There has been a fortunate burgeoning of interest in the work and thought of Angelo Ambrogini, Il Poliziano (1454–94) since Alessandro Perosa's 1954 exhibition commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of the poet and scholar's birth. The volume Il Poliziano e il suo tempo (1957) contained contributions by masters such as Augusto Campana and Eugenio Garin, on Poliziano's library and on his social and intellectual context respectively. Ida Maïer's indispensable two volumes on the early biography and manuscripts of Poliziano appeared in the 1960s, and her three-volume Bottega d'Erasmo reprint editions of his Opera Omnia came out in 1971. Perosa himself edited Poliziano's Della Congiura dei Pazzi (Coniurationis Commentarium) in 1968 (Antenore), and his students produced punctilious editions of other texts in the 1970s. Vittore Branca and Manlio Pastore Stocchi, with the posthumously acknowledged participation of Teresa Lodi, published a four-volume work, including an introductory study, facsimile, and edition of Poliziano's manuscript of his unfinished second Centuria in the collection of the Fondazione Cini, Venice, in 1972 (Alinari). Branca republished that introduction and numerous other essays of his own in the Einaudi volume, Poliziano e l'umanesimo della parola, in 1983. At the end of the last century, Peter Godman produced a book-length essay on Poliziano and Machiavelli that attempted to fathom the character of Poliziano in the recent warts-and-all fashion. And the new century has seen the initiation of an edizione nazionale of Poliziano's works, including further collections of studies and editions of particular works. (See especially the review of two of these volumes by Jeroen De Keyser in MEG 17 [2017]: 431–33.)
Now we are fortunate to have an annotated bilingual Latin-English edition of the two volumes of Poliziano's Miscellanea. The editors lean, for the first Centuria, on the Miscomini incunabulum of 1489 overseen by Poliziano and on his bifolium corrections of errata which they have assiduously tracked down and incorporated, and, for the second Centuria, on the edition of Branca and Pastore Stocchi, making some emendations of their own, with reference to the Venice autograph manuscript. Their rather brief introduction grants Poliziano his deserved position as the pioneering philologist of the fifteenth century, and is completed by the notes to the translation, situated at the back of the book. Poliziano's high intelligence and care to philological detail, which distinguish him from most of his contemporaries, are appropriately emphasized, and attention is called to his attempts to integrate philosophical considerations into his historical, lexicographical, and syntactical observations in this remarkable work of scholarship. The editors also do not ignore the fact that Poliziano was applying what I have defined as scientific criteria to his study of texts, as he did to his study of history and philosophy through those texts in his later years (Poliziano nel suo tempo, ed. L. Secchi Tarugi [1996], 371–86 [which they cite]).
Translation is a knotty art. In some senses, it is impossible. However, it is always useful to have handy when approaching an original text in a language other than one's native tongue. One hopes that the translation may accurately reflect the character and thought of the writer of the original text. Upon reading the first sentence of this attempt, one finds Poliziano saying to Lorenzo de’ Medici, his close friend and patron, that as he had been reading his Miscellanea aloud to him, he felt Lorenzo's delight “at the very novelty of their content and the charming variety of the text” (3). Alas, I could not imagine Poliziano calling his own prose “charming,” so I consulted his own words and found he had said, “delectatus arbitror novitiate ipsa rerum et varietate non illepida lectionis” (2); in other words, he had said, in his normal ironic non-modesty, “the not rude—that is, not crude or unpolished—variety of the text.” This is a picayune complaint, but since the locution is in the very first sentence, it assumes a greater importance as the reader's introduction to the character of the author. On the other hand, I do not doubt the translators’ deep knowledge of Latin, and I am very glad to have their guidance in passages I might labor over without their version to compare and discuss in my mind.
One could wish for this volume, as for the other I Tatti Renaissance Library volumes, that the four sets of notes had been placed at the bottoms of the pages—a device rendered far simpler by today's technologies—rather than at the end of the introduction and then at the ends of the volumes. What a nuisance! The notes to the translation, as mentioned earlier, complete the introduction, and belong with the text they annotate. This is supposedly a scholarly series, like its predecessor, the Loeb Classical Library, also published by Harvard, and earlier by Heinemann and Macmillan, and whose notes are where they belong.
