Aristophanes Redivivus: le Nuvole e il loro primo traduttore occidentale

Aristophanes’s plays, unknown to the Latin Middle Ages, were recovered in Renaissance Italy at the dawn of the Quattrocento. Latin versions were the principal form in which Aristophanes was introduced into the high Latin culture of the Western world. Thanks to the humanist Latin translations of the plays, scholars gained access to the Greek text of Aristophanes, who figured prominently in the educational curriculum of the time. This study focuses on an unpublished and little-known Latin version of Aristophanes’s Nubes (‘The Clouds’), which is preserved in MS Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, philos. et philol. gr. 204, of the mid-fifteenth century. The Greek text is accompanied by an interlinear translation into Latin, made by the Dominican friar and Professor of theology Alessandro da Otranto (1458). This previously neglected manuscript is especially interesting because of the Latin version it contains, since it appears to be among the first ever made of Aristophanes’s Nubes. In this paper, I examine and discuss the various translational strategies employed by Alessandro to make Aristophanes’s fifth-century BC text accessible to a fifteenth-century Latin readership. I also offer a semi-diplomatic edition of the unpublished Latin text.