Essay Review: Copernicus in Translation: Nicholas Copernicus on the Revolutions

In “Great Books of the Western World”, 1952.

Copernicus Nicolaus , On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres (Newton Abbot and New York, 1976).

For a recent discussion of this problem of methodology, see Swerdlow N. , JHA, xii (1981), 35–46.

A curious example is p. 71, where on line 3 the necessary addition “the difference between” is put in square brackets as if it were the translator's addition, when in fact it occurs in the editio princeps (no note), while on line 46 “together with the meridian altitude AB” is printed without brackets, and noted as an “omission repaired by N” (the printed text).

E.g. p. 120, line 4, the phrase “as though so large a number of circles were not enough” appears in the text, with no note to warn the reader that it appears only in the manuscript, where it has been deleted. Extraordinary is p. 84:11, where we read “ Job Hesiod , and Homer “in the translation although, as the note on the passage makes clear, Copernicus deleted “Iobum” in the autograph and substituted “Hesiodum et Homerum” in the margin.

E.g. p. 46:35 “and GA is equal to LC”. This apparently stems from Menzzer's German translation (Thorn, 1879), to which Rosen owes a good deal.

See also p. 83:40, where Copernicus's misdating of an observation by Ptolemy to 24 Feb. 139 is changed to “23 Feb.”

He is capable, however, of purely linguistic mistakes, e.g. p. 141 (III 11) “supputatio Ptolemaei declarat, quae apud historiographos in Salmanassar Chaldaeorum regem cadit” is translated “as is shown by Ptolemy's computation. According to historians, Nabonassar as the ruler was followed by Shalmaneser, king of the Chaldaeans”, where it can only mean “as is shown by Ptolemy's reckoning, which coincides with Shalmaneser, the king of the Chaldaeans, in the historical writers” (i.e. Copernicus identifies “Nabonassar”, known to him only from the Almagest, with “Salmanassar”, Shalmaneser of the Bible (e.g. II Kings 17.3), and not with Nebuchadnezzar, which he has rejected as an identification).

A technical commentary, by Neugebauer O. and Swerdlow N. , is currently in course of publication.

The question had in any case been discussed in much greater detail by Dobrzycki Jerzy , “Katalog Gariazd w De Revolutionibus”, Studia i Materialy z Dziejów Nauki Polskiej, Seria C, vii (1963), 109–53, an article which makes Rosen's treatment superfluous, but to which he does not refer.

Rome A. , “L'Astrolabe et le Météoroscope d'après le commentaire de Pappus sur le 5e livre de l'Almageste”, Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles, xlvii (1927), 2e partie, Mémoires, 77–102.

For details see Swerdlow N. , “On Copernicus' theory of precession”, in The Copernican achievement, ed. by Westman R. S. (Los Angeles, 1975), 49–98, pp. 58–59. Rosen could have derived a detailed calculation from this article.

He could have found an explanation of Copernicus's procedure in Moesgaard K. P. , “The 1717 Egyptian years and the Copernican theory of precession”, Centaurus, xiii (1969), 120–38 (the passage in question is dealt with on p. 133).

In his note on 128:37 he makes the baffling statement that Copernicus “should have” substituted “Aristyllus” for “Aristarchus”, but that it would still have been wrong.

Toomer G. J. , “The solar theory of az-Zarqāl: A history of errors”, Centaurus, xiv (1969), 306–36.

Where he would have discovered a colon, which Rosen imagines somehow supports his interpretation.

This leads to obscurities: The note on 140:12 (p. 389) is intelligible only when one realizes that it is an attempt to refute a remark by Swerdlow , “On Copernicus' theory of precession”, 62–63 (cf. 97–98) (to which Rosen never refers). Even so, the logic of Rosen's argument escapes me.