Translation And Transposition In The Early Modern Period

This volume makes an important contribution to the understanding of translation theory and practice in the Early Modern period, focusing on the translation of knowledge, literature and travel writing, and examining discussions about the role of women and office of interpreter. Over the course of the Early Modern period, there was a dramatic shift in the way that translation was conceptualised, a change that would have repercussions far beyond the world of letters. At the beginning of the period, translation was largely indistinguishable from other textual operations such as exegesis, glossing, paraphrase, commentary, or compilation, and theorists did not yet think in terms of the binaries that would come to characterise modern translation theory. Just how and when this shift occurred in actual translation practice is one of the topics explored in this volume through a series of case studies offering snapshots of translational activity in different times and places. Overall, the picture that emerges is of a translational practice that is still very flexible, as source texts are creatively appropriated for new purposes, whether pragmatic, pedagogical, or diversional, across a range of genres, from science and philosophy to literature, travel writing and language teaching. This book will be of value to those interested in Early Modern history, linguistics, and translation studies.

The relationship between travel and translation might seem obvious at first, but to study it in earnest is to discover that it is at once intriguing and elusive. Of course, travelers translate in order to make sense of their new surroundings; sometimes they must translate in order to put food on the table. The relationship between these two human compulsions, however, goes much deeper than this. What gets translated, it seems, is not merely the written or the spoken word, but the very identity of the traveler. These seventeen essays—which treat not only such well-known figures as Martin Luther, Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Milton, but also such lesser known figures as Konrad Grünemberg, Leo Africanus, and Garcilaso de la Vega—constitute the first survey of how this relationship manifests itself in the early modern period. As such, it should be of interest both to scholars who are studying theories of translation and to those who are studying “hodoeporics”, or travel and the literature of travel.

This book explores modalities and cultural interventions of translation in the early modern period, focusing on the shared parameters of these two translation cultures. Translation emerges as a powerful tool for thinking about community and citizenship, literary tradition and the classical past, certitude and doubt, language and the imagination.

Judith H. Anderson conceives the intertext as a relation between or among texts that encompasses both Kristevan intertextuality and traditional relationships of influence, imitation, allusion, and citation. Like the Internet, the intertext is a state, or place, of potential expressed in ways ranging from deliberate emulation to linguistic free play. Relatedly, the intertext is also a convenient fiction that enables examination of individual agency and sociocultural determinism. Anderson’s intertext is allegorical because Spenser’s Faerie Queene is pivotal to her study and because allegory, understood as continued or moving metaphor, encapsulates, even as it magnifies, the process of signification. Her title signals the variousness of an intertext extending from Chaucer through Shakespeare to Milton and the breadth of allegory itself. Literary allegory, in Anderson’s view, is at once a mimetic form and a psychic one—a process thinking that combines mind with matter, emblem with narrative, abstraction with history. Anderson’s first section focuses on relations between Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, including the role of the narrator, the nature of the textual source, the dynamics of influence, and the bearing of allegorical narrative on lyric vision. The second centers on agency and cultural influence in a variety of Spenserian and medieval texts. Allegorical form, a recurrent concern throughout, becomes the pressing issue of section three. This section treats plays and poems of Shakespeare and Milton and includes two intertextually relevant essays on Spenser. How Paradise Lost or Shakespeare’s plays participate in allegorical form is controversial. Spenser’s experiments with allegory revise its form, and this intervention is largely what Shakespeare and Milton find in his poetry and develop. Anderson’s book, the result of decades of teaching and writing about allegory, especially Spenserian allegory, will reorient thinking about fundamental critical issues and the landmark texts in which they play themselves out.

Translating Early Modern Science explores the essential role translators played in a time when the scientific community used Latin and vernacular European languages side-by-side. This interdisciplinary volume illustrates how translators were mediators, agents, and interpreters of scientific knowledge.

"Would there have been a Renaissance without translation?" Karen Newman and Jane Tylus ask in their Introduction to this wide-ranging group of essays on the uses of translation in an era formative for the modern age. The early modern period saw cross-cultural translation on a massive scale. Humanists negotiated status by means of their literary skills as translators of culturally prestigious Greek and Latin texts, as teachers of those same languages, and as purveyors of the new technologies for the dissemination of writing. Indeed, with the emergence of new vernaculars and new literatures came a sense of the necessary interactions of languages in a moment that can truly be defined as "after Babel." As they take their starting point from a wide range of primary sources—the poems of Louise Labé, the first Catalan dictionary, early printed versions of the Ptolemy world map, the King James Bible, and Roger Williams's Key to the Language of America—the contributors to this volume provide a sense of the political, religious, and cultural stakes for translators, their patrons, and their readers. They also vividly show how the very instabilities engendered by unprecedented linguistic and technological change resulted in a far more capacious understanding of translation than what we have today. A genuinely interdisciplinary volume, Early Modern Cultures of Translation looks both east and west while at the same time telling a story that continues to the present about the slow, uncertain rise of English as a major European and, eventually, world language. Contributors: Gordon Braden, Peter Burke, Anne Coldiron, Line Cottegnies, Margaret Ferguson, Edith Grossman, Ann Rosalind Jones, Lázló Kontler, Jacques Lezra, Carla Nappi, Karen Newman, Katharina N. Piechocki, Sarah Rivett, Naomi Tadmor, Jane Tylus.

This volume revisits Genette’s definition of the printed book’s liminal devices, or paratexts, as ‘thresholds of interpretation’ by focussing specifically on translations produced in Britain in the early age of print (1473-1660). At a time when translation played a major role in shaping English and Scottish literary culture, paratexts afforded translators and their printers a privileged space in which to advertise their activities, display their social and ideological affiliations, influence literary tastes, and fashion Britain’s representations of the cultural ‘other’. Written by an international team of scholars of translation and material culture, the ten essays in the volume examine the various material shapes, textual forms, and cultural uses of paratexts as markers (and makers) of cultural exchange in early modern Britain. The collection will be of interest to scholars of early modern translation, print, and literary culture, and, more broadly, to those studying the material and cultural aspects of text production and circulation in early modern Europe.

This book offers the first cultural history of translation in Japan during the Tokugawa period, 1600-1868.