sterling) too. For a couple of decades, Cambridge Medieval Classics (1994–2005), produced by Cambridge University Press under the editorship of my Doktorvater Peter Dronke (1934–), made available an attractive cross-section of literature from Latin and Greek from the millennium from 350 to 1350, but not cheaply enough to serve students, not in satisfactory number to have achieved critical mass, and not possessing the stabilizing force and funding from having an endowment or an endowed organization behind it. In due course, the Cantabrigian experiment folded—but the parabola of its trajectory taught one former dissertation writer much about how to approach a sequel. Here and there, publishing houses in Europe and the Americas have come out with sporadic books with Latin and, to a decidedly lesser extent, Greek texts from the Middle Ages in facing-page format, with the original languages on the verso and English on the recto, but beyond being few and far between, these publications have had diminished effect for being scattered across the marketplace, with no standardization. Some were issued by prominent trade presses, such as Penguin; others, by university ones; and still another scattering by a galaxy of independent operations. 52 The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library None were guaranteed to stay in print, many were priced for acquisition by libraries but not individual purchasers, and all of them looked isolated rather than cohering as a uniform product line. In the year before being appointed to head Dumbarton Oaks, I broached the notion of a series to its outgoing director. He wisely held his tongue and let the idea ride. Then, almost as soon as I stepped into his intimidating shoes in 2007, I entered official negotiations with the Press. The institutional backing of the well-funded institute was an immediate open sesame—as was the engagement of a supportive acquiring editor, Sharmila Sen,2 with the intellectual wherewithal, professional dynamism, and personal enthusiasm to advocate for the undertaking. Although anything but a card-carrying medievalist, she had fond memories of Old English from her graduate studies in New Haven and acknowledged the need for both conservation and innovation from her teaching in the English department at Harvard. Before long, the Finance Director and I traveled to Cambridge for a meeting to formalize arrangements for the foundation of DOML.3 The Library, although published by Harvard University Press, is closely tied, as its name signals, to the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC. Constitutionally, the two have been conveniently connected since their inception: the paid Director of the institute has been the unpaid General Editor of series. This coincidence, unlikely to recur anytime soon after my directorship, has obviously facilitated relations between the institution and the series: the two officeholders cherish the most cordial relations, and the Director never rejects a reasonable petition from the General Editor. What drove my interest in embarking upon the venture or adventure? One objective was institutional, while the other related to the whole realm of medieval studies. As the leader of Dumbarton Oaks, I was propelled by a hankering to spread its fame before a more extensive audience. Despite having existed since 1940 as a site for advanced research under the aegis of Harvard University, its exposure in the media has dropped precipitously. The donors, who exercised substantial influence in shaping its mission over its first three decades, gave the sixteen acres modest renown by allowing it to be used in 1944 for the Dumbarton 2 Sharmila Sen has remained a constant at the Press for the series, flanked capably and generously by first Ian Stevenson and more recently Heather M. Hughes. 3 The agreement was signed with Harvard University Press on 12 June 2008. 53 Jan M. Ziolkowski Oaks Conversations, deliberations that led to the formation of the United Nations. The frequency with which the phrase is encountered has plummeted. It has devolved into being a hidden gem. Such concealment is a status slightly preferable to a pearl in a dung-heap, but still not ideal. Beyond any desire to strengthen brand recognition of Dumbarton Oaks as (in the wonderful phrase of its founders) “a home of the humanities,” the ultimate inspiration for the dual-language array was beyond the shadow of a doubt LCL. All along, I have felt great fortune that DOML has a niche among the progeny of the Loebs. Harvard University Press has headline-grabbers, such as the 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. These titles matter: they could be likened to awe-inspiring new pledges of funds to the university as a whole. To persist in a likeness that nods to the French economist, the Press stands in need not just of bestsellers, but also of long-term cultural capital— the stabilizing gravitas of the past. In a sense, LCL, ITRL, DOML, and MCLI bear a resemblance to the overall endowment.4 My undergraduate and graduate years fell during the deepest trough in the prestige of LCL, when puns ran rampant that dilated the founder’s name as “low-ebb” or that medicalized the reliance upon trots or cribs by slurring the users for having subjected themselves to a “Loebotomy.” Classics professors no doubt owned the little green and red volumes but kept them punctiliously secreted from the inquisitive eyes of students and colleagues. To translate the crisis once again into the figurative language inspired by economics, we could describe the 1970s as a disaster of deferred maintenance in the series. For all that, I was profoundly grateful to my father, for inviting me as a teenager to pick out $100 worth of Loebs from the Harvard University Press: he had earned complimentary copies by submitting a reader’s report on a manuscript. At this moment, I cannot recollect all the wares I chose, but I remember relishing owning the complete run of Ovid. The editions for sale back then came nowhere near being flawless, but the relevant Oxford Classical Texts and Teubners (from the Bibliotheca Teubneriana) would have exceeded my wherewithal as a teenager, not only in my restricted budget for book-buying but probably also in my limited capacity for fathoming the ins and outs of their critical apparatuses. 4 54 I owe the rudiments of this metaphor to none other than Sharmila Sen. The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library The translations suffered from even more imperfections than did the presentation of the Latin. Thinking back on the blemishes of Loebs fifty years ago accords solace for the shortcomings of DOMLs today. LCL did not emerge at 500-plus listings in one fell swoop. Likewise, it did not attain its present-day grade of excellence from the very start. In the early years its stable of translators featured a host of also-rans. In addition, it resorted in occasional cases to the expedient of reprinting lightly modified English from as far back as the sixteenth century. Another inspiration for DOML was ITRL, at the serried blue ranks of which I gaped (and continue to goggle) with undiluted admiration. In short order, it became apparent that DOML would gain from economy of scale by adopting for its volumes the identical dimensions. By using the same-sized paper, we could purchase our stock in larger bulk at lower prices. The page sides in Loeb volumes measure 6.375” high by 4.25” wide, so as to fit—according to ideals of a century ago that may seem equally quaint and exclusionary—within a gentleman’s pocket. In the meantime, gentility, clothing, and reading habits have altered so much that the books in ITRL and DOML have opted for a more spacious trim of 8” by 5.25”. To risk anachronism by drawing a comparison to consumer electronics, we resolved to inch closer to a small tablet than an oversized smartphone. In compensation for reduced portability, the dimensions facilitate layout of text: the more commodious format allows verse such as dactylic hexameter to be accommodated more easily without spawning run-ons that spill into second lines. The enlarged size is only one symptom of the care expended upon the design of the books, to ensure a beauty that enhances the reading experience: these hardbacks transmit the stuff of rumination, slow food for thought. The boards are bound in purple, a hue of exceptional prominence in Byzantine culture. The wrapper is a metallic gold that shouts out the luxury that elicits the exclamation c’est byzance in French.5 Each volume sports a ribbon, the color of which betokens the language of the subseries: purple signifies Byzantine Greek; red, Medieval Latin; and blue, Old English. The books are seductive. For the aesthetic care and craft in the conception of the books as physical objects, thanks go to Harvard University Press, in the persons of Sharmila Sen and colleagues. 5 The only reaction to the dust jacket that a Byzantinist uttered to me was a complaint calling for its redesign: the wrapper discolored when clasped on half-hour walks in the heat and humidity of Washington’s summer. 55 Jan M. Ziolkowski They set for themselves a timeframe of both now and forever—of being at once modern and timeless. Some people may snap up these hardcovers as surrogates for actual reading: like their equivalents in the Library of America, the books foster fantasies of leisure, maybe non-existent, for curling up and reading. But the volumes are meant first and foremost to be perused and not to be surrogates. A conscious effort has been made in the structuring of the contents to make communing with the text and translation as elegantly and enticingly uncomplicated as possible. Toward the end of this simplicity, notes are provided at the back, while both the original language and the English are kept unencumbered by superscript numbers for footnotes. Annotation at the feet of pages may devolve into functioning as a form of armor (or perhaps athletic supporters) to shield scholars from hurtful blows. The symbolic systems for documentation and textual criticism can make a poetic text resemble symbolic logic, mathematics theorems, or mathematical economics. Instead, the explanations in DOML are pitched at non-specialists. They are supposed to deliver what a general reader needs for making sense of the text, not what a specialized researcher wishes to convey about an interpretation of it. To advanced scholars who are keen to accompany what they regard as a barebones edition and translation, I have been delighted to offer our authors recourse to a supplementary series. In volumes of exactly the same size and appearance as the usual ones, it is feasible to deposit the heavy-gauge content of a full-bore philological edition or commentary that cannot be sanctioned within DOML. To assist in determining what sort of information is warranted or not in the notes, summer interns—intelligent undergraduates or graduate students—perform as guinea pigs (if such rodents can master literacy) by trudging through drafts before the final files are transmitted to the Press for touch-up copyediting and page spreads. Translators have universally expressed appreciation for the reactions and guidance, since many have become accustomed unconsciously to communicating only with other scholars. In referring to book series, the term library does not denote a building but instead a gathering of texts. LCL assembles writings in the classical languages of Greek and Latin. Although at first the aspiration may be to constitute a reference library that assimilates everything 56 The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library written on the subject, the reality of sheer quantity strikes home and inflicts the necessity of preferences and selectivity. Thus, a Library of this sort implies a canon. The activity of curation is much in vogue these days. Culture-seekers, like consumers of all sorts, crave the direction of likeminded pundits who will help them figure out where to deploy their money and minutes most fruitfully. I wish I could assert that we editors and editorial board members deserved to be called curators (or as medievalists should we insist upon curates as our honorific?), but too much is too happenstance about what does and does not undergo the bookish apotheosis of emerging in DOML. If only I could maintain plausibly that we drew up lists of desiderata a decade ago, homed in on perfect editors and translators subsequently, and checked them off item by item in the intervening years. Alas, the reality of what has appeared bears little relation to the pipedreams of yore. From 2010 until today, DOML has had three editorial boards, each with a distinct collective character that corresponds to the essence of the intellectual province that it represents. The Byzantine Greek Editor has been Alice-Mary Talbot, the Medieval Latin, Danuta Shanzer; and the Old English, Dan Donoghue. The only retiree in this troika has been the first-mentioned, who has toiled fulltime on the Greek series and has been assigned institutional office space. In her modesty she ascribes her success as lead Editor to the spare time she has had as a retiree to lavish upon the nitty-gritty of editing, and she has intimated that the same arrangement would bring advantage to the other series. Over much of her decade-long tenure she has been flanked by a Byzantinist graduate student who has worked halftime in the editorial process. Across the three areas, appreciable care has been required to identify board members with the qualifications and willingness to contribute. Retired professors have been essential for their industry and intelligence in evaluating submissions of others, as well as in making those of their own. The importance of such emeriti owes partly to a decline in numbers and training of younger philologists, but also to the craving that wells up in academics (even the vegetarians) for the meat and potatoes of editing, translating, and close reading. These activities loom large among the enticements that attract many in languages and literatures to university life, but later we are often impeded from pursuing them much by other obligations that the profession imposes as it is currently constituted. 57 Jan M. Ziolkowski An exacerbating factor is that early-career academics must be warned strongly against making an edition the core of either their dissertations or their first books. Editing has gone from being perilous to being utterly doomed, as the challenge of explaining what it entails has risen: scribbling an introduction to a reissue of Billy Budd, scooping up and revising the proceedings of a conference, and soldiering through the collation of twenty manuscripts are all described in English by one and the same word. Against this backdrop, I counsel tenure-track assistant professors to sign a contract with us only if the outcome can be a complement to a scholarly monograph—and only if the would-be editor and translator commands the necessary expertise. In such circumstances, a volume in DOML, even if by definition text and translation, and bearing the prestigious imprint of Harvard University Press, can supplement nicely a conventional “tenure book.” In all three boards we have prided ourselves upon including international representation, although the only one with many non-native English speakers has been the Byzantine. The three advisory boards, which are unremunerated and called upon infrequently for timeconsuming labor, have even more non-anglophone members. The fantasy of enlisting non-natives to be translators by pairing them with natives has been fulfilled, but only seldom. My role as General Editor has been to ensure that our edifice of communal enlightenment and wisdom soars like a skyscraper under rapid construction, while preventing it from collapsing into a Babel of mutually unintelligible policies and practices. Although fervently committed to the Library as an instrument for the advancement of research and the perpetuation of philology, I champion the elusive general reader with tiresome intensity. Now and then that vociferous advocacy lands me in a precarious situation, since specialists remain who regard popularity or even mere readability as concessions or failures. The imperatives of constructing an academic career nowadays— especially the intensity of specialization and “publish-or-perish”— drive researchers from editing and translating, especially major titles. Sometimes the deterrent is that the texts have received considerable attention from past luminaries: tampering with the magnum opus of this or that big name takes as its prerequisite courage. In other cases, the pieces have not yet been edited adequately, but survive in so many codices that decades might be the indispensable preliminary for sorting 58 The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library out their filiation and editing them properly. Whatever the causes, it has been an ongoing struggle in the Greek and Latin subseries to get the bigticket items into the DOML roster. Greater passion has been shown for compositions with more restricted manuscript and editorial traditions. We have reached determinations on a case-by-case basis about the gains a projected volume will bring to the field. Does the “value added” arise from the edition contributing something new to the advance of knowledge? The translation? Both? Has the text been esteemed by many, or has no one apart from the would-be translator been disposed to deem it a valuable find and worthwhile read? The Greek subseries brought up the rearguard in putting out volumes, but since in 2012 it has turned them out at a regular clip. It has steered clear of the few big-name authors and texts in Byzantine studies, on the grounds that they have been translated already, such as The Secret History and other writings of Procopius and The Alexiad of Anna Komnene (the Byzantine princess and historian formerly known as Comnena), or that they were written in the vernacular Greek language, such as the epic Digenes Akrites (the title is spelt variously). Instead, it has constructed a cornucopia of genres to convey the marvelous multiplicity of literature from the Eastern Roman Empire. The Byzantine wing of DOML has been consistently the most steadfastly erudite, with heated internal debates over citations, notes, apparatus, and even proposed titles. After pitched battles, two of the last-mentioned were demoted to subtitles because they were Latin descriptors too concise to be intelligible to non-specialists, and others contained Greek technical terms that had to be translated or glossed. Once a translator’s monastic name had to be swapped for his legal one, for the sake of staving off despair among bibliographers. By the same token, Greek volumes have shattered all records across DOML for the total number of editors and translators who participate, which has multiplied the disputes over title pages. None of this is to criticize: led by Talbot (what would the proper Attic be for dux femina facti?), the Byzantinists have brought forth well-received volumes of the highest scholarly caliber. Each subseries has had a bestseller, and the Greek one has been the intriguingly named Ambigua of Maximos the Confessor. The customer reviews on amazon.com bring home what an appreciative cult has mushroomed around these two tomes. 59 Jan M. Ziolkowski If the Medieval Latin subseries may be conceived as a vertebrate, its spinal column comprises the six volumes of the Vulgate Bible. Other bones and organs have arrived in a couple of dozen other volumes, many of them hefty. They range temporally from the fourth through the thirteenth century—from late antiquity into scholasticism. The broad sweep has posed challenges for codifying stylistic consistency within the subseries. Conventions and expectations for textual editions of late antiquity differ from those of medieval. For the early centuries the policy of homogenizing spelling to what is customary for Classical Latin causes few problems, whereas forcing it on later written works can be awkward: wordplay and rhymes can disappear. Worse still, an editorial split opens up between those who believe in collation to reconstruct a conjectural original on the basis of common error and those who prefer to honor individual manuscripts faithfully as evidence for the Sitz im Leben of the text as received in a particular place and time. My hunch is that the early nineteenth-century German philologist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) has more devotees among students of the centuries closest to classical antiquity, the later French medievalist Joseph Bédier (1864–1938) among those of the High Middle Ages and beyond. Whatever the case may be, I have elected to license inconsistency and to be deliberately undogmatic by imposing normalization in the overwhelming majority of cases but permitting for the anomalies of single manuscripts in special instances. In the Latin as in its sister Greek subseries, Danuta Shanzer has had to be hardnosed and realistic. We have not been able to populate the shelves with the most recognizable titles. In fact, the names known to the grand publique sometimes turn out to be the least likely to be edited and translated. A case in point: LCL has been prepared all along to cede Bede’s masterwork to DOML, but we have struggled through one prospective editor and translator after another without yet wrestling the Ecclesiastic History of the English People to the ground. The Pentateuch portion of the Vulgate Bible has prevailed as the subseries-wide bestseller, although the two volumes of the Carmina Burana may ultimately usurp that status. The Latin subseries has comprehended its fair share of prose works— and now and again unduly prosaic English. Despite having had gifted translators of poetry, we have had to contend with others who have had tin ears or (to shift substances) who have tended in a reverse alchemy to 60 The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library turn medieval gold into modern woodenness. Beyond questions of style, it has proven surprisingly hard to find translators who have mastered the basics of ecdotics or who even think much about the constitution of texts: editing and textual criticism are studied ever more rarely. In Old English, Dan Donoghue and his board sat down early to figure out how to handle their literary corpus over the long haul. The inaugural volume was The Beowulf Manuscript, which has become the bestseller of both the subseries and of all DOML, now in its fifth printing. It was succeeded in systematic fashion by the entirety of poetry in this early medieval vernacular. Since then, they have been revolutionizing their domain of learning by bringing into print carefully chosen prose texts. DOML could be vital for the future of medieval studies. It makes me feel lucky beyond words that the legacies of the Blisses enabled Dumbarton Oaks to set up the Library many years after their deaths, and that Harvard University Press has backed the enterprise unwaveringly. I suspect that if I had not promoted the commencement of DOML at the instant when I did, the uncertainties of the financial crisis and of digitization might have ruled it out. In the interval, the unknowns of digital publication have only grown. Having lauded the physical objects, I should confess to feeling an urgency about piggybacking on the investment of the LCL and moving to present all our many words on a digital platform—once we have enough volumes in each of the subseries to justify the initial outlay of time and dollars. If one pressure arises from navigating the peculiarities of copyright as it applies to long-ago texts, another stems from the opposite way of thinking that prevails in the open-access mentality. Who will procure books, and who will recoup the expenses that ensue from making them, if everyone expects to obtain their content gratis, and if governments dictate that the results of the research they fund cost nothing? The bilingual series are a constituent of reception studies. This one enriches the humanities as a whole by putting a sampling from the vast variety of the Middle Ages on display before prospective readers. DOML enables the publication of entirely new translations that never existed before or greatly improved ones that will supplant obsolete or inferior ones. By its format, it stimulates engagement with the source languages or at a minimum reminds people that the translations rest upon something exotically different. For translators and editors, the series affords 61 Jan M. Ziolkowski an opportunity to acquire, sharpen, or practice skills and keep alive philology. In Classics LCL coexists to mutual benefit with Oxford Classical Texts, Teubners, Les Belles Lettres, and other series. The same could and should be the case in medieval studies. The more curiosity among generalists and students that is stirred by a series such as DOML, the more scholarly buyers and libraries will be drawn to the more expensive products of for-profit philological series released in Europe. The generosity of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica is to be lauded, in making the original-language texts freely and readily usable by others. The attempt to treat pre-modern texts as property and commodities in a zero-sum game will hurt everyone and must be resisted. Investing to bring out affordable dual-language editions and to make them obtainable worldwide is not an act of cultural imperialism but a votive of cultural philanthropy. Reasoned and informed intercultural dialogue matters more than ever, whether it happens face to face or whether it results from placing languages across from each other in a printed book or on the screen. What we have striven to accomplish within these covers, as in the bilingual libraries themselves, counts. All four series that have propelled this compendium of essays seek to effect an intersection between specialists and nonspecialists, between ivory towers and ordinary people. The libraries are an elevator that enables those who regard themselves as towering intellects to avoid turret syndrome, while encouraging outsiders to partake of the knowledge being accumulated within. The facing-language collections furnish a corrective to the widespread condition of being ignorant about other cultures, both foreign and not—and those of the past stand in even more acute need of advocacy than do others of the present. Now more than ever, the world thirsts for all the remedies against ignorance that we can imagine and produce. Renaissances, both the twelfth-century one and its more famous fourteenth-century successor, have originated in books and other languages. Our own rebirth will be different again, but this time too libraries may have their contribution to make. 62