Benedict’s motherhouse Monte Cassino-in the year 1327. Eco’s setting is a fictional Benedictine monastery, that bears a striking resemblance to St. If the book was successful (and it was) in the English speaking world, it was due in no small part to that “Dean Of All Italian Translators”, the late William Weaver, who was able to make it, if not appealing, at least not off-putting to the English ear.īut a translator can only do so much. For one thing, it was written by Eco-who models himself on that most impenetrable of all twentieth century writers, James Joyce-with words that send one scurrying for a dictionary about every other paragraph. The famous Catholic publisher and friend of Thomas Merton, Robert Giroux (of the publishing house Farrar, Strauss, Giroux), once opined that “A ‘Classic Book’ is a book that stays in print.” Using that metric, The Name of the Rose is indeed a classic. Thus began one of the all-time unlikeliest best-sellers of the past half-century: Eco’s The Name of The Rose, has been translated into every major language, turned into a movie, a mini-series, a board-game, a video game, in 1984 gave birth to Eco’s own Post-script to “The Name of the Rose”, and even spawned an unauthorized parallel book entitled The Key To “The Name of The Rose”: Including Translations of All Non-English Passages by a couple of professors at Hunter College. And as if that ruse wasn’t enough, he wrote a five-page Preface about how this manuscript had come down to him and he’d searched and researched it, but in the end, settled on his own translation (from what was supposedly the original Latin into Italian).

Adso of Melk, O.S.B., and had translated it. He was so uncertain of how it would be received that he pretended he’d actually found a medieval manuscript from one Fr. Thomas Aquinas-named Umberto Eco published his first (and at that time, only) novel Il Nomma della Rosa, that is, The Name of the Rose. In 1980, a pretty much unknown Italian author-he’d only written a couple of children’s books and some graduate-level textbooks on semiotics (the study of signs), James Joyce and St.

The name of the rose pages