Ortensio Lando and the French Version of His Paradoxes

Abstract

Ortensio Lando was an Italian promoter of the thought of Erasmus of Rotterdam and he translated Thomas Moore's Utopia into Italian. Also, he was author of a provocative set of paradoxes (Paradossi, Lyon 1532) that were before long translated into French (Paradoxes, translated by Charles Estienne, Paris 1553), and then into English (The Defence of Contraries, translated by Anthony Munday, London 1593). A contrastive analysis of one of the paradoxes („Better to be a fool than a scholar”) in its original and its French translation displays interesting aspects of text reception. The French translator of the text engages into an intellectual play based on the use of rhetorical devices. The translation is purposefully devoid of any veiled and alluded content of ideological nature, whose presence is deducible in the Italian text.