6

I Googled Vigenère's "Traicté des Chiffres": no English translations, not even a reference to one. Perhaps someone's Google-wu is better than mine; I can't find it.

I'm slogging my way through a PDF of the 1586 edition of "Traicté Des Chiffres, ou Secretes Manieres D'escrire" by Blaise de Vigenère. The language is early Modern French and doesn't translate easily in Google Translate (the words for 'right' and 'left' back then were droict and gaulche, etc).

I'd love to read it in English. Is an English translation available?

Patriot
  • 3,162
  • 3
  • 20
  • 66
D Mac
  • 200
  • 6

2 Answers2

2

Is an English translation available?

Unfortunately, Vigenère's "Traicté Des Chiffres, ou Secretes Manieres D'escrire" is not yet available in English.

Covering many disparate subjects, it is a rambling 600-page work that introduces some important advances in cryptography. For example, having the ciphertext itself serve as a key after a priming key. The autokey ciphers outlined in Vigenère's book, according to David Kahn, "were entirely forgotten and only entered the stream of cryptology late in the 19th century after they were reinvented."[1]

Vigenère was a prolific writer. The lengthiness and many digressions of "Traicté Des Chiffres, ou Secretes Manieres D'escrire" have contributed to its obscurity. It seems that no one has wanted to translate this very long and strange work that attempts to interrelate alchemy, Japanese ideograms, God, magic, and genuine advances in cryptology. Nevertheless, many have found this book utterly fascinating.

[1] Kahn, D. (1967). The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (1st ed.). The Macmillan Company. pp. 147, 148.

Patriot
  • 3,162
  • 3
  • 20
  • 66
-4

There is neither a „modern” French edition, nor an English translation, contemporary or modern. Time to learn some contemporary French. What's the use of attempting cryptoanalysis if you can't manage the historic version of a quite common language, in this case early modern French? Your approach works like the Traicté on its own linguistic grounds, not on yours.

Maarten Bodewes
  • 96,351
  • 14
  • 169
  • 323
user75673
  • 3