Dialogue and scientific writings in the 16th century: Cyprian Lucar's translation of Niccolò Tartaglia

Niccolò Tartaglia (Brescia 1500-Venice 1557) authored Quesiti et Inventioni diverse, written in Italian and divided into nine books, each including a series of queries about specific military matters like shooting, gunpowder, infantry order, ballistics and mathematics. The work was really successful in Italy with at least four editions (1546, 1554, 1562 and 1606) and prestigious enough to be translated several times into various foreign languages between 1547 and 1846: twice into French and German and once into English. The English version, entitled Three Bookes of Colloquies concerning the arte of shooting, was completed in London in the year of the Armada by a certain Cyprian Lucar, who translated the first three books in order to obtain and divulge information on ballistics, a new science evidently of primary importance for the defence of a country, especially when war was looming so close. Although Lucar chose to translate only three books out of the original nine, the resulting text is endowed with its own style: it is precise, well-structured, with an overall coherence and sense of completeness. Lucar aimed in fact to grasp and clarify Tartaglia’s ideas and principles on such important topics as artillery and ballistics. As both works are structured on a series of 'queries', the dialogic part clearly commands first place and plays the role of a protagonist. The main aim of our paper will be to indepth the way in which modal verbs are deployed by the translator as a tool for conveying intentionality in the strongly persuasive context of a dialogic text with didactic purposes.