Richard Armstrong "The First Modern Aeneid: Enrique de Villenaís Eneida of 1428"

         It is not well known in the English-speaking world that the first full translation of the Aeneid into a major European language was done in 1428 by the Aragonese nobleman, Enrique de Aragón, Marqués de Villena (known today as Enrique de Villena).  This Castilian translation was made at the request of Juan II of Navarre, de Villenaís nephew, and is a complete prose translation with extensive original commentary on the first three books.  He was unable to finish the commentary on the remaining books before his death in 1434, but his translation was completely drafted by November 10, 1428.  It was undertaken simultaneously with a translation of Danteís Divine Comedy, which is the first translation of that work as well into another language.

         This paper analyses this translation of the Aeneid in its cultural context as a product of late-medieval / proto-humanistic Spain, and illustrates the following points.
 

1. Spain was a likely place for translations to be made, since the Spanish courts were quite multilingual and had a long tradition of sponsoring the translation of important texts from numerous languages into Castilian (or another vernacular, depending on the region).

    

2. Spain was undergoing a powerful cultural change at this time, however, which was the result of Spanish involvement in Italian politics.  The literature of the tre corone (Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch) was making its first impact on the Spanish courts, and this conditioned the reception of Vergil.  Juan II of Navarre had come upon the character of Vergil in Danteís Divine Comedy, andóstruck by the extravagance of Danteís praise for the Aeneid and its authorócommissioned Enrique de Villena to translate it for him.

    

3. This last detail brings up another major point: though a powerful political presence in Italy, Spain was much inferior to Italy in its Latin literacy, a problem which would remain an embarrassment to Spanish intellectuals and diplomats for many decades to come.  Italian humanists like Bruni, Decembrio, Valla, and Filelfo had much contact with Spanish rulers, but the Spaniards were unable to keep pace with the Latin-language humanism so powerfully present in Italy during this period.  While Italy was enjoying the first fruits of renaissance culture, like translations of Homer and Plato made into Latin, Spain was enjoying a late medieval renaissance of vernacular poetry, termed by Roger Boase the ìtroubadour revival.î  At the Neapolitan court of the Aragonese King Alfonso V el Magnánimo, Italian Latin humanism and the Spanish medieval revival mixed freely, and oddly, together.  De Villena himself presided over the Jochs Florals in Catalonia, a Catalan importation of the ìConsistori de gai saberî of Toulouse, itself a revival of the Occitanian troubadour tradition.

         De Villenaís translation, then, comes at an awkward moment when medieval and renaissance cultures (if such a distinction even makes sense here at all) are so thoroughly confused as to defy any simple historical periodization or characterization.  This translation breaks with the medieval ìretellingsî of the Aeneid precisely in its fidelity to the Vergilian original, which it renders line for line without additions or subtractions into a rather plain Castilian prose.  It does not attempt to assimilate the Aeneid into another genre (as did, for example, the author of the Old French Eneas); rather, De Villena meant the translation, surrounded by his lengthy commentary, to lay bare the ìprovechosa doctrinaî embodied in the Masterís text.  The rationale for such a pedantic translation was that Latin studies in Spain were very weak; yet from this very weakness came the impetus to create a Spanish Aeneid long before the Italiansówho would translate Vergil every imaginable way in the next centuryóattempted such an ambitious project.  De Villenaís translation is thus a fascinating comment on the peculiar cultural situation of Spain in the first half of the 15th century.