Burke e Hsia (2007) - Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe

 CULTURAL TRANSLATION IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

Introduction - Burke e Hsia

• Holmes > Zohar e Toury > Historical turn.

1 Cultures of translation in early modern Europe - Peter Burke (7-38)

• Todo hist é um trad se o passado é um foreign country. Tenta manter fidelidade com o passado ao mesmo tempo que tenta passar a história para seu tempo.
• cultural translation em antropologia 8
• vários problemas de comunicação ao longo da hist.
• outro jeito: decontextualization e recontextualization: 
• first reaching out to appropriate something alien and then domesticating it. Interlingual translation may be regarded not only as an instance of this process but also as a kind of litmus paper that makes it unusually visible – or audible. It may be illuminating to attempt to look at the process from a double viewpoint. From the receiver’s point of view it is a form of gain, enriching the host culture as a result of skilful adaptation. From the donor’s point of view, on the other hand, translation is a form of loss, leading to misunderstanding and doing violence to the original. 10
• Who translates? With what intentions? What? For whom? In what manner? With what consequences? 11 (de Lambert 1993)
• Quem traduzia: 
• maior parte individual mas ainda haviam trads grupais especialmente para a biblia. 
• Maioria era trad amadora e traduzia dentro de seu metier. 
• Mulheres presentes, trad apropriada para mulheres pois não era escrita original. 
• Profissionais (ou semiprofissionais) geralmente eram escritores e intérpretes ou outros trabalhadores relacionados às linguas . Assim como hj poucos são trads full time
• Dicionários surgiram a partir do XVI, sendo que alguns lang pairs demoraram até o XVIII.
• Muitos refugiados e jesuitas.
• Porque:
• Maioria religioso.
• Em vários paises haviam "programas" de trad financiados pelas coroas. Aí entravam trads mais diverdsas como textos militares, politicos e cientificos.
• Também textos literários como forma de aculturamento por vernaculização da população ou soberania nacional.
• O que:
• Escolha a fim de preencher lacunas na cultura alvo. Ou o principio de confirmação na qual os trabalhos traduzidos confirmam crenças da cultura alvo.
• If they do not support ideas of this kind, the translations are modified, directly or indirectly (via ‘paratexts’ such as prefaces or letters to the reader) in order to give the impression that they do, [...] 20
• Para quem
• dois movimentos: do grego e lat para o vernaculo e do vernaculo para o latim.
• Translations into Latin were made primarily so that educated men whose first language was Germanic or Slav could have access to works written in Italian, French or Spanish (below, p. 71). As for translations from one European vernacular into another, they may be analysed according to both their original language (a sign of its prestige or cultural hegemony) and their target language (a sign that that culture was open to ideas from outside). In other words the ‘political economy of translation’, both the imports and the exports, makes a revealing cultural indicator. 22
• Lista os imports e exports de cada país fazendo relação com o prestígio das linguas.
• Como
• o habitus do tradutor
• Debates revolved around the distinction between translating word for word – often denounced as ‘slavery’, ‘servility’ or ‘superstition’ – and translating the sense of a given text. A phrase from Horace about the ‘faithful translator’, fidus interpres, the equivalent for translation theory of his phrase ut pictura poesis in Renaissance art criticism, was discussed over and over again 25
• Também se discutia intraduzibilidade.
• No medievo haiva a dominação do sistema word for word ((com permissão de i9serções desavidas no texto). Literalismo permitia estrangeirização.
• Da renascença pra frente houve enfase no sense-for sense. Domesticação.
• Maioria feita por interpolação. No xix ja seriam diretas.
• Contudo havia uma pluralidade de subculturas de trad o que ocasionava querelas entree a expectativa e a relaidade do texto final.
• Belles infedeles
• In seventeenth-century France, a famous debate centred on the new translations of the classics by Nicolas d’Ablancourt. These free and fluent versions provoked the critic Gilles Me´nage to refer to the belles infide`les, comparing translations to women and claiming that the beautiful ones are not faithful, while the faithful ones are not beautiful.91 Replying to his critics and secularizing a traditional phrase of religious reformers like Flacius (above, p. 28), D’Ablancourt attacked what he called the ‘Judaic superstition’ of following the original text word by word. ‘I do not always stick to the author’s words or even to his thoughts,’ he declared. ‘I keep the effect he wanted to produce in mind.’ What he advocated was what we might call cultural translation, giving the old metaphor of a language as a form of clothing a new twist and arguing that ‘Different times do not just require different words but also different thoughts, and ambassadors usually dress in the fashion of the country to which they are sent.’ 29-30
• Grande embate entre fidelidade e liberdade.
• Trads permitiam grandes edições na época da renascença. 
• Inclusive em textos cientificos e filosogicos 33
• The freedom of translators may be compared with the freedom of scribes. It was not uncommon for copyists of poems, for instance those of John Donne (which circulated in manuscript at the beginning of the seventeenth century), to leave out stanzas or even to insert new ones. Manuscript was what we might call an ‘interactive’ medium.108 Like these scribes, early modern translators of medieval or modern works seem to have viewed themselves as co-authors with the right to modify the original text. In the early modern period it was only very gradually that the idea of a text as both the work and the property of a single individual imposed itself. 34
• essa liberdade e cultura de domesticação se estendeu até o xviii
• No inicio do XIX isso foi formalizado em escolhas por Shcleiermacher e Humboldt.
• In other words, changes in translation practices fit the model proposed by Michel Foucault in which 1800 marks a major break in what he calls the European ‘episteme’.114 The rise of foreignization is part of the rise of romanticism and historicism, including the idea that different languages express different world-views and that the past is a foreign country. The view expressed by Dryden, that Virgil should be presented in translation as if he had been born ‘in this present age’, was now rejected. 35
• Isso foi tambem um embate entre a tradição alemã (estrangeirizante) e francesa (domesticadora)
• Consequencias:
• Misunderstandings
• aumento de vocab 36
• multiplicadores
• spread of ideas
• Burke da enfase no perdido
• Whether translators follow the strategy of domestication or that of foreignizing, whether they understand or misunderstand the text they are turning into another language, the activity of translation necessarily involves both decontextualizing and recontextualizing. Something is always ‘lost in translation’. However, the close examination of what is lost is one of the most effective ways of identifying differences between cultures. For this reason, the study of translation is or should be central to the practice of cultural history. 38

The role of translations in european scientific exchanges in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - Isabelle Pantin (163-180)

• Circulação de manuscritos ainda era representativa. Paracelso e um exemplo
• No XVI ingles era pouco representativo. Europa continental, excluindo a peninsula iberica, dominavam o comercio
• Trad saia rapido, do latim pro vern ou vice versa. Entre verns era mais raro.
• "The purpose of these translations [of Paracelsus (XVI)] was clear: they were made by practitioners for practitioners, with the idea that they could spread new and useful information on the most frequent or dangerous infirmities and diseases, paying increasing attention to exhaustiveness and clarity." [Justificava-se a mudança de termos)
• Traduções as vezes seriam o que chamamos hoje de re-edições.
• Ao final do renascimento o latim ainda era dominante mas os verns já havima se construido como linguas de cultura (faz relação com Dante e com a formação do estado nacional). Critérios era a poesia e filosofia (que incluia as ccs) 169;
• A versão em latim era mais interativa e mais canonica
• Paracelso trad pensando em praticidade e anti-aristotelismo.
• Ideologias de trad
• Another sort of ‘ideology’ was involved in the translations designed to accommodate the needs and requirements of a professional group or, possibly, institution. For example, physicians put much effort into translation, defending Latin on the one hand, a sign of professional competence, and vernacular languages, on the other hand, to enable the distribution of useful and wholesome knowledge. Medicine was one of the fields in which the simultaneous circulation of the same text in two languages (Latin and the vernacular) was not exceptional, notably in the case of treatises on the plague. 175
• n the translation business, the desire to facilitate communication between scientists was not the only – and not even the main – factor. Booksellers would rather include both the Latin and vernacular version of the same work in their catalogues. English booksellers largely imported learned books in Latin: so the export of the Royal Society scientific publications in translation was some compensation. Quite a modest beginning, and without real prospects: the great obstacle to the penetration of foreign markets by English books was their prohibitive cost of production.
• The most ‘ideological’ translation undertakings had to satisfy commercial requirements, as is obvious even in the case of the Galilean translations. When he wished to publish his works abroad, Galileo was informed that the use of Italian would put off many readers. His disciple Pieroni in Vienna argued in 1635 that he had numerous supporters throughout Europe who were eager to read his books, without being able to do so: ‘If the Dialogues were in Latin, I think that they would be already reprinted in France, in Belgium and Germany, and in more places, because the curious are very numerous.’ Other correspondents wrote that the booksellers strongly objected to publishing books in foreign languages, fearing that they could not find customers. 176
• Fatores comerciais eram salientes.
• Situação geral
•  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the translation of modern scientific books was only a marginal phenomenon without significant economical importance, even in the case of England – I should rather say of London – where there was a truly dynamic confrontation between Latin and the vernacular. It is significant that the chapter entitled ‘Science and the book’ in the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain does not discuss the problem of translations, and that, on the other hand, the part concerning ‘vernacular traditions’ does not deal with scientific literature, except via the ‘periodical press’. 178
• Thus there was no large flow of scientific translations; and the corollary was that works were rarely translated only to supply the market. The great majority of translations were from the vernacular into Latin, and had special motives. Above all, they were a sign of value. In the prefaces, they were often presented as proof of the international importance of the work, with the topos of the eagerly awaiting foreign audience. 178
• Latin translations were, for the writers, a means to establish themselves in the dignified Republic of Letters, and they were all the more significant when they concerned books which had first been written in the vernacular for important special reasons, like Galileo’s Dialogo, or Lansbergen’s treatise on the motion of the earth. On the other hand, they often reduced the authors’ control over their own work. Several factors contributed to this effect, from the initiatives taken by disciples or distant followers (and the liberties taken by the translators), to the strategies of the booksellers. Robert Boyle had only too keen a perception of the unpleasant aspects of the process, whereas Galileo eventually submitted to enduring them, seeing that he thus secured the survival of his work. However, the most important thing was probably that the audience of the books changed: it became larger, more foreign, often ignorant of the circumstances of the first publication, and freer in its interpretations. Henceforth the work was a kind of common property (bonum publicum), it belonged to the whole community of philosophers and lettered persons. [interessante caminho contrário com o estabelecimento do autor individual] 179