
Messy handwriting reveals mystery translator: Queen Elizabeth I - the-enemy
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/29/handwriting-identifies-elizabeth-i-tacitus-translation
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devindotcom
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.

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

~~~
rswail
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."

~~~
Goladus
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.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
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.

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dmurray
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.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
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...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7735885/Queen-
Elizabeth-translated-Roman-historian-Tacituss-work-Latin-English-spare-
time.html)

~~~
dmurray
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'".

~~~
NeedMoreTea
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.

~~~
dmurray
> 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...](https://academic.oup.com/res/advance-
article/doi/10.1093/res/hgz112/5640388?searchresult=1)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
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.

------
dmurray
The journal article:

[https://academic.oup.com/res/advance-
article/doi/10.1093/res...](https://academic.oup.com/res/advance-
article/doi/10.1093/res/hgz112/5640388?searchresult=1)

