TRANSLATION AS RESPITE FROM INSANITY
ALFIERI, Vittorio, and Charles LLOYD, translator.
The Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri; translated from the Italian … In three Volumes …
London, Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown … 1815.
Three volumes, 12mo; lightly browned, a few spots; nonetheless a very good set in later nineteenth century half plum morocco with marbled sides, gilt; joints and corners rubbed.
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The Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri; translated from the Italian … In three Volumes …
First edition of this translation of Alfieri’s (1749–1803) tragedies into English, undertaken by the poet Charles Lloyd ‘on the suggestion of a friend whose judgement I highly respect’, likely Robert Southey, whom he addresses as his ‘sponsor’ in the ‘Dedicatory Sonnet’.
Lloyd held Southey in high esteem and benefited from his friendship through testing times. Lloyd’s temperament was always difficult, but in 1811 he began to suffer serious auditory delusions which clouded the rest of his life in periodic spells of insanity. De Quincey suggests that he began the Alfieri project to divert his mind from the onset of madness, and held that Lloyd was amongst the most interesting men he had known. Lloyd himself acknowledges that ‘the greater part [of the translation] has been executed when a state of ill health, and much suffering, made it difficult for me to execute anything at all. I do not offer this by way of apology, for it was at my option to print or not; but I mention it as an explanation, if at times my language may have fallen beneath that level of correctness and perspicuity, which, doubtless, it would have been my ambition to have attained’. A year later, Lloyd would be removed to The Retreat, a Quaker psychiatric hospital in York.
Here, he explains his aim to ‘catch perspicuously the general meaning of Alfieri, without at all binding myself down for a literal word-for-word translation, or to a close imitation of his style’. This is indeed a work of some poetic licence, although he maintains the original’s eight dedications to various nobles, including Charles I ‘an unfortunate and dead king’, and General Washington ‘the most illustrious and free citizen’. These, especially the final dedication to ‘The future People of Italy’, written in Paris in 1789, convey Alfieri’s hopes for the rousing lessons of antiquity.
