Early Modern Exchanges

Dialogues Between Nations and Cultures, 1550-1750

Helen Hackett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317146940
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Marcus Gheeraerts's portrait of a 'Persian lady' - probably in fact an English lady in masquing costume - exemplifies the hybridity of early modern English culture. Her surrounding landscape and the embroidery on her gown are typically English; but her head-dress and slippers are decidedly exotic, the inscriptions beside her are Latin, and her creator was an 'incomer' artist. She is emblematic of the early modern culture of exchange, both between England and its neighbours, and between Europe and the wider world. This volume presents fresh research into such early modern exchanges, exploring how new identities, subjectivities and artefacts were forged in dialogues and encounters between diverse cultures, nations and language communities. The early modern period was a time of creative interactions between cultures and disciplines, and accordingly this is a multidisciplinary volume, drawing together international experts in literature, history, modern and ancient languages and art history. It understands cultural exchange as encompassing both the geographical mobilities of travel and trade and the transmission of ideas across borders and between languages, as enabled by the new technology of print. Sites of exchange were located not only in distant and unfamiliar lands, but also in the bookseller's shop and the scholar's study. The volume also explores the productive and complex dialogues between early modern culture and the classical past. The types of exchanges discussed include the linguistic transactions of translation and imitation; interactions between cultural elites, such as monarchs, courtiers and diplomats; and the catalytic influences of particularly mobile or outward-looking individuals and groups. Ranging from the neo-Latin poetry of an English author to the plays of a nun in seventeenth-century New Spain, from royal portraits exchanged in diplomatic negotiations to travelling companions in the Ottoman Empire, the volume sheds new light

PART I
Linguistic Exchanges: Translation and Imitation

Chapter 1
Translation as a Currency of Cultural Exchange in Early Modern England

Brenda M. Hosington

In 1603, that indefatigable lexicographer and translator, John Florio, exclaimed in his address to the reader prefacing the first edition of his translation of Montaigne’s Essayes that ‘From translation all Science had it’s of’spring’ (A5). A mere three centuries and a half later, in 1975, Louis Kelly opened his discussion of translation in The True Interpreter. A History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West, with an equally strong statement: ‘Western Europe’, he says, ‘owes its civilization to translators’ (1). George Steiner asserts over and over again in After Babel that translation of one kind or another guarantees our shared survival, being a ‘constant of organic survival’ because the individual and the species depend on the exchange of information; translation is ‘fully implicit in the most rudimentary communication’ between human beings (437, 495). Indeed, translation has always and everywhere played a crucial role in developing cross-cultural activities and encounters and in disseminating knowledge in many branches of intellectual and practical endeavour, ranging over a whole spectrum of human activity. Translators through the centuries have played an indispensable role in facilitating the exchanges that take place via the medium of international networks of scholars and thinkers and in bridging geographical, linguistic, cultural, and temporal divides. Finally, a study of translation contributes to our understanding of how nations and individuals communicate, how ideas are cross-pollinated and often in the process transformed, and how causes and movements transcend national boundaries. For all these reasons, then, translation constitutes a primary and an indisputable site of linguistic and cultural exchange, and one that was particularly important in early modern England.

Translation and Metaphors of Exchange

Given the importance of translation, it is not surprising that translative discourse has over the years and in various languages exploited a variety of metaphors to describe the translating process. Some of the most popular are drawn from the field of economics – for example, merchandise, treasure, wealth, monetary value and coin – and appear in early modern English commentary on translation and the translating process, as we shall see in this first section of this chapter. However, the linguistic and cultural exchange that translation makes possible can only occur through the mediation of translators and interpreters, go-betweens who transmit the message of the original text and features of the source culture to another audience from within a network of agents, who continue the process of exchange in multiple and varying ways. In England, these translators constitute a group of variously motivated and talented men and women: for example, scholars, teachers, printers, religious, courtiers, travellers and diplomats. Their contribution as cultural and intellectual mediators will be discussed in the second section. Finally, as we have said above, translational exchange also enables what today we would call knowledge-transfer. Information was exchanged in early modern England in over 80 different domains, via 20 or so different languages, both ancient and modern, and between almost as many countries. These will be analysed in the final section.

As has been pointed out many times, ‘metaphor’ (

) and ‘translation’ (translatio) are linked etymologically and semantically: both mean ‘a carrying over’ or ‘transferral’ (translatio being formed from translatus, the past participle of the verb transferre), both words could, in Classical Greek and Renaissance Latin, denote translation, both could refer either to transference from one language to another, or transference of meaning within one language. According to Aristotle (Poetics XXI.2–4), metaphor carries over an ‘alien’ or foreign (

) term, or one that is unusual, to a familiar or domestic context by transference and subordination of difference to similitude. This concept has resulted in stress being laid on the secondary role of metaphors as purely ornamental, a view now rejected in favour of seeing their ‘creative epistemological potential’, to quote Rainer Guldin (163). Translation has until relatively recently been described in strikingly similar terms. A translated text domesticates a foreign one in order to make it familiar for the target readership, and in so doing occupies a secondary and subservient place vis-à-vis the original. Yet, as theorists have convincingly argued over the past two decades, a translation is not an imperfect derivative text, but a newly created one. In both cases, then, a hierarchic model has been created in which the literal was set above the figurative, the original above the translation. In the case of metaphor, this establishes a certain ambiguity since Classical and Renaissance rhetoric favoured its use and considered it essential to eloquent speech. In the case of translation, while the authority and perceived value of the original has resolutely outweighed that of its translated version over the centuries, translators and theorists have regularly emphasised the importance of the target text and the strategies of ‘domestication’ that will make the original accessible to the target readership by replacing the foreign cultural markers with familiar, domestic ones. As Lawrence Venuti has claimed for English translation from the mid-seventeenth century to the present, this type of translation, which he also tellingly calls ‘submission’, has held sway (266) but it is certainly not limited to England. Voices have been raised to present an alternative method of translating, one which will bring readers to the source text and its culture by retaining its foreign elements. Friedrich Schleiermacher, in Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens (On the Different Methods of Translating, 1813), set up a binary division of texts, literary and philosophical, factual and informative, with a corresponding binary divison of translating methods: the first requires the translator to bring the reader to the original through ‘alienation’, or foreignisation, the second reverses the process, ‘naturalising’ or domesticating the original. Influenced by Schleiermacher, Walter Benjamin also favoured the ‘alienation’ method of translating, arguing in ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ (‘The Task of the Translator’, 1923) that the translator must reach out to the ‘fruit’ of the source text, the hidden meanings couched in ‘pure language’, and attempt to make them visible in the translation, thus assuring an afterlife for the source text. Finally, Antoine Berman, in L’Épreuve de l’étranger (The Experience of the Foreign, 1984), also demonstrates his debt to Schleiermacher, but relates the domesticating method of translating to ethical concerns, notably the issue of ‘ethnocentrism’.

In 1992, Lieven D’hulst examined the question of the role of metaphors in translation theory, concluding that, among other things, they served to support new models and represent new concepts. However, the most exhaustive discussion to date of the interlinking of metaphor and metaphor theory on the one hand and translation and translation studies on the other is by Rainer Guldin. He claims that metaphor and translation both function as ‘double agents’, the former as figures of foreignness and displacement yet at the same time figures of ‘proper’ language, and the latter as manifestations of fidelity to the foreign original and compliance with the demands of the target text (174–5). Ideally, the inter-relationships set up would be reciprocal and equal, entailing in the case of metaphor the exchange of one word or phrase denoting a certain object for another describing a different object, and in the case of translation, the exchange of words encoded in one language and culture for words encoded in another. However, as we said above, such exchange has, until relatively recently, contained within it a notion of substitution and submission. As late as 1975, George Steiner used inexcusably sexist metaphors to describe the translating process as exchange, saying that complete substitution of meaning is achieved only in the fourth stage of the translational act, the ‘piston-stroke’ that follows ‘trust’, ‘penetration’ and ‘appropriation’, and it must be restitutional if to be significant. The ‘elicitation and appropriative transfer of meaning’ that inevitably result in either loss or gain must be followed by a compensatory restoration of balance between source and target texts, which can only be done, he claims, through mediation ‘into exchange and restored parity’, an ‘exchange without loss’ (316, 302). Tejaswini Niranjana refutes this view of restoration and equal exchange, saying that it does not take into account the ‘relations of power implicit in translation’ and the ‘asymmetry between languages’ (59). Similarly, Pascale Casanova, adapting Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to literary translation, questions whether such equal exchange and restorative transfer can take place within a hierarchal world in which some languages and cultures dominate while others are dominated. Although made within the context of contemporary translation and theory, these comments pertain equally well to much translation in the early modern period, a fact amply supported in the many paratextual materials penned by the translators, as well as by the theorists.

Two other major points of contact between translation and metaphor, according to Guldin (162), are the use of translation as metaphor for exchange and transformation within different forms of discourse, and the use of specific metaphors to describe the functioning of translation. Again, these comments are pertinent to early modern translation, as several specialists have demonstrated. Some suggest that the metaphors themselves used to describe translation and translators embody theoretical principles. Yehudi Lindeman suspects that these are ‘buried inside the metaphors’ used to describe ‘good’ and ‘bad’ translations and, indeed, the whole translating process (206). Metaphors of various sorts, he says, ‘map’ the progression of a translation from the initial step of emulation and imitation, through enargeia, the creation of a vivid mental picture, to the final stage of clear, concrete verbalisation. Gleaning metaphors from the paratexts accompanying translations, Theo Hermans also demonstrates how they relate to three essential questions pertaining to the translating process: Is translation possible? What is a translation’s relationship to its original? How does the translator relate to his or her readership? (105). These metaphors embedded in translation discourse are highly functional, Hermans concludes, and form ‘an integral and essential part of the Renaissance theory of translation’, reflecting changes in translating practices and attitudes towards them (105–6). Anne Coldiron agrees that, like commonplaces, metaphors are used with regard to the process of translating and to author–translator–reader relations, but adds that they are also used to claim a place for translation in English literature (‘Commonplaces’ 109). Finally, Massimiliano Morini, discussing the use of metaphors in Tudor and later seventeenth-century English translation discourse, argues that they are also used to reflect on other contemporary concerns, such as translation and the debate over the status of the English language, or the ‘new awareness of textual complexity’ that was slowly gaining ground as the sixteenth century wore on, and that provoked comments on the need to respect both content and form, both sense and sound (47).

We have seen how multiple uses of the word ‘exchange’ in relation to metaphor and translation all contain some notion of mutuality and reciprocity, of receiving and giving, ideally in equivalent measure although, according to many theorists, complete parity is rarely achieved. We have also seen how this is significant for translation theory. Another meaning of ‘exchange’, again containing a notion of reciprocity, relates specifically to cross-cultural transmission between countries and peoples, and as such is eminently suitable for describing the act of translating. This linking of cultural exchange and linguistic transfer owes a particular debt to social anthropologists. Edward Evans-Pritchard, in fact, coined the term ‘cultural translation’ to describe the means by which members of one culture attempt to understand that of another, but it continued to be used by later anthropologists such as Godfrey Lienhardt, for whom ‘translation’ is a metaphor meaning ‘modes of thought’, and Edmund Leach, who saw translation as the essential problem of social anthropology (Asad 10). Today it has taken on new life, with the recognition that both ethnography (a part of cultural anthropology) and translation studies overlap in several ways. Wolfgang Iser was among the first to explore the exchange between cultures in terms of translatability, using features of a linguistic, intra-cultural and cross-cultural translation to test its feasibility and defining modes of cross-cultural relations that are pertinent to translation, namely, conversion, assimilation, and appropriation. More recently, Paula Rubel and Abraham Rosman have specifically appealed for a closer collaboration between anthropologists and translators, listing shared concerns and calling on ethnographers to follow the lead of translation specialists (Rubel and Rosman 1–21). Not least among these concerns is a preoccupation with the manner in which power relations influence our attempts to decode other cultures and languages. As we saw above, Niranjana addressed the problem of the imbalance of powers entailed in translation, although, ironically, she accused translation studies specialists for not having emulated the efforts made by ethnographers (48). Three years later in 1995, Michaela Wolf wrote that both ethnography and translation attempt to ‘express other discourses in one’s own form of discourse, as well as to identify and capture the differences in language’ but that both are ‘positioned between systems of meanings which are marked by power relations’ (126, 128). Talal Asad has also argued that the process of cultural translation is ‘inevitably enmeshed in conditions of power’ and it is up to the ethnographer to explore the ‘possibilities and limits of effective translation’ (163–4). The question of cultural translation and the exercise of power, according to Maria Tymoczko, is inseparable from ideology, for the former is a prime site for ‘engaging in cultural assertion’ and ‘asserting dominance’ in various ways (Enlarging Translation 255).

So far, translation studies specialists exploring some of the issues related to cultural translation and the process of exchange, and p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I LINGUISTIC EXCHANGES: TRANSLATION AND IMITATION
• PART II INTERNATIONAL DIALOGUES BETWEEN CULTURAL ELITES
• PART III COMMUNITIES OF EXCHANGE, AGENTS OF EXCHANGE
• Epilogue Exchanges: Time to Face the Strange?
• Index