Translation and self-censorship between the Venetian Buovo d'Antona and Elia Levita's Bovo-Bukh

Abstract

After the 17^th Ecumenical Council came to an end in 1449, the Papacy became an absolutistic State which could and would play a prominent role in Italian politics. As a result, Venice, fearing the Ottoman expansionism and wishing to end a century of conflicts, shifted towards a position of consequence with Catholic orthodoxy. Upholding this ideology became a priority as the introduction of the printing press expanded the readers’ numbers.

An example of preventive self-censorship is to be found in the incunabula which, throughout the 1480s, diffused the vernacular adaptation of an ancient Anglo-Norman chivalry poem—Buovo d’Antona. The text is interpolated with confessional invocations whose purpose was to prevent allegations of licentiousness of the matter.

About 1507, scholar Elia Levita adapted the poem into Yiddish-Taytsh. He would publish it in print in Isny 34 years later. For his Jewish readers, he found it necessary to cancel or change those confessionally biased fragments.

The purpose of the paper is to compare Buovo d’Antona with Levita’s Bovo-Bukh in search for those narrative differences which can be considered as preventive self-censorship.