Trust and Proof. Translators in Renaissance Print Culture

328 Pages·2017·11.244 MB·English

by  Rizzi Andrea (ed.)

Trust and Proof
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Library of the Written Word
VOLUME 63
The Handpress World
Editor-in-Chief
Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews)
Editorial Board
Ann Blair (Harvard University)
Falk Eisermann (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preuβischer Kulturbesitz)
Ian Maclean (All Souls College, Oxford)
Alicia Montoya (Radboud University, Nijmegen)
Angela Nuovo (University of Udine)
Helen Smith (University of York)
Mark Towsey (University of Liverpool)
Malcolm Walsby (University of Rennes)
Arthur der Weduwen (University of St Andrews)
VOLUME 48
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lww
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Trust and Proof
Translators in Renaissance Print Culture
Edited by
Andrea Rizzi
LEIDEN | BOSTON
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Cover illustration: Detail of Laurent de Premierfait’s offers his French translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus
virorum illustrium to Jean Duke of Berry (London, British Library, Royal 14 E V, fol. 5r, ca. 1479). Image repro-
duced from http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/illumin.asp?size=mid&illid=50625 under
CC0. See also Color Plate 5 (fig. 2.7) in this book.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov
lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017040845
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 1874-4834
isbn 978-90-04-32385-8 (hardback with dustjacket)
isbn 978-90-04-32388-9 (e-book)
Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
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This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
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Contents
Foreword: Translation, Print Technologies, and Modernity:
Testing the Grand Narrative vii
Anthony Pym
Acknowledgements xiv
List of Figures xv
List of Contributors xvii
Introduction 1
Andrea Rizzi and Cynthia Troup
part 1
Translators’ Rhetorics: Dedication and Imitatio
1 The Social Transmission of Translations in Renaissance Italy:
Strategies of Dedication 13
Brian Richardson
2 Monkey Business: Imitatio and Translators’ Visibility
in Renaissance Europe 33
Andrea Rizzi
3 Rhetorical Ethos and the Translating Self in Early Modern England 62
Marie-Alice Belle
part 2
Transcultural Translations
4 Multi-Version Texts and Translators’ Anxieties: Imagined Readers
in John Florio’s Bilingual Dialogues 87
Belén Bistué
5 “No Stranger in Foreign Lands”: Francisco de Hollanda
and the Translation of Italian Art and Art Theory 112
Elena Calvillo
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vi Contents
6 Authors, Translators, Printers: Production and Reception of Novels
between Manuscript and Print in Fifteenth-Century Germany 146
Albrecht Classen
7 Reframing Idolatry in Zapotec: Dominican Translations
of the Christian Doctrine in Sixteenth-Century Oaxaca 164
David Tavárez
part 3
Women Translating in Renaissance Europe
8 Paratextual Economies in Tudor Women’s Translations:
Margaret More Roper, Mary Roper Basset and Mary Tudor 185
Rosalind Smith
9 Translating Eloquence: History, Fidelity, and Creativity
in the Fairy Tales of Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier 209
Bronwyn Reddan
10 Women Translators and Print Culture in Sixteenth-Century
Germany 229
Hilary Brown
Conclusion 251
Deanna Shemek
Color Plates following 256
Bibliography 257
Index of Names 289
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Foreword: Translation, Print Technologies, and
Modernity: Testing the Grand Narrative
Anthony Pym
We need more Bibles like that.
musa dube (2012)
∵
Technologies, we know, strongly affect how we communicate, especially how
we communicate from one language to another. In the case of print technolo-
gies, that general relationship can be thought about in terms of the following
all-embracing narrative.
In Strasbourg, around 1440, Johannes Gutenberg’s introduction of moveable
type endowed texts with a degree of fixity. Printing allowed texts degrees of
material survival over time and mobility through space, to an extent greater
than did previous technologies. The new fixity, in turn, meant that transla-
tion could be ideologically based on an established “start text”. This kind of
translation thereby differed from the kind that had been just one among many
forms of the general rewriting that produced variant copies, modifications
and adaptations. Since print established the start in this way, there was “some-
thing there” to which a translation could be assumed to be faithful (or, in the
twentieth century, equivalent). More important, the quality of this fidelity (or
equivalence) was to the text as object—before it was to an author or reader as
person. And since fidelity was to a material thing instead of a person, it became
a relationship into which potentially anyone could enter, if and when they had
the required literacy. The spread of literacy thus allowed for more democratic
access to knowledge and fewer restrictions on the right to translate. Print thus
made possible a democratisation of knowledge, or so would run the narrative.
The tale can be continued. Print brought about the need for linguistic con-
ventions, and thus standardised languages, which tended to be the languages
of the European nation state and its colonial counterparts. Since the emerg-
ing nation states developed a regime of mutual recognition based on a fiction
of equality, their languages were also presumed to be of equal value—as
opposed to medieval regimes, where some languages were considered to be
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viii Pym
closer to divine revelation and hence superior. Rather than take knowledge
from a superior to an inferior language, print-based translation was thus as-
sumed to operate between equal languages. And that assumption reinforced
the regime of fidelity (or equivalence), which was similarly based on a fiction
of equality.
In sum, according to this story, the age of print would correspond to a partic-
ular way of thinking about translation: based on a start text; working between
languages of potentially equal values; producing a text that ideally has a value
equivalent to that of the start text; carried out by individuals. That general
mode of thought was rarely found prior to the advent of print (if only because
of the medieval hierarchy of languages), and was not common beyond Europe
prior to the nineteenth century. It became important and coherent enough
to be regarded as the Western form or mode of translation, which travelled
out from Europe as one piece of that complex set of technologies and values
known presumptuously as modernity.
Such might be the kind of grand narrative that is tested, implicitly, in all
close analyses of translation in the age of print. It is tested well and closely by
the contents of this volume.
Print and Translation: A Test Case of Two Renaissance Bibles
Here I would briefly like to test the same narrative on the basis of a particular
historical comparison, just to see how it fares. The comparison concerns the
Bible (but it might contain lessons for much else as well). And while it con-
cerns Hispanic translation history, it hopefully resonates beyond.
One of the problems facing the Church in Hispania from the thirteenth cen-
tury through to the fifteenth century was the presence of numerous vernacular
variants of the biblical texts. Since the institutional authority of the Church
was based on the Bible as book, different versions of that book—especially
those held by the Jewish population prior to 1492—undermined that author-
ity. The problem would be addressed by the physical burning of variant texts:
in Tarragona, for example, in 1233 (prior to print) and in the city of Salamanca
in 1490 (in the age of print). Same problem, same solution, and the existence
of print would appear to make no difference at all: a book burns as a book, no
matter how the book has been produced.
There were other ways to address the problem, however. One of them was
to locate the different versions, variants, and adaptations of the Bible and find
out about them. The ensuing knowledge might then be used either to produce
a corrected version or to enter into a disputation. That was the general spirit
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Foreword ix
in which the Order of Calatrava organised a project, from 1422 to 1430, to have
Moses Arragel, rabbi of the Jewish community of Maqueda in Toledo province,
translate the Hebrew biblical texts into Spanish. The result is the superb illus-
trated manuscript known as the Alba Bible (the “Biblia de Alba”), since it has
long been owned by the House of Alba. A second attempted solution, which
ran from 1502 to 1520, was Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros’s project for
a polyglot Bible based on linguistic scholarship—now known as the Complu-
tensian Polyglot, which was printed.1 Both of these projects aimed to establish
texts, albeit in different ways. One was pre-print; the other occurred in the age
of print (bearing in mind that the Gutenberg Bible was produced in 1450–55).
What can these two projects tell us about print and translation?
Some differences are immediately obvious and eloquent. The Alba Bible was
ordered as “una biblia en rromançe, glosada e ystoriada”, that is to say, “a Bible
in Romance [in this case Castilian Spanish], with glosses and explanations”.
And indeed, for many of the pages there are more words in the commentaries
than in the actual translation. The Complutensian Polyglot, on the other hand,
establishes previous versions of the biblical text: Hebrew, Latin, and Greek for
the Old Testament, with Aramaic Targum of Onkelos and its Latin translation,
and then various etymologies and a Greek grammar, but no commentaries or
explanations as such. So both volumes are presenting knowledge about the
biblical text, but in very different ways. The Alba Bible presents the worldview
of Hebrew as a relatively unknown language, offering particular explanations
and interpretations: this is what the Hebrew-speaking rabbi can tell us, as a cul-
tural informant for his time and place. The Complutensian Polyglot ostensibly
presents no worldview beyond linguistic knowledge: it provides the tools with
which a humanist could set about interpreting the text; it implicitly declares,
“now you decide what you think”. This difference in approach resonates with
the kind of distinction that one would like to attribute to print and modernity:
in making knowledge available on printed pages rather than through personal
authority, the book opens to many possible interpretations, in a democracy of
knowledge where all people potentially have the tools with which to decide.
If only history were that easy. Let us see how the effect of print actually
works, for example on Isaiah 7:14. This verse can serve as a litmus test for any
Bible translation: it is the place in which some believe the biblical text an-
nounces a virgin birth. The Hebrew has המלע (‘almah); Jerome’s Latin Vulgate
clearly has the word virgo (virgin); the Greek of the Septuagint has παρθένος
(young, unmarried woman, maiden, or virgin), and the Complutensian P olyglot
1 Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (ed.), Vetus testamentū multiplici lingua nūc primo impressum
(Alcalá de Henares: Copluti Universitate, 1514).
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