Messy handwriting reveals mystery translator: Queen Elizabeth I | Hacker News Reader

Messy handwriting reveals mystery translator: Queen Elizabeth I

theguardian.com

56 pointsthe-enemy22 comments

Interesting. I wasn't aware Elizabeth I was such an avid translator. Now I'm interested in her work - though I suppose it would be in the contemporary diction, which will make it somewhat less readable than a modern translation. Still, as Philo points out, she's a better Latinist than most today.

Her translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae is not unrenowned.

An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

I wonder what linguistics professors think of Australian slang:

"Nah yeah" -> Yes

"Yeah nah" -> No

"Yeah nah yeah" -> Yes (very)

That's not Australian-specific. I've heard it a lot in Canada, for example.

funny but just in case anyone takes it literally, "yeah, right" requires some contextual indication of sarcasm to be negative. The same words could be uttered as an expression of impatient agreement rather than disagreement, and most positives can be turned negative with additional context.

This is different from the English double negative which is an application of context-free logic to a statement.

Indeed. This joke doesn't really work written down- it's absolutely possible to say "yeah, right" in an entirely positive way. It's the sarcastic tone when spoken that makes it negative.

The one item I've seen attributing this to a named person, attributed it to a philosophy professor at CCNY. This was in "The Lives They Led" year-end collection of obituaries the NY Times publishes, and it was probably at least five years ago.

That was Sidney Morgenbesser, a philosopher so witty that the remarks he came up with have turned into jokes and proverbs.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/1772...

Have you run across a reference that traces this story? Because you get everything from joke, funny story about the person to true story about the person. In seemingly endless circular reference.

I don't quite follow this. The translation is written neatly, but has some emendments in Elizabeth's hand. So the conclusion is that Elizabeth translated it, had her translation recorded by a scribe (she dictated it? Or wrote it somewhere that does not survive?) and then made corrections when reading it back. It sounds plausible but hardly conclusive - couldn't it be someone else's translation she was working on?

It's also unfortunate that the article doesn't seem to give a relevant image. There's a neatly written page from the Tacitus under discussion, and a separate sample of the queen's handwriting, but I can't see an example of her making an editor's note in the Tacitus book, as the article claims.

The neatly written prose is an example of Elizabeth's idiosyncratic hand. Standards were a little different (far higher) back then.

I really hesitate to do this, as I hate linking or even acknowledging them, but the Mail are often good and heavy with pictures. As they prove to be in this case:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7735885/Quee...

Standards really have changed if that's true. What should I make of this, then?

> While the translation itself is copied in the elegant hand of a scribe, the corrections and additions are in “an extremely distinctive, disjointed hand”.

Is the whole Tacitus page to be considered part of the "corrections and additions"? The Daily Mail article shows an example of a correction, inserting the word "Calme" which is clearly written sloppily even to modern eyes. But it also implies the whole page was written by her, picking out one example of a "hastily formed letter 'd'".

No, it implies the whole page was translated by her, but the main body of the text was transcribed by a scribe.

A scribe would have had better Latin.

I think Grauniad are using clumsy wording as "in the elegant hand of a scribe" can just as easily imply that was her Sunday best script in the style of a scribe, which degrades as she hurries. Which is how I took it. Auntie Beeb brings a tad more precision with:

"But the clinching argument was the handwriting. The translation was copied by one of her secretaries but it is covered in corrections and additions which match the queen's highly distinctive, indeed rather messy, hand."

So I was entirely wrong, and the Mail appear to be making stuff up, which is to be expected. :)

Three sources, three differing results. lol. Dr Philo needs his own blog.

> Three sources, three differing results. lol. Dr Philo needs his own blog.

This provoked me to find the original source published in the Journal of English Studies this week, which appears to be freely available [0].

I haven't read the journal article yet, much like the journalists. It's not clear from the abstract whether the page in question was written by a professional or by the queen. The abstract does mention other stylistic arguments for the queen being the translator.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/res/advance-article/doi/10.1093/res...

Nice, thanks for finding that. Had a lengthy skim of that over lunch, really clear with lots of nice pictorial example snippets to compare, and lots of other circumstantial pointers.

Seems she completely lost her careful italic style that she'd had as a youngster, and often used a secretary to rewrite letters and documents in a better hand. Page in question seems to have been written by her secretary, and amended.

> I really hesitate to do this, as I hate linking or even acknowledging them

They get the most hate for their best reporting, not their worst.

The translation is very bad, and looks almost word for word to the Latin. I'm a little surprised not to see a schoolmaster's corrections on it. I wonder what she conceived this document as.

> They get the most hate for their best reporting, not their worst.

If the Mail's celebrity gossip and baseless muck slinging constitutes their "best reporting" I'm even more glad that I proactively avoid them.

It could have been someone else's but accounts seem to concur that Elizabeth would have been exceptionally able to provide her own translation. There's consistent evidence (as far as I can tell) that she was very bright. I'm not aware of the sources for these claims including the one that she was fluent in French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, German and Greek.

The journal article:

https://academic.oup.com/res/advance-article/doi/10.1093/res...

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