A Translator at Work: Samuel ben Judah of Marseilles's Translation Notes on Alexander's De Anima

Samuel ben Judah of Marseilles's mid-fourteenth-century Hebrew translation of Alexander of Aphrodisias's De anima, made from Isḥaq ibn Ḥunayn's ninth-century Arabic translation of the original Greek, survives in four manuscripts. Three of these contain Samuel's notes on his translation, which disclose a wealth of information concerning textual problems he faced, editorial decisions he took, and his understanding of the text and its arguments.

The present paper analyses these notes, which have never been studied before, according to philosophical and philological methods.

My analysis shows that Samuel is a philosophically engaged translator who approaches Alexander's text with a text-critical attitude that enables him to render it in a more coherent and accessible form than that found in the Arabic manuscript that served as his source. Thus, this paper deepens our understanding of Samuel's activity as a translator.

These results shows that we should take translators seriously as philosophical agents in their own right and compels us to study manuscripts that contain translations to find and explore the translators' own voices within or next to their works.