Segneri is difficult to translate for the same reason he is worth translating: the man wrote to be heard. His sentences were built for the voice, and they carry, even on the page, the pressure of a speaker who means to hold a crowd and change it. The first duty of an English version is to keep that pressure. Where a choice had to be made between the smooth and the faithful, I have generally chosen the faithful, on the principle that a reader would rather meet Segneri than meet me.
The sentence
The central difficulty is his period. Segneri thinks in long, mounting sentences that gather clause upon clause and release their weight only at the end. The modern instinct, and the instinct of most translators, is to break these into short declaratives. I have resisted it. When he piles his phrases one on another, the English piles them too; when he builds by repetition, hammering a single word until it lodges, the repetition stands. So in the sermon on the love of Christ for his Mother he sets image against image without pause, set the Abrahams, set the Josephs, set the Apostles, set the martyrs, and only then, against the whole of it, sets the Virgin alone; to chop that into tidy units would be to unstring the bow. Elsewhere he circles back on a word for the plain reason that a preacher, watching faces, says a thing twice: Debtor? Yes, my lords, debtor, yes, debtor. An editor’s pencil would strike out half of that. I have left it, because the doubling is the sound of the pulpit.
Something is lost all the same, and it is only honest to say what. Italians prize Segneri’s prose for its music, and music is the one thing that will not cross a language. His puns mostly go with it. Now and then one survives the passage intact, as when he says the wicked spend their days in good things but never spend good days, and where a conceit could be carried over I have carried it; but the reader should know that the original is quicker and more chiming than any English can be, and should give Segneri the benefit of that doubt whenever a turn here seems to strain.
Scripture and the Latin
Segneri preaches with the Vulgate open before him, and quotes it constantly. For those quotations I have used the Douay-Rheims Bible, which is simply the Vulgate in English and the Scripture of the tradition Segneri belonged to; a reader who knows his Bible in this form will hear the texts land as the preacher meant them to. Scripture is printed in italic and set within quotation marks throughout, so that the eye can always separate the word of God from the word of the preacher, even when Segneri weaves them together in the same breath.
The Latin itself has not been thrown away. Every Scriptural, patristic, and classical quotation is keyed by a small raised figure to a note at the end of each sermon, where the source is named and the original Latin given in full. A reader content to take the English may pass the figures by; a reader who wants to check Segneri against Jerome, or against Suárez, or against Pliny, has the words in hand.
The citations, and the errors in them
Two things about that apparatus deserve a word.
The printed editions number their notes afresh on every page, so that within one sermon the little figures may run up to five, then start again at one, several times over. I have renumbered each sermon in a single unbroken sequence, and keyed it to a single list, which makes the notes usable but means the figures here will not match those in the old Italian print. The regularization is mine.
The old print is also, here and there, simply wrong in its references: a chapter cited for a neighbouring chapter, a psalm number transposed, a verse off by one. Rather than mend these in silence, I have given the true place and noted alongside it, as “print: …”, the reading the 1752 edition actually sets. The reader thus sees both where the passage lies and what Segneri’s printer put. A handful of the sources are genuinely obscure, their abbreviations half-blotted in the original; these are flagged as such rather than guessed at.
Names and spelling
Biblical names follow the Douay-Rheims, so that they agree with the Scripture the reader is holding: Assuerus and not Ahasuerus, Booz and not Boaz, Bethsabee, Noemi, Elcana. Names from Greece and Rome are given in their familiar English forms, Coriolanus and Volumnia, Polycrates, Artaxerxes. Spelling throughout is British, and keeps the older honour, favour, labour, and Saviour.
Thou and you
This is the Reader’s Edition. Segneri’s own words — his preaching, his prayers, his address to God and to the hearer alike — are given throughout in plain modern English: you, not thou. The older forms are kept in one place only, the words of Scripture, which are quoted in the Douay-Rheims and carry their thou as that version always has. A companion edition keeps the older second person throughout, for readers who prefer it; this one is meant to be handed to anyone, and to read as naturally as it can while holding to every word of Segneri’s sense.
What this edition is for
The forty sermons are given whole, in their order, the thirty-eight of the season and the two Segneri appended for Saint Joseph and the Annunciation. Each is followed by a plain Synopsis of its argument, its sources given as notes, and the three indexes at the back open the book to anyone who wishes to trace a text, a story, or a subject through the whole course. None of this is Segneri’s; all of it is meant to carry him more easily to a reader three centuries and a language away from the squares where he first spoke. If it does that, and then gets out of his way, it has done its work.