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Updated: June 26, 2025
But his translator is of a different order of men, one of the devout votaries of falsehood and concealment; and he has done his best to remove some of the most characteristic touches of Benvenuto's work, regarding them as unfavorable to the Church, which even now in the nineteenth century cannot well bear to have exposed the sins committed by its rulers and its clergy in the thirteenth or fourteenth.
It will be noticed that the translator changes the phrase, "the avarice of the Pastors of the Church," into "the avarice of some ecclesiastics," while throughout the passage, as indeed throughout every page of the work, the vigor of Benvenuto's style and the point of his animated sentences are quite lost in the flatness of a dull and inaccurate paraphrase.
Take, for instance, The Birth-Mark, which we might call the best of the smaller stories, if we had not just said the same thing of Rappaccini's Daughter for so even and complete is Hawthorne's power, that, with few exceptions, each work of his, like Benvenuto's, seems the most characteristic and felicitous.
The book is worse than worthless to students; for it is not only full of mistakes of carelessness, stupidity, and ignorance, but also of wilful perversions of the meaning of the original by additions, alterations, and omissions. The three large volumes contain few pages which do not afford examples of mutilation or misrepresentation of Benvenuto's words.
Such omissions as these deprive Benvenuto's pages of the charm of naïveté, and of the simple expression of personal experience and feeling with which they abound in the original, and take from them a great part of their interest for the general reader.
We might fill page after page with examples such as these of the distortions and corruptions of Benvenuto's meaning which we have noted on the margin of this so-called translation.
We pass over many instances of similar misunderstanding of Benvenuto's easily intelligible though inelegant Latin, to a blunder which would be extraordinary in any other book, by which our translator has ruined a most characteristic story in the comment on the 112th verse of Canto XIV. of the "Purgatory." We must give here the two texts.
However, I am not going to enlarge on Benvenuto's many talents, but to tell you of a wonderful adventure which befell him in the very Castle of St. Angelo he had helped to defend. Those were lawless days, and Cellini was a man of fiery temper, to whom blows came more naturally than patience and forbearance.
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