Self-Translation in the Northern Renaissance: Jan van der Noot’s French Verse

The Brabantian poet Jan van der Noot (1539-95?) wrote in both Dutch and French, and composed several works in both languages. Sometimes the two versions were published separately: the Dutch collection Het Theatre and its French counterpart, Le Theatre, were each printed in London in 1568. More often, the versions appeared alongside each other in bilingual editions: Cort begryp der XII boeken Olympiados / Abregé des douze livres Olympiades (1579), Lofsang van Braband / Hymne de Braband (1580), and various short pieces reproduced in anthologies of Van der Noot’s poetry (1580-95). The present study contends that Van der Noot’s self-translations should be read as translations from Dutch to French, rather than from French to Dutch as scholars have commonly assumed. It examines Van der Noot’s self-translational strategies, focusing in particular on his handling of form and versification, and the role played by paratext and illustrations. In doing so, it offers an alternative perspective on a figure whose translational activity is generally considered to have operated in the opposite direction, introducing innovations into Dutch poetry by imitating the work of Ronsard and the Pléiade.

In the Beginning Was the Image

Renaissance artists represented the Bible as the preeminent monument of classical culture well before humanist scholars began their revolutionary efforts to recover the ancient forms of biblical texts. Once Renaissance humanism and the Reformation turned decisively to biblical philology (and began overturning the authority of the Vulgate Bible and medieval theology), artists supported their creation of innovative conceptualizations of the Bible. Remarkably, the three most influential artists of the Northern Renaissance—Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein the Younger—made profound contributions to all the major Renaissance and Reformation Bibles in Germany and Switzerland and to the biblical humanist movement generally. The chapter concludes with an introduction to the history of biblical humanism, including the emergence of new authoritative Bibles beginning with Erasmus’s first edition of the New Testament in the original Greek.