Power and style

“The PRINCE,” even more than most texts, calls for a good and faithful translator. Machiavelli’s political theories are presented in a language that veers from arcane terminology to a tangy vernacular and in a tone that mingles high-flown exhortation with biting sarcasm. This mix is what makes Machiavelli an artist as well as a political analyst, and one of the finest prose stylists in the Italian language. Attentive readers may not be surprised to learn that when he died, in 1527, he was much more renowned for racy, fast-paced comedies, such as “La Mandragola,” than he was as a political theorist.

But if Machiavelli’s variegated prose is a pleasure for the reader, it must be a nightmare for the translator. How to find the right balance between readability and pedantic accuracy? One of the problems dogging a translator is the host of terms -- virtu, fortuna, necessita -- that constantly appear in “The Prince” but whose exact meanings philosophers and political scientists still wrangle over. One of Machiavelli’s earlier translators, Allan Gilbert, was tempted to throw up his hands in despair: “To expect from a translation the effect of an original is to demand an English ‘Prince’ written by Machiavelli himself.”

Luckily, Machiavelli has been blessed with able translators, and readers of “The Prince” are spoiled for choice. Peter Constantine’s new translation is a welcome addition, but the claim by the publishers that it’s the “first major translation in more than twenty-five years” is an exaggeration. The translations read by a previous generation of students -- those by George Bull, James B. Atkinson, Leo Paul de Alvarez and Harvey C. Mansfield -- may now be approaching literary middle age, and Russell Price’s for Cambridge University Press came out in 1988. But the 1990s also saw translations from Paul Sonnino, Stephen J. Milner and David Wootton; in this decade we have had two more, both from major presses. William J. Connell, who translated “The Prince” as part of the Bedford Series in History and Culture, used his knowledge of Machiavelli’s local Tuscan idiom to give a more authentic rendition of the text. Oxford University Press issued Peter Bondanella’s version, which, like Connell’s, comes with maps, copious notes and a comprehensive bibliography. The field, then, is not exactly wide open.

Constantine, however, is even more well-equipped than many of his predecessors to cope with the peppery elegance of Machiavelli’s prose. An award-winning translator of Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, Mann and Voltaire, he comes to “The Prince” fresh after translating last year’s “The Essential Writings of Machiavelli,” also published by the Modern Library. That volume is a choice collection of Machiavelli’s works, including a vigorous and lively new translation of “La Mandragola.”

As we would expect of someone with an ear attuned to literary nuances, Constantine has done a superb job of creating a clear and highly readable version of “The Prince.” He condenses many of Machiavelli’s longer sentences, and his deft phrasing makes for a more streamlined version than either Connell’s or Bondanella’s. Here, for example, is Connell’s translation of Machiavelli on Pope Alexander VI: “Never was there a man who had greater efficacy in his assertions; and the greater the oaths with which he affirmed something, the less he observed it.” In Constantine’s snappier version this becomes: “Never has a man made more grandiose promises or sworn greater oaths, and kept them less.”

The price of this agreeable concision is occasionally a depletion of the full range of Machiavelli’s meaning. The sparseness of the footnotes and lack of a glossary are, from a pedagogical point of view, this edition’s weakness. Unlike the Connell and Bondanella translations, the Modern Library keeps the critical apparatus to a minimum. There is a fine, if brief, introduction by Albert Russell Ascoli, who sketches out the political crises that gave rise to “The Prince.” Suggestions for further reading are included at the end, though this list rather perversely points readers in the direction of J.G.A. Pocock’s “The Machiavellian Moment” and Sebastian de Grazia’s “Machiavelli in Hell,” two books that are completely unreadable to all but the most painstakingly initiated. At the same time, curiously, it passes over the best short exposition of Machiavelli’s thought, Quentin Skinner’s “Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction,” a masterpiece of clarity and compression.

The Modern Library may not have done enough to usurp other translations on reading lists and in the classroom; but for those who simply want to see for themselves how, 500 years after they were written, his words can still shock and resound, Constantine’s finely honed translation comes about as close as we’re likely to get to the elusive “ ‘English ‘Prince’ written by Machiavelli himself.”