Giambattista Marinos Wort-Zucht-Peitschen

Giambattista Marino, who for many years was the official poet laureate at the French court, becomes, thanks to his mythological poem LAdone, the outstanding figure amongst the baroque authors of the Italian conceptualism with and gives his name to this stylistic school. In 1617 Marino writes one of the lesser known works in the long series of his political invectives, La sferza invettiva, a confessional polemic against the French Calvinists. Printed for the first time posthumously in 1625 in Paris, this violent defense of the catholic position is a reply to a Huguenot pamphlet of the same year. Translated by the completely unknown Heinrich Schmidt the invective is published in a German version in Vienna 1655, dedicated to Veit Daniel Colewaldt, an imperial officer only recently converted to Catholicism and amateur translator from the Italian. Tellingly the frontispiece of the Viennese print shows the four Church Fathers Hieronymus, Ambrosius, Augustinus and Gregorius each of them in the act of flogging one of the protestant leaders Huss, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin. Unlike Brockes translation of Marinos La strage degli innocenti (printed 1715 for the first time as Bethlehemitischer Kinder=Mord) this is, as Johann Jacob Bauer already pointed out in his Bibliotheca librorum rariorum universalis, Supplement 2 (Nürnberg 1774, p. 198: libellus rarissimus) an extremely rare book (the Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel conserves the only known copy in a miscellany that cannot be copied). The edition of Heinrich Schmidts translation of Marinos text complete with an introduction and a commentary will not only give material access to the text, but allow also to view its polemic contents in the larger historical picture of the Counter Reformation in Vienna and Central Europe, and illustrate the ways in which the translator proceeds in his transposition from the original French reality to his contemporary Austrian context. Finally, in the linguistic as in the spiritual domain, this invective is a remarkable example of the transferring and reception processes of literature in this period from one European country to the other.