Machiavelli's friend
Sir: Mr Lamer (Letters, 31 January) must have an odd sense of English—especially odd in an historian—if he considers incitation, obligated, a new regime, minimal, and evalu- ate as 'modern jargon.' Shall I point out the presence of these words in the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Webster, and in the 1616 edition of Fenton's transla- tion of Guicciardini's Storia? . . . Or did these authors also have a 'passion for modern jargon'?
One man's infelicities are another man's felicities. Mr Lamer proposes a number of variant readings; or contents himself with questioning mine without proposing his own. We could argue about that until the cows come home. De gustibus . . . After all it's a big text; I translated almost half a million words of Guicciardini and I don't pretend to infallibility. We might have amiable differ- ences; and I am sure that I could improve some of my readings (within my own phil- osophy of translation), goaded by Mr Larner's very different point of view. That's all right.
But it's not all right when an historian who claims competence in sniffing out the nuances of English prose, lights smokepot sentences which pervert the truth. Mr Lerner asserts flatly that he did not borrow the second citation of his review from my ver- sion, that he 'silently amended' my text . . . 'in the interests of clarity and grammar . . I have re-checked his citation against both instances in my book in which the passage occurs : in the introduction where it was correctly printed, and in the text (p. 142) where, by typographical error, the phrase 'as a result of' was omitted. (In his review Mr Lamer does not specify from which of these two passages he was quoting.) Well now, with the exception of substitut- ing 'through' for 'as a result of' (if from the introduction; or adding 'through' if from the text), Mr Larner's citation tallies with mine, word for word (in precisely the same order), dash for dash, comma for comma, and most importantly, syntax for syntax (which lends the sentence its unique Guicciardinian flavour and which led Mr Lerner to remark so admiringly in his review about how much of 'the man and his history' was expressed therein). One word substituted (or inserted) in a complex sentence of sixty-five words! — in all other respects a carbon copy!
And Mr Lamer has the effrontery to deny that he was quoting from my version.
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