Jean-Pierre de Mesmes grammairien de la Pléiade et la traduction didactique

This essay focuses on the translation strategies that were carried out by Jean-Pierre de Mesmes, a poet and translator with close ties with the most prominent members of the Pléiade, in two works that were conceived as tools for language-learning: the Grammaire italienne, which contains translations of prose or verse fragments taken from several Italian authors while being itself, for the most part, a translation of the third book of Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua, and the Comedie des Supposez, a translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s I Suppositi that was published in bilingual editions from 1552 onwards. Our purpose is to shed light on the role that Jean-Pierre de Mesmes played as a cultural mediator for his younger friends of the “Brigade”, who were painstakingly reading and imitating Italian poetry at the time. Furthermore, we will highlight his contribution to the enrichment of the French language, a task that he would later carry on, with mixed results, in the scientific field, notably in his Institutions astronomiques (published in 1557).