CONFERENCIA PETER BURKE EN EL FORO COMPLUTENSE Jueves 26 de Octubre de 2006 Lugar de celebracin: Biblioteca Histrica Marqus de Valdecilla

TRANSLATING TEXTS, TRANSLATING CULTURES IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

In cultural history, the practice of translation is central. The role of translated texts in movements such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment is of obvious importance to say nothing of the expansion of Europe into other continents. But today I should like to go much further in this direction. My suggestion is that translation between languages is like the tip of an iceberg. It is the most visible part of an activity sometimes described as cultural translation. Alternatively, we might describe verbal translation as a kind of litmus paper, allowing us to watch the process of cultural translation. The term cultural translation was originally coined by anthropologists in the circle of Edward Evans-Pritchard, to describe what happens in cultural encounters when each side tries to make sense of the actions of the other. A vivid example, famous among anthropologists, is Laura Bohannans account of how she told the story of Hamlet in a

West African village and heard the story corrected by the elders until it matched the patterns of the local culture. The concept of cultural translation has been taken up by a group of literary scholars. It also has its uses in historical writing and even in everyday life. It has been suggested more than once that the act of understanding is a kind of translation, a form of domesticating the alien, of turning other peoples concepts and practices into their equivalents in our own vocabulary (in both the literal and the metaphorical sense of the term). If the past is a foreign country, as some scholars like to say, then all historians may be regarded as translators between past and present. Like anthropologists, they translate from one culture to another rather than from one language to another. Like the translators of texts, historians and anthropologists need to steer between the opposite dangers of unfaithfulness to the culture from which they translate and unintelligibility to their target audience. My own aim might be described as a historical anthropology of translation, viewing translation between languages as a case of translation between cultures. This work of translation involves negotiation, a concept that has recently expanded and moved beyond the worlds of trade and diplomacy to refer to the exchange of ideas and the mutual modification of meanings. Some words, ideas and customs are a good deal less translatable than others. Especially the important ones. So much so that the British writer Salman Rushdie once suggested, in his novel Shame, that to understand a culture, one should focus on its untranslatable words. For similar reasons a Russian sociologist has proposed compiling a

dictionary of untranslatable terms. These words are so many small signs of what is lost in translation, a phrase that was employed as the title of the autobiography of a Polish refugee to the United States, Eva Hoffman, before it was used in the film directed by Sofia Coppola.. The history of the Christian missions beyond Europe is full of examples of the misunderstandings that regularly take place when people attempt to spread their ideas in a culture that is very different from their own. The Jesuits, for instance, were active in China, Japan and South India as well as in Brazil and Paraguay. Their difficulties began with the problem of translating the word God. Sometimes they chose a local

equivalent, like the Chinese Tien, which literally means Heaven. In that case the Chinese may have been led to think that the new religion was a version of their own traditional beliefs. For this reason other Jesuits refused to translate the word Deus, avoiding misunderstanding but paying the price of unintelligibility. As cultural translators, the Jesuits also faced problems. In China, for example, Matteo Ricci discovered that if he dressed as a priest or a Buddhist monk the elite would not take him seriously. Hence he put on the clothes of a Confucian scholar, translating his social position into Chinese. Again, Ricci allowed the Chinese whom he converted to pay reverence to their ancestors in the traditional manner, arguing that this was a social custom rather than a religious one. In Europe, this practice led to the accusation that the Jesuits had been converted to the religion of the Chinese rather than converting them to Christianity. What appeared in Beijing to be a good cultural translation looked like a mistranslation in Rome.

So much for general reflections. In what follows, I shall adopt the point of view of a historical anthropologist offering an overview of what might be called the culture of translation in early modern Europe. This survey is organized around five questions. What was translated? From which and into which languages? By whom? With what intentions? And finally, in what manner were translations made? II

What was translated? The selection of texts for translation is a valuable clue to what culture finds of interest in another, more exactly to what some individuals and groups in a given culture find of interest in another. In early modern Europe the Bible took the first place, as might have been expected. Between the invention of printing and the end of the seventeenth century, translations were published in fifty-one languages, including Catalan (1478), Castilian (1553, 1569, published in Ferrara and Basel) and Basque (1571). After the Bible, the Imitatio Christi was far ahead of the rest of the field, with 52 translations in the same period into twelve languages (twice into Spanish). Then came the classics. Over 1000 translations from the Greek and Latin classics were published before the year 1600 alone. In Spanish, fifteen such translations were published in the 15th century, 123 in the16th and 216 in the 17th century. Among the most translated modern writers of the period, it is no surprise to find religious writers such as Erasmus, Luther and Calvin. The vogue for translations of Erasmus in early sixteenth-century Spain was discussed seventy years ago by the French scholar Marcel Bataillon. Spanish translations of Protestant writers were sometimes

published abroad and smuggled into Spain, including Calvins Institutes in 1597, and El Catholico Reformado by the Cambridge Puritan William Perkins in 1599 (both books printed in London). As for the catechism written by the Italian Jesuit Roberto Bellarmino, it was translated into no fewer than 40 languages, seventeen of them from outside Europe, including Arabic, Georgian, Maratha, Quechua, Tagalog and Tamil. Translation was also important in the Scientific Revolution. It is true that many natural philosophers, like other early modern scholars, wrote in Latin. Even Galileo followed this tradition at the beginning of his career, switching to Italian later in order to reach a wider domestic audience. One of his German admirers, unable to read Italian, wrote to Galileo to protest. The problem was solved by translation, in this case not a translation of Galileo into German but into Latin. Newton followed Galileos example, writing his Principia in Latin but his Optics in English, confident by this time that it would soon be translated. Works of political theory were frequently translated into European vernaculars at this time. In Spanish there was Machiavellis Discourses (c.1552), Bodins Republic (1590), Boteros Reason of State (1603). The example of Machiavelli is a reminder of the cultural significance of absences, translations that were not made. His Prince, for example, was not translated into Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare was rarely translated into any foreign language before the middle of the eighteenth century. We should remember not only what is lost in translation but also what is lost when translations are not made lost, we might say, in untranslation.

III From what languages into what? In this period many translations were made from ancient Greek into Latin, and even more from Greek and Latin - classical and modern - into the vernaculars. These translations have often been studied. Without denying their importance, what I should like to emphasize here is a movement in the reverse direction, in other words of translations from European vernaculars into Latin. I have so far discovered nearly 1200 such translations published between 1500 and 1800. Among the books translated from Spanish were works of piety by Teresa of Avila and Luis de Granada; Gracins Orculo; Huartes Examen de Ingenios; and works of fiction such as the Celestina, Guzman de Alfarache and Cervantes, El licenciado Vidriera. Let me now turn to what might be called the balance of trade between vernaculars, the relation between linguistic imports and exports, which reveals a number of contrasts between cultures. East-Central Europe for instance had very few exports and also relatively few imports, among them two great humanists from the Netherlands, Erasmus and Justus Lipsius. Erasmus was published in Czech and Polish; while both the Constancy and the Politics of Lipsius appeared in Polish and Hungarian. The Spanish writer on politics Fadrique Furi Ceriol also appeared in Polish translation, and so did Ariosto and Tasso. Italy was obviously a high exporter in the Renaissance, but Italians also imported a great deal, especially from Spanish. Spanish texts were often translated into other languages at this time (including the languages of political enemies such as the Dutch and English). Among the mosttranslated texts were the works of Antonio de Guevara and Luis de Granada, the accounts

of the New World by Acosta, Corts, Gmara or Zrate, Cervantes, Gracin, Quevedos Buscn and his Sueos. On the other hand, relatively few texts (most of them Italian) were translated into Spanish, and fewer in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, suggesting that Spanish culture was closing. IV By whom, then, were the translations made? Translation was sometimes a collective activity, with teams or even committees at work especially to translate Bibles, thanks not only to the length of the text but also to the need for consensus on interpretation. There was a Dutch team, another in England, another in Bohemia, others in Sweden and Finland. In Finland Sweden and the Netherlands, translators were deliberately recruited from different parts of the country in order to produce a text that would be as widely understood as possible, thus contributing to the development of a standard language. As for individuals, we know very little about the lives of the majority. A biographical dictionary of early modern Spanish or English translators would make a valuable contribution to cultural history. Until such volumes are produced, any conclusions should be taken as extremely provisional. The remarks that follow are based on the biographies of 200 Spanish translators, which I hope is a reasonable sample. One way of classifying translators is into amateurs and professionals. Of the thousands of translators active in Europe in this period, the majority were amateurs, who only engaged in this activity once or twice in their lives. Some were nobles or even rulers, like the emperor Charles V (who translated a romance of chivalry by Olivier de la

Marche), and Philip IV of Spain (who translated Guicciardini). Physicians such as Andres de Laguna translated books on medicine, and architects such as Francisco de Villalpando translated treatises on art and architecture. In the case of Spain, the importance of the clergy as translators is particularly clear. About a quarter of my sample were clerics: two bishops, three monks, nine friars, nine ordinary members of the secular clergy and no fewer than 22 Jesuits. Jesuits played an important role as translators all over the Catholic world, a role that is obviously related to their aim to be all things to all people (omnia omnibus) and their policy of the accommodation of Christianity to other cultures - more or less what I have been describing as cultural translation. It may also be significant that a number of diplomats made translations, including Bernardo de Mendoza (who translated Lipsius) and Baltasar de Ziga (who translated Montaigne). In their professional life they were political go-betweens, in their leisure hours they were cultural go-betweens. After all, translation as Umberto Eco and others have suggested is itself a kind of negotiation. Some amateur translators were professors, others were retired soldiers, yet others were high officials such as Diego Gracin and Gonzalo Prez, both secretaries to Charles V and Philip II. Women were also relatively prominent in this field, though not in Spain. Indeed, the only female translator into Spanish from the early modern period known to me lived in the Netherlands: Isabel Correa, the translator of the poet Guarini and a member of the Sephardic community in Amsterdam. On the other hand, a small minority of translators were professional or more exactly, semi-professional in the sense of devoting a considerable amount of their life to

this task even if they had other occupations as well. The Swede Eric Schroder made more than forty translations, the Dutchman Jan Glazemaker, nearly seventy different and the Frenchman Gabriel Chappuys translated about eighty texts. Among Spaniards there was Alfonso de Ulloa a former soldier who settled in Venice and translated Spanish and Portuguese texts into Italian as well as Italian texts into Spanish. The example of Ulloa is a reminder of the importance of migrs among translators. We might describe this group - like the diplomats - as go betweens, or as skilled negotiators between languages and between cultures. This group of migr translators was dominated by Protestant refugees: Italians in Switzerland, for instance, or Frenchmen and Netherlanders in England. But there were a few Catholic refugees. Mateo Martinez van Waucquier, a hybrid name suggesting a hybrid identity. Martinez came from Middelburg in the Northern Netherlands. When the Calvinists took over the North he fled south to Antwerp, where he translated a number of devotional works from Spanish into Latin. V What were the intentions, projects or strategies of these thousands of translators? Bible translation by Protestants makes one obvious example of a conscious strategy. Again, the importance of the so-called Calvinist international the links between Calvinist communities in different parts of Europe - lies behind the translations of the Cambridge Puritan William Perkins into Dutch, Latin, Hungarian and even Spanish. The Spanish translations of Calvin and Perkins claimed to have been printed En casa de Ricardo del Campo. In other words, they were produced in London by the printer Richard Field, in order to be smuggled into Spain.

On the Catholic side, one Jesuit might translate the work of another, possibly a biography of a third Jesuit. One might speak of a conspiracy or at least of a Jesuit translation policy, linked their missionary activities. Publishers too followed strategies. In Venice, Gabriel Giolito hired professional writers to translate the classics as well as a few more recent texts. Another Italian, Barezzo Barezzi of Cremona, was both a printer and a translator from Spanish who produced Italian versions of Lazarillo de Tormes and Guzmn de Alfarache. 17th-century governments sometimes supported the task of translation, notably in the cases of Sweden in the early seventeenth century and Russia in the eighteenth. In these two cases state support was part of a strategy. It expressed an awareness that Sweden and Russia were culturally backward as well as located on the periphery of Europe. A campaign of translation would allow catch up with cultural developments in the centre. VI Finally, in what manner were translations made? We have reached what might be called the tactics of translation, as opposed to the strategy. Once again an anthropological approach may be illuminating, distinguishing different cultures of translation or as they say in Translation Studies, different regimes - in the sense of a system of conventions, whether they were followed consciously or unconsciously. Simplifying for the sake of brevity, we may say that the dominant regime in the Middle Ages was translating word for word. After 1800 we see the rise of what is now called foreignizing, in other words allowing what was alien to remain visible.

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Early modern translations, by contrast, were much freer. Translators aimed at domestication, at making the text intelligible and relevant to the reader at the expense of its foreign qualities. They allowed themselves a good deal of liberty, a scandalous amount by later standards. For example, translation at second hand, from another translation, was common and does not seem to have attracted much criticism. Translators often seem to have considered themselves to be co-authors, with the right either to abridge or to amplify the texts translated. On occasion the title-page of a translation might boast that it had improved on the original. The Spanish translation of the French political theorist Jean Bodin declared that it had been emended catlicamente. The title-page of the Spanish version of Richardsons novel Pamela described the text as corregida y acomodada a nuestras costumbres por el traductor. In extreme cases translators might shift the action of dialogues, plays and stories from one locale to another, a process that may be described as transposition. When Machiavellis dialogue on the Art of War was translated into Spanish, the Italian soldiers who had taken part in the debate were replaced by Spaniards. This was indeed a spectacular case of cultural translation. VII

It is time to conclude, returning to an overview of Europe. In the early modern period, the translation of texts was becoming more and more frequent, as both supply and demand increased. The supply was increased by emigration in the age of religious wars. There was also an increasing demand for translations, led by the expansion of the reading

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public to include new social groups such as women and artisans and also by the gradual decline of Latin as the common tongue of the Republic of Letters. That the Republic of Letters did not fragment in the 17th century is something that we owe to the many translators active in the period, individuals who have never received the recognition that they surely deserve. The problem is that if a translation is successful, its creator becomes invisible, lost in translation. I am glad to have had an opportunity to offer a small tribute to early modern translators. And since this lecture was translated while I was giving it, I should like to thank my translator for tonight.

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