Biography

Thomas Patrick Wisniewski is a literary scholar and translator. Currently an Associate of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, he also serves on the faculty of the Graduate Writing and Literature Program in Harvard Extension and Summer School. Previously a Lecturer in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, he has also held visiting lectureships at Boston University and Tufts University. His research centers on rhythm, prose fiction, translation, and modernism. His publications have appeared in Biography, World Literature Today, Gradiva, Italica, Italian Culture, In Other Words, L’anello che non tiene, Forum Italicum, Quaderni d’italianistica, and Music & Literature. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, where his work was awarded the Provostial Fund for the Arts & Humanities Research Grant, the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, the Krupp Foundation Research Fellowship, the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, and the Global Humanities Junior Fellowship at Freie Universität Berlin.

Project Summary

How has Il Principe shaped and been shaped in translation from its earliest translators to its most recent? That Machiavelli’s work of political philosophy has had such a remarkable impact on fields outside the genre of mirrors for princes has commonly led scholars to study this treatise both in the original and in translation. To that end, this project examines the history of the transnational circulation and reception of Il Principe by reframing a range of translations of the original text that circulated in and outside of Italy since its first printing in 1532, five years after the author’s death. In recasting a seminal text as a case study in the practice, history, and theory of translation, this project shifts scholarly emphasis from political theory to world literature and translation studies. To emphasize the value of the multiplicity of translations over a single definitive edition, this study aims to show how a single text may traverse literary, historical, and political discourses well beyond the readership of the original and its intended audience: a handbook for new and inexperienced rulers anxious about holding onto their precarious power, made ever the more memorable by the author’s witty maxims and epigrams. Translation, then, takes on a triple meaning: of language; of ideas; and of time.