OUDIN, Antoine; [César OUDIN]. Dialogues fort recreatifs composez en espagnol, et nouvvellement mis en Italien, Alleman, & Francois.

‘If We Ate as Much as the English, We’d All Be Dead’

OUDIN, Antoine; [César OUDIN]. Dialogues fort recreatifs composez en espagnol, et nouvvellement mis en Italien, Alleman, & Francois. Rome: [Stamperia del Falco for] Guillaume Hallé. [1664.]

8vo. Contemporary vellum, spine lettered in ink, spine lined with contemporary printed waste; pp. [8], 543, [1 (colophon)]; woodcut Papal arms of Alexander VII to title, typographic headpiece, woodcut initial, floral woodcut vignette to colophon; text in four columns in facing Spanish, Italian, German, and French; a few small nicks and abrasions to vellum, upper cover partially slightly loose; closed vertical tear to ff. A3, A6, B1, and B2 due to brittle paper not affecting legibility, lightly browned throughout (heavier to quires C–E), paperflaw to lower corner of f. O7 not affecting legibility; 1672 ownership inscription ‘Bibliotheci Nicolspurgensis Scholarum Piarum’ to title; early twentieth-century bookplate of Emma Radio von Radiis Pantolska to front pastedown.

Very rare first edition published in Italy of this humorous, dialogic polyglot handbook in parallel Spanish, Italian, German, and French, the second edition to include Italian and German, which had been added in 1650 by the author’s son; our copy has seventeenth-century Piarist provenance.

French Hispanist, translator, grammarian, and lexicographer César Oudin (1550–1625) was secretary and interpreter of foreign languages to Henry IV and was the first to translate any part of Don Quixote into French. Seven of the eight dialogues in this volume first appeared in Paris in 1608 as César Oudin’s Dialogos muy apazibles, escritos en lengua española y traduzidos en frances, itself plagiarised from John Minsheu’s 1599 Pleasant and Delightfull Dialogues in Spanish and English (the English portion of the dialogues was abandoned in Oudin’s versions).

In 1640, César’s son Antoine (1595–1653), Spanish and Italian translator and interpreter for Louis XIII and Louis XIV, produced the Curiosités, a dictionary of French idioms; he was also responsible for significantly revising his father’s grammars and linguistic works. In 1650 Antoine added German and Italian translations to his father’s French and Spanish. The eighth dialogue, in which Polyglottus and Philoxenes discuss a trip to Spain, was added by César to the 1622 edition.

Antoine explains in his preface to the present edition that, in this expanded adaptation of his father’s work, he has modernised the French and rendered more idiomatic the Italian and German translations; he has also purged the dictionary of ‘certain vulgarities befitting only those of very low station’. The dialogues – which cover waking up; buying and selling; travel; a banquet; a discussion between two pages; ‘some curiosities’ (a conversation among two Englishmen and two Spaniards); the qualities of an ideal soldier; and a trip to Spain – are highly amusing and not without a certain amount of colourful language despite Oudin’s best efforts. This ‘process of “bowdlerization” was not very extensive, and the “plusieurs endroits” [which Oudin claimed to have expurgated] are no more than six or seven’ (Instituto Cervantes, online, trans.)

In the first dialogue, for example, Don Pietro criticises his servant, Alfonso, for mistaking the time of day, the weather outside, and for the delayed delivery of his laundry:

Don Pietro: You idiot! You’ve given me my coat before my shirt. Do you want me to look like I’ve just been screwed?

Alfonso: The laundress hasn’t brought your shirt back yet.

Don Pietro: So go and get it then, you son of a whore!

There is discussion of how avid wine-drinking ensures salvation (’Good wine makes good blood, good blood leads to good nature, good nature creates good works, and good works get you to Heaven’, p. 224) and how if women were banned from drinking there would be no women left at all (p. 326); and whether love thrives in warm or cold climates. The sixth dialogue consists mostly of jabs at the English, with a raised eyebrow from two Spanish visitors at the English practice of kissing in public and the snide remark ‘if we Spaniards ate as much as the English, we’d all be dead’ (pp. 359-60).

Provenance: 1672 ownership inscription of the Piarist School at Nikolsburg (now Mikulov, Czech Republic), established in 1631. The Piarists, or the Order of Poor Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools, are the oldest Catholic religious order dedicated specifically to education, founded by Spanish Priest St Joseph Calasan, who opened Europe’s first free public school in 1597. Founded in 1631 with eight teachers and nine students, the school expanded to over one hundred students within its first month. The library was dispersed in 1873 following educational reforms across the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the nationalisation of the school.

OCLC finds a handful of copies in continental Europe and only one in the US, at Cornell; no copies traced on Library Hub.

USTC 1713537; see Brunet IV, col. 260 (recording the 1611 French and Spanish edition only); not in BM STC Italian.

SKU: 2125778