Los Adagia de Erasmo en español (Lorenzo Palmireno, 1560) y en portugués (Jerónimo Cardoso, 1570)

Abstract

Erasmus' Adagia, though published many times in Europe since 1500, were not printed in Spain in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Yet they were known. In 1560, the Aragonese Lorenzo Palmireno, professor at the 'Estudi General' of Valencia, wrote a book for the teaching of Latin in which, to the hypothetical question by a student about the possible adaptation of Castillan proverbs to Latin, he answers that they need not be translated literadly but rather by their meaning. To illustrate his point, he produces the free translation into traditional Castillan of some 200 Latin adagia. It so happens that these adagia come from Erasmus' repertoire without acknowledging it. Then, in 1570, in Portugal, Jerónimo Cardoso published a Dictionarium latinolusitanicum in which many entries are illustrated with examples taken precisely from Erasmus' Adagia, again without mentioning the source—possibly out of dread of the Inquisition. This Portuguese adaptation is generally more literal than Palmireno's. The Romance texts of both authors provide us with a fair comparative corpus of Iberian Romance languages.