Damião de Góis's Translation and Commentary on Cicero's De Senectute

Summary

In 1538 Damião de Góis, at the time a student in Padua, wrote two translations which he published through the Venetian firm of Stephano Sabio. They are probably the least well-known of all his works. One of them, a version of the book of Ecclesiastes, disappeared from view completely as soon as it was written. Only one copy of it is known to have survived, in the Codrington Library of All Souls College, Oxford, where it lay, misleadingly catalogued and probably unread for centuries until its chance discovery in 2000. History has been slightly kinder to the translation of De senectute, though it too remains an extremely rare book. It survives in All Souls, where it is bound together with Ecclesiastes. Despite the fact that the two translations were intended to form a pair Catam Maior, ou da Velhiçe (the title Góis gave to De senectute) can also be found, on its own, in the Marciana in Venice. No Portuguese library open to the public has a copy of the 1538 edition, but there is a manuscript of it in the Biblioteca Municipal do Porto. It was reprinted in the nineteenth century and twice very recently.

Góis's translations from Latin have found few readers, yet they have considerable historical interest. It has to be said that, of the two, his Ecclesiastes is the greater achievement. It was a courageous act to make any translation from the Bible into Portuguese, while the introduction and notes which accompany the text reveal an intellectual curiosity and tolerance quite possibly unmatched in sixteenth-century Europe. Góis's enthusiastic admiration for the commentary on the Bible of Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra, and his attempt to reach some kind of accommodation with the work of Luther, place him in the front rank of sixteenth-century Biblical exegesis, not necessarily in terms of profound scholarship, but certainly in openness of spirit.

Cicero was a much less dangerous writer than King Solomon, in the sixteenth century normally regarded as the author of the book of Ecclesiastes. Yet in its own way the version of De senectute is also a considerable achievement. Every translator has a dual role to play as he puts into his own language thoughts originally formulated in a different linguistic and cultural environment.