The Prince Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘or padded it out with long sentences or pompous, pretentious words, or any of the irrelevant flourishes and attractions so many writers use; I didn’t want it to please for anything but the range and seriousness of its subject matter.’ I have taken that statement of intention as my guide in this translation, attempting wherever possible to free the text from the archaisms and corrosive quaintness of older English versions, to get to the essential meaning of the original and deliver it, as we say today, but perhaps not tomorrow, straight.
    It isn’t easy. The first problem, and one that sets up all the others, is already there in the title: The Prince . What is a prince for Machiavelli? Well, a duke is a prince. The pope is a prince. A Roman emperor is a prince. The King of France is a prince. The Lord of Imola is a prince.
    This won’t work in modern English. The English have Prince Charles. And the thing about Prince Charles is that he is not King Charles and probably never will be. And even if he were king he would wield no real power, not even the kind of power the pope wields, and we never think of the pope as a king or prince.
    The only other idea we have of ‘the prince’, in English, is Prince Charming. This concept is a long way from the ageing Prince Charles and even further from the kind of prince Machiavelli was talking about. Machiavelli’s word ‘prince’ does not mean ‘the son of the king’, and even less ‘an attractive young suitor’. Machiavelli’s ‘ principe ’ refers generically to men of power, men who rule a state. The prince is the first, or principal, man.
    So the translator is tempted to use the word ‘king’. At least in the past a king stood at the apex of a hierarchical system, he was the man who mattered. But it is difficult, translating Machiavelli, to use the word ‘king’ to refer to the lord of Imola, or a pope, or a Roman emperor. In the end, as far as possible, I have resolved this problem by using the rather unattractive word ‘ruler’, or even the more generic ‘leader’, though always making it clear that we’re talking about the political leader of a state. The book’s famous title, however, must be left as it is.
    Even harder to solve is the translation of ‘ virtù ’, together with a number of other words that cluster round it. It would be so easy to write the English cognate ‘virtue’, meaning the opposite of vice, but this is not what Machiavelli was talking about. He was not interested in the polarity ‘good’/‘evil’, but in winning and losing, strength and weakness, success and failure. For Machiavelli ‘ virtù ’ was any quality of character that enabled you to take political power or to hold on to it; in short, a winning trait. It could be courage in battle, or strength of personality, or political cunning, or it might even be the kind of ruthless cruelty that lets your subjects know you mean business. But one can hardly write ‘cunning’ or ‘cruelty’ for ‘ virtù ’, even if one knows that in this context that is what the text means; because then you would lose the sense that although Machiavelli is not talking about the moral virtues he nevertheless wants to give a positive connotation to the particular qualities he is talking about: this cruelty is aimed at solving problems, retaining power, keeping a state strong, hence, in this context it is a ‘ virtù ’.
    Ugly though it may sound, then, I have sometimes been obliged to translate ‘ virtù ’ as ‘positive qualities’ or ‘strength of character’, except of course on those occasions - because there are some - when Machiavelli does mean ‘virtues’ in the moral sense: in which case he’s usually talking about the importance of faking them even if you may not have them. Faking, of course,