Dialogo della Rettorica by Sperone Speroni and its Translation to Portuguese

Abstract

In this paper we present to the Brazilian public, interested in the history of the Italian language, a text unpublished in Portuguese written by one of the intellectuals who took part in the “questione della lingua” between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy. This is the Dialogo della Retorica by Sperone Speroni. It seems important to emphasize that, although much quoted and studied, the “questione” still is addressed by referring only to some of its protagonists, namely Pietro Bembo, Gian Giorgio Trissino, Baldassare Castiglione and Machiavelli, forgetting that it involved all the leading intellectuals of the time (and not just them, when we think that many intellectuals until Gramsci wrote about the “questione”), and that resulted in a number of interesting texts of excellent linguistic, historical and literary quality. For this reason, and in the hope of resolving this gap, we present here the text translated into Portuguese by inserting it into the wider debate about the language.