The present contribution will not be exempt, all awareness of its historical determination notwithstanding, from the inherent logic of pre‑emptive commentary. The “authentic” meaning intended by the author cannot, therefore, claim to any possible form of directness, which in turn paves the way to all sorts of suspicious, indirect or Straussian hermeneutics. From the very beginning, that is to say starting with the text authorized by Maimonides himself, the reader is engaged on a steeplechase, having to overcome a series of hurdles before the text, in itself a haqdamah to the reading of the Bible as a philosophical allegory, could display its meaning.
As a consequence, the very text of the Guide fades in the distance both linguistically, since we are facing the translation of a translation, and from the perspective of its contents. Although the modality of the commentary ex post is largely prevalent in Jewish culture, in the specific textual features of philosophy one witnesses the remarkable development of a different type of paratext, be it called “introduction,” “preface” or “preliminary remark.” The locus classicus of Rabbinical creativity is usually placed after any given statement, whereas philosophical texts are commented also a priori, before their own textuality can assess itself. 2 One could even go as far to say, in a generalizing vein, that the paratextual genre of the introduction, or haqdamah, in the case of Maimonides, affects subtly the text itself and deserves to be qualified as equally important as the long chain of translations it underwent, transposing the book and its growing prefaces from a given cultural environment to completely different ones. Thus, the perception of that dialogic work as utterly “Kabbalistic” in nature was determined even before its characters (Filone and Sophia) could utter a single word. This in turn influenced profoundly its perception as a major component of an ideal canon of Jewish philosophical and Kabbalistical literature of the Renaissance, bestowing a peculiar bent to the subsequent translations and adaptations of the Dialoghi, particularly the three Spanish translations, twice or three times removed from the original. On that occasion, I could show that a rather marginal dimension of the Italian “original,” a short Kabbalistic excursus, became the main focus of the paratextual elements of the 1569 edition. Paratexts are not only essential in orienting the reception of a given work, but affect significantly its very contents, as I have had the opportunity to show in the quite similar case of the Latin translation of Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore. Such an undertaking would be certainly worthwhile, but I have preferred to focus not so much on the text, whose status is, both from a linguistic and an ideological viewpoint, very much debatable, but rather on its paratextual dimension. I am not going to study Johannes Buxtorf the Younger’s translation of the Guide of the Perplexed from a strictly linguistic point of view. 4 G enette, 1987 English translation: id., 1997.ġSince there are many ways to study a translation, it seems appropriate to state beforehand what the reader will not find in this contribution.3 Or rather paraneologism, since the term is already attested cf. B redehoft, 2014, p. 143.This hymn has been translated into English as the following: Caswall made his translation that appeared in the Lyra Catholica (1849): Here is the longer text of this hymn as it appeared in the Carcassonne Breviary. John the Apostle Before the Latin Gate (May 6.) It was also used in the Paris Breviary for Lauds on the Feast of St.
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