Multi-version texts and translators' anxieties: Imagined readers in John Florio's bilingual dialogs

Abstract

This essay analyzes the concerns for the reader that emerge in John Florio´s bilingual dialogs (First Fruits, of 1578, and Second Fruits, of 1591), placing them in the context of multilingual translations´ production in Renaissance Europe. Following in the steps of a long manuscript tradition, many early modern printers prepared multilingual editions of such diverse works as the Bible, scientific treatises, dictionaries, proverb and dialog collections,Roman and Greek classics, Aesopic tales, pamphlets, and even complete romances.This practice also seems to have been meaningful for translators, copyists, and editors, all of whom took great care to correlate different versions, using a variety of formats and strategies. Yet, as we move forward in time--and perhaps in consonance with the increased circulation brought by the print industry--we begin to see in some of the prefatory materials of these works a certain anxiety about who their readers would be, and, in particular, about what gender, age, status, position,or office theses readers might have. The present analysis of these concerns, as they appear in Florio´s dialogs in particular, is inscribed in a reflection on the constraints of monolingual textual models.