17^th CENTURY HUNGARIAN TRANSLATIONS OF ANCIENT LATIN AUTHORS
Edited by Gábor Kecskeméti

In 1993, I edited a great volume of old Hungarian translations of school authors. These were translations of some ancient Greek and Roman classical works used everywhere in the schools of Hungary and Transylvania in the late 16^th and all of the 17^th century.

Some hand-written copies of the translations of Horatian, Ciceronian, Vergilian and other works could be found with merged school notes, commentaries and practical exercises. Translating them from the original to the vernacular and reverse, from the original Greek to Latin, from the original verse to Hungarian prose, from Hungarian prose version to a different Latin verse were well-known and highly appreciated exercises. Some of these hand-written copies were used for decades in the same school by different pupils, some of them by different members of the same family, generation to generation. It is not surprising to find hand-written copies that bear the marks of at least three or four hands, making the vernacular text more and more correct, applying Hungarian language inventions for the Latin phrases that had caused troubles for the previous learners. There are copies that were owned by teachers as well, used for correcting and controlling the schoolboys’ private works. It is evident that the good command of Latin language of the Hungarian youth appreciated by a number of declarations of professors of Western universities of the 17^th century was formed by the help of these translations.

Quite different statements can be made of the printed versions of the vernacular translations of classical works of the same period. They evidently show the signs of a traditional school work that taught the translators to express, phrase to phrase, word to word, the correct meaning of the original in Hungarian. But great alterations can be found in the intended function of the publication and the supposed circles of audience. From the very start of the research it could be seen that the printed translations were not mere products of daily school exercises. The publication of these works showed the next step of development in course of using these texts for public aims, and the new type of publicity brought some new circles of audience to that of the schoolboys’.

The printed translations of the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries had a pragmatic function for a broader audience. János Baranyai Decsi translated both the major works of Sallust, i.e. Iugurta and Catilina, to Hungarian in 1596; Pál Háportoni Forró translated the life of Alexander the Great from Quintus Curtius Rufus in 1619. Both printed translations were dedicated to the princeps of Transylvania (to Zsigmond Báthory the first, to Gábor Bethlen the other), and it is clear from their preface that the ideal reader was supposed to be a leader of courtly affairs. A good cortegiano can learn from the reading of these classical historical works the ways of arranging courtly manners, of taking part in a council, of expressing and suggesting his opinion, of exploring the motivations of others, and the way of ideal leadership of an army can be learned from the ancient historians as well.

At the end of the 17^th century some new translations of classics were printed in Hungary and Transylvania. Cornelius Nepos and the Ciceronian Epistolae ad familiares were translated by the Sopron schoolmaster György Balog, while Epitoma of Lucius Annaeus Florus by the Transylvanian Márton Dálnoki Benkő. These publications broadened the public wished to reach to the entire population with the ability of reading Hungarian. The translators stressed that not only noblemen but everybody could found predecessors in the ancient history, and by imitating them could found the ideal ways of his own profession. This precept causes, of course, the increment of moralizing use of the translations. However, in addition to the practical and the moralizing uses of the text, the possibility of a third function was opened also. The history as it is, can be learned from these books; the era starts when knowledge about historical persons, facts and dates becomes to be essential part of being well educated. Dálnoki Benkő gives a chronology of the four empires in his dedication, and in his preface the first Hungarian language systematization of antiquitates can be read. It is the same time when the first initiatives are taken to lead history into schools as an independent discipline. The modification in the function of printed translations of the two schoolmasters shows the pedagogical tendency as the systematic knowledge of sciences starts to be evaluated higher than mere teaching of Latin grammar.

The way these translations were made and the aims they were intended to, could be followed into the 18^th and 19^th centuries and periodically new and newer functions associated with them could be shown. It is only the middle of the 19^th century when the aesthetical oriented reading strategy of these texts (so familiar to us) starts to be well founded and the practical, pragmatic functions become to fade away.

The translations of Greek and Roman authors originated from the practical school exercises, and their practically oriented ways of use determined the functions that the early Hungarian literature theory was able to attribute to the global area of literary activity itself. History of school authors has an inevitable importance concerning the early periods of Hungarian literature and its theory.