Translators come to The Prince with prejudices; one is tempted to play to the reader’s expectations, laying on Machiavelli’s supposed cynicism at the expense of the text’s surprising subtlety. When translating The Prince, rightly or wrongly I fell for the challenge of looking for every possible way to make the sentences sharp and direct while delivering exactly the sense of the original and keeping the no-nonsense tone. Rather than a liberty, this seemed right in line with Machiavelli’s desire that the work be free of all “irrelevant flourishes.”

Source: A No-Nonsense Machiavelli | by Tim Parks | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books