Lost in Early Modern Translation…

Lost and Found in Translation:
A cultural history of translators and translating in Early Modern Europe. Peter Burke. Koninklijke Bibliotheek Lecture.

This post is based around the original and just goes to show how I interacted with it. Well worth reading only 22 pages long. Brilliant piece of scholarship and appreciation of the many questions raised by translation.

Shakespeare in the Bush is an anthropologist’s take on Hamlet. And Hamlet is the best SHakespeare play to follow in terms of its impact on the early modern audience that was Sh’s audience.

The Otherists in identifying Shakes seem to take one big slice of the Historical Elizabethan gateau and subject it to a microhistorical reading incorporating a whole lot of icing, which is sweet yet insubstantial. The raw ingredients for SHakespeare demand a full and intellectually stimulating curiousity for words and language.

He would have been aware that in his time English was at least 5th in ranking as a language to speak in, let alone compose poetry in. The diss about the English language applied to all true Englishmen (and Wimmin) no matter their placement on the social scale. If they had English hearts they felt it. The French knew us at Agincourt as ‘les fuck offs’.

Shakespeare knew French and not just un petit peu. La coude c’est quoi? ah oui, le Bilbo! Shakespeare knew accents and dialects. I know he heard Dutch and knew Dutch people. Archive scholar Leslie Hotson found him in a deal between Dutch, Lancashire and London men with the owner of the Mermaid Tavern. I think it was Sh’s friday nights that grew into the assembly of wits recorded many years later by Beaumont.

The French people he knew early on when he was a newbie to London worked for Thomas Vautrollier, the printer where Stratford neighbour and friend Richard Field worked for and then took over. This printing house printed works in classical and early modern languages. The people who worked there had to be multi-lingual. Language acquisition from this standpoint where all interests are more or less equal is a piece o.

But some say he could never have learned another language without having set foot in another country. But then explain how the Sovereign herself spoke 7 or 8 classical and early modern foreign languages without ever having set foot in Europe. Yes, she knew people of the language being taught either expert in the dead ones, or sprightly in the living. In a case of Latin being a living language like at the Vatican, Elizabeth met once Grainne O Malley, the Irish Pirate Queen, and they conversed in Latin.

So that rant on the non-impossibility of Sh’s gaining a second or third or heavens even a fourth other language over. Today’s blog is nicked (as noted above) in the form of notes i made before handing it back. This, I’ve top and tailed with my usual ramblings and voila, Viola, a shipwreck of a blog.

Language learning, and translation of any language to any other, demands making choices. The sonnet form had hit England through 2 of Henry VIII’s diplomats. So since then until Shakespeare arrived in London, many French sonnets had been translated and re- negotiated as poetic goods to be bartered and sold on the ear’s marketplace…

A negotiation of ideas and meanings.
De-contextualisation and re-contextualisation.

Svetlana Boym Untranslateable terms. Dictionary of?

eg Jesuits in China, Japan, India, Brazil and Paraguay.
(what is it about this country? Why Paraguay)?

5 questions:

What was being translated?

#1 the Bible into 51 languages.
#2 Imitatio Christi into 12 languages over 52 translations.
#3 Classics from Antiquity over 1000+ before 1600.

Plutarch was popularly translated into French by Jacques Amyot
Tacitus translated into Dutch by P.C. Hooft.

Some popular modern translations of the Early Modern Era were the Euchiridion of Erasmus, Luther, Calvin.
The Catechism by Italian jesuit Roberto Bellarmino translated into 40 languages, 17 of which lay outside Europe.
A play about the fall of the Ming Dynasty, ‘Zungchin’ by Vondel.
Books on Natural Philosophy by Gallileo, Newton, Robert Boyle.

Shakespeare was rarely translated before the middle of the 18thC.

What remained untranslated is also interesting. eg P.C. Hooft did a European history book up to the 17thC.

From which language into which language?

Ancient Greek to Latin composed many translations.
Greek and Latin into several vernaculars were more translated.
On the flip side many works were translated from European languages to Latin (the lingua france of European scholars and therefore the HTML of the time).

Religious and scientific books, histories, travel books, poems, plays and stories.
Other works of the imagination were translated into Latin.
eg Ariosto, della Porta, de Rojas, Dante, Spenser, Tasso, Brant, Dryden.

There was a relation between linguistic imports and exports.
Italy both exported and imported works from Spanish and French.
Scandinavia imported works from French, Italian, German.
Germans from Italian, Spanish, French and English.
Spain had very few imports.
The Czechs, Polish, Hungarian and Swedish all imported books in translation.

By whom were they being translated?

By collectives, teams and committees who worked by consensus on interpretation of the texts.
Especially where the Bible was concerned.
Eg Staten Bijbel NL
Authorised King James in Britain.
Gustav Vasa Bible in Sweden.
Kralicy Bible in Bohemia.
FInnish and Swedish translators took their translators from all over the country to ensure it was understood by all.

Most translators were amateurs and not professionals. They cover the gamut of occupations and interests with the majority being Clergy. Also lawyers, physicians, artists, connoisseurs, diplomats, nobility, women, emigres, Italian protestants, and Huguenots.

What were the intentions of the translators?

Obviously religious converts were the goal of many translations
Calvinist Internationals.
The Jesuits, (the fast growing militant missionary and educational arm of the Catholic Church), had a translation policy they adhered to.

The major publishing centres were Venice, Paris, Antwerp, and Amsterdam

Naturally 17thC governments kept a close watch on what was being published. Prominently Gustav Adolf of Sweden and Peter the Great of Russia.

In what manner were the works translated?

This refers to the tactics and regime the translators used. There are different sets of rules and conventions for the 3 broadly defined periods:

Middle Ages Pre-1500
We don’t know much about this period when translation would have been confined to manuscript, and the reproduction a matter of copying by hand.

Early Modern 1500-1799
The advent of the printing press meant translations could be put into print runs and therefore made into a commodity. Translations were aimed at domesticating the text making it intelligible and relevant to the reader at the expense of its foreign qualities.

There was also a translating incidence from works not in their original language re-translated into another language.
eg Thomas North’s Plutarch (used by SHakespeare and his contemporaries printed by Vautrollier) was translated from the French by Jacques Amyot.
Jan Glazenmaker translated the Koran into Dutch from the French.

Translators often considered themselves as co-authors who abridged, amplified, and improved the texts. Or they would bowdlerize them, or tranpose events. Fidelity to the original was not high on their list of criteria.

Modern 1800-NOW
Translators emphasis now switched to ‘foreignizing’ or allowing the alien to be seen, or as Schleiermacher put it, ‘bringing the reader to the text’.

See Foucault’s model of Intellectual History.

CONCLUSIONS:

There were few translations from English prior to 1650.

The most popularly translated Early Modern languages were Italian, Spanish and French with German, Dutch and English trailing far behind. When foreigners did translate from English there were usually mitigating circumstances.
eg Genevieve Chappelain lived at the English Court.
She did a translation of Sidney’s Arcadia.
Jean Badouin translated Sidney and Bacon.
Jean Verneuilh wasat Magdalen College, Oxford.
Pierre de Mareuil who translated Milton was a Jesuit.

There is only one language that did make translations of English works prior to 1650- DUTCH!

Cornelis Sconeveld lists 641 works between 1600-1700.
The Dutch Short title catalogue lists 2000+ works in the 17thC.

Mostly these were of a religious nature.
Puritans such as William Perkins, Richard Baxter, Joseph Hall.
Quakers such as George Fox, William Penn.
Baptists such as John Bunyan.

Other secular works such as Sir Walter Raleigh’s Discovery of Guiana, Sidney’s Arcadia, Bacon’s Essays, Sir Thomas Browne’s meditations.

Shakespeare’s play ‘The Taming of a Shrew’ was translated into Dutch as De Dolle Bruyloft around 1640.

A known German prose translation of ‘Titus Andronicus’ appeared around 1620 and was probably creatively copied by the Dutch working class poet and playwright Jan Vos, aka de dichtende Glazenmaker (the poetry writing glass maker). The success of his play Aaron and Titus (1661) took the reigning Dutch rederijkers of the moment by surprise and they fell about weeping praise at his play.

It is also known that Hamlet was played on board an East India Company’s ship whilst anchored off Sierra Leone in 1607. By that time we had 2 published Quartos of Hamlet, with Q1 in 1603 and Q2 in 1604 . Which one got played?

Captin Keeling’s ship hosted the first recorded amateur performance of a Shakespearean play! JSTOR has a first page account here, and for those lucky enough to have a subscription, a whole account.

Hamlet also lived a life on the German Danish and Dutch stages but in another form by another author. But here our story ends.