Abstracts
Abstract
Thomas Hobbes had a deep and, to some extent, controversial relationship with both the classics and the classical world. At the beginning of his career as a political thinker, for example, he translated from Greek into English the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Despite this initial involvement, the philosopher subsequently stopped translating, although, several decades later, in the final period of his life, he decided to return to this activity, translating the Iliad and the Odyssey, apparently for his own amusement, nothing more. However, recent literature has suggested that these works, as in the case of his translation of Thucydides’s work, hid another motive: he wanted to continue spreading his political thought in a period when he no longer able to do it in the usual way because of old age, illness, and, above all, censorship. By offering a comparison of the original Greek texts and Hobbes’s translations, this essay aims to show how he handled the political elements of the Iliad and the Odyssey that did not fit his political theory and ran the risk of undermining his attempt to teach moral and political virtue. It focuses in particular on the political question of overlapping sovereignties, with a view to explaining some systematic uses of translation choices that clearly deviate from the Greek.
Keywords:
- Hobbes,
- Homer,
- translation,
- sovereignty,
- king
Résumé
Thomas Hobbes entretenait une relation profonde et, dans une certaine mesure, controversée avec les classiques et le monde classique. Au début de sa carrière de penseur politique, par exemple, il a traduit du grec en anglais l’Histoire de la guerre du Péloponnèse de Thucydide. Malgré cette implication initiale, le philosophe finit par cesser de traduire. Plusieurs décennies plus tard, dans la dernière période de sa vie, il a choisi de revenir à ce genre de travail en traduisant l’Iliade et l’Odyssée, apparemment pour son propre amusement, rien de plus. Cependant, des ouvrages récents avancent l’hypothèse que ces travaux, tout comme sa traduction de l’oeuvre de Thucydide, cachaient un autre motif : il voulait continuer à diffuser sa pensée politique dans un contexte où il ne pouvait plus le faire à sa manière habituelle, à cause de la vieillesse, de la maladie et, surtout, de la censure. En proposant une comparaison entre les textes grecs originaux et leurs traductions hobbesiennes, cet essai vise à montrer comment Hobbes a traité les éléments politiques de l’Iliade et de l’Odyssée qui ne cadraient pas avec sa théorie politique et, par là, risquaient de contrecarrer sa volonté d’enseigner la vertu morale et politique. Il s’attache en particulier à sonder le problème politique des souverainetés superposées, en vue de clarifier certains choix de traduction systématiques qui s’écartent clairement du grec.
Mots-clés :
- Hobbes,
- Homère,
- traduction,
- souveraineté,
- roi
Appendices
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