If we want
to know how cultures interrelate, it is worth looking closely
at who intermediaries are and how they work in intercultures (overlaps
of cultures, defined by criteria of professionalism and 'secondness').
The frontier society of the Hispanic reconquista contained certain
kinds of intercultural groups, the development of which can be
traced through later history. The work of such groups can be analyzed
in terms of the ways cultural frontiers are agreed upon, and the
modes of agreement can be approached through neo-classical negotiation
theory and the general concept of regimes.
1. The Abbot's Gold
In 1145 the
abbot of Cluny visited Hispania and sponsored a Latin translation
of the Qur'an. This set the scene for later translation activities
in Toledo. Formulated on the frontier between Christian and Islamic
Europe, the translation project was justified in terms of providing
information for a future disputation that would save souls from
the 'heresy' of Islam. However, in calling for open debate on
the basis of translation, the abbot risked exposing the sacred
texts of Christianity to the same examination, since many of those
texts were actually in the Qur'an. In effect this meant siding
with the main intercultural writers working on the project, who
were more interested in science than religion. The actual translator
of the Qur'an thus did a shoddy job, for which he was happy enough
to take the abbot's gold. The culture of generalized disputation,
which would eventually undo the authority of the church, was then
used to remarkably little avail against Islam.
2. Toledo and All That
Despite all
the talk about a twelfth-century School of Translators in Toledo,
the scientific translating that took place there remains a poorly
understood phenomenon. Attention to its political dimension suggests
that it should not be attached to the state-subsidized work carried
out under Alfonso X after 1250 but is better explained in terms
of Cluniac sponsorship of the first Latin translation of the Qur'an
in 1142. This approach reveals grounds for potential conflict
between the foreign scientific translators and the Toledo cathedral.
Such conflict would nevertheless have been smoothed over by certain
translation principles serving both scientific and religious interests.
The foremost of these principles were literalism, secondary elaboration,
the use of teamwork, the inferiorization of non-Latinist intermediaries,
the justification of conquest, and the accordance of authority
to non-Christian texts. Thanks to this shared regime, the church
helped scientific translations to enter Latin.
3. The Price of Alfonso's Learning
The mainly
protoscientific translations carried out after 1250 for Alfonso
X of Castile are among the reasons why the king has been dubbed
'the Learned'. The translations were from Arabic into Castilian,
although further translations were made from Castilian into Latin
and French. Some historians have willfully attached these court-organized
activities to the properly twelfth-century translations carried
out into Latin for the Toledo cathedral, as if there had been
a merely logical transition from church to court. It can be argued,
however, that the Alphonsine translations resulted from a nation-building
language policy that opposed church power by avoiding the use
of Latin for translations from Arabic. Coupled to this was a specific
extranslation policy designed to win the king international prestige
by translating from Castilian target texts and using Latin when
required. These two aspects of the general policy corresponded
to two teams of professional intercultural mediators, comprising
mainly Jews for the work into Castilian and Italians for translations
from Castilian. The policy, and its economic results, can be compared
with similarly nationalist language policies operative in Europe
today.
4. The Importance of Paper
Since the introduction
of paper-making coincided with the translation teams of both ninth-century
Baghdad and thirteenth-century Castile, one might legitimately
speculate on the consequences this material technology might have
had for medieval translation processes. Attention to the translations
commissioned by Alfonso X from 1250 suggests that the use of paper
would have allowed intermediary versions to be written out in
full and corrected, thus promoting increased bureaucratization
and state control of translation activities. Comparison with print
culture also suggests that the initial use of paper extended rather
than opposed oral-based translation processes, challenging the
ideal of the definitive target text in much the same way as computer-based
networking is doing today.
5. A Christian's Rabbinic Bible
In the early
fifteenth century the Grand Master of the Order of Calatrava commissioned
rabbi Mose Arragel to translate the Old Testament into Castilian
and to provide numerous rabbinical glosses, to which the translator
was instructed to add Christian glosses. The result, know as the
Biblia de Alba, is an apparently hybrid document based on a complex
negotiation of cultural and religious boundaries. From the rabbi's
explicit documentation of the negotiation and redaction processes,
it is possible to formalize the principles used for the writing
of the glosses and, on the basis of selected passages, for the
actual translation itself, where key terms are invested with double
meanings. The result is a frontier where a profoundly Rabbinic
bible was effectively concealed beneath a Christianized surface.
6. From traslad- to traduc-
In the course
of the fifteenth century the Spanish names for translation changed
from the morphology of traslad- (trasladador, trasladacion, etc.)
to various forms of traduc- (traductor, traducción, etc.).
This transition would seem to have occurred between the time of
the Biblia de Alba and 1455, when Pero Díaz de Toledo produced
the first vernacular translation of Plato. The reasons for the
change can be associated with the Italian Leonardo Bruni, who
not only provided the Latin Plato that the Castilian translator
worked from, but was also engaged in a well-known debate with
Alonso Cartagena about the nature of translation. It is thus in
terms of the cultural relations between Castile and Italian humanism
that the change in the names for translation is to be understood.
Although many of the conditions that informed Italian humanism
did not obtain in Castile and the values of newness and cross-cultural
prestige effectively covered over those differences, Spanish thought
underwent significant sea-changes with respect to the medieval
hierarchy of languages and the use of translation from Latin to
develop the vernacular.
On 3 August
1492 Columbus left Spain in search of the New World. The previous
day, ten ships set out from Barcelona carrying expelled Jews to
a rather different kind of cultural expansion. In both cases,
the frontier that had defined medieval Hispania moved outward,
and various intercultures were displaced accordingly.
7. The Language of Empire
The colonial
expansion of Castilian was by no means automatic. It followed
significant standardization of the language and its expansion
within Spain in the late fifteenth century. More important, it
was only one of a number of possible solutions to the problems
of colonial domination. The use of interpreters in the initial
voyages of conquest gave way to the presence of missionaries,
who actively learnt and described some of the Amerindian tongues.
The considerable debate over the status of these languages can
partly be understood in terms of the medieval hierarchy of languages,
although what was at stake was more particularly the standardization
of languages like Nahuatl. Attempts to develop intercultural groups
using standardized Amerindian languages were associated with the
use of translation, but the various groups of active and potential
translators failed to supply lasting solutions to the demands
of domination. In terms of regime theory, this was largely because
the missionaries who were intent on protecting languages were
at the same time engaged in the ideological transformation of
those same languages. This ideological contradiction became untenable,
eventually giving way to the use of Castilian as the language
of empire.
8. The Language of Exile
Virtually in
parallel with the imposition of Castilian in the colonies, the
Counter-Reformation in mainland Spain forced many members of intercultural
groups to take the paths of European exile. This particularly
concerned scholars influenced by Erasmus and inspired by projects
such as the Complutense Polyglot Bible; it meant that representatives
of Spanish Protestantism entered the mainstream of northern European
learning, translating the Bible accordingly. Within Spain, the
triumph of Castilian was thus accompanied by a cultural closure
and a relative distancing of humanist translation practices. The
differences between translation within Spain and translation as
carried out by Spanish exiles would then inform the various waves
that were forced to leave as a result of subsequent expulsions,
right through to the many translating exiles of the twentieth
century. In effect, Spanish intercultural history over this period
can be approached in terms of a profoundly divided translation
culture that was nevertheless able to agree on some points.
9. A Volcano Unbaptized
Rubén
Darío's 1907 poem 'Momotombo' cites and translates a citation
from Victor Hugo that helps the Nicaraguan poet to understand
his pre-Columbian homeland ('Momotombo' is a volcano that refused
to be baptized with a Christian name). The reasons for this very
marginal translation practice can be traced to the way colonial
frontier society constructed cultural value in terms of passages
to and from what was perceived as the centre of development, in
this case Paris. In Darío, such practices allow a tragic
form of mutual exoticization, in which both the centre and the
periphery are denied substance. Symbolic translations, at once
allowing and covering the presence of French, nevertheless permitted
Darío and other Modernista writers to furnish markers of
cultural distinction and upward mobility to privileged social
groups in the colonies. This in turn fed into the notion of a
supranational 'Latin' America as part of a decolonizing development
ideology.
10. Authorship in Translation Anthologies
In the early
twentieth century the minor intermediaries Fernando Maristany
and Enrique Díez-Canedo produced Castilian anthologies
of translated poetry. Maristany approached his anthologies as
a private mode of retreat and refinement, whereas Díez-Canedo
worked with other poets, using the anthology form as a mode of
cultural socialization. Despite these differences, both intermediaries
worked within an international network of nontranslation anthologies,
based on the British publishers Gowans and Gray. The principles
of the translational and nontranslational regimes may thus be
compared, revealing that the use of translation paradoxically
allowed the Spanish intermediaries a more authorial status than
was the case for the compilers of nontranslational anthologies.
11. The Symbolic Olympics
The 1992 Olympic
Games in Barcelona had four official languages (English, French,
Castilian, and Catalan), although the role of translations to
and from Catalan was progressively reduced in the course of the
Olympiad. In fact, the Catalan translators may have symbolically
made up for the absence of a properly Catalan Olympic team. Although
the use of translation for such symbolic purposes may be questioned
in financial terms, it does achieve certain goals when limited
by a fixed timeframe. In long-term scenarios, however, serious
questions must be raised about the ideological returns on such
material investments.
12. Training for Globalizing Markets
If globalization
is understood in terms of cross-cultural distance increasingly
entering the production of cultural products, many of the models
we use to explain translation are of limited value. In particular,
the development of professional cultures that habitually cross
the boundaries of territorial cultures means that communication
may take place wholly within those professional cultures, and
that intermediaries may themselves become members of those same
professional cultures. The resulting image is one of a very segmented
labour market for translators, where much 'pragmatic' translating
remains poorly remunerated and unprofessionalized, whereas the
most globalizing sectors require and pay for skills that are in
short supply. Within this context, the rapid growth of translator-training
institutions in Spain since 1991 cannot be seen as a wholly positive
response to market demands. That growth has instead had much to
do with the internal demands of the Spanish university system.
The structural interculturality of translator-training institutions
may nevertheless yet allow those institutions not only to adjust
to the demands of globalization but also to promote critical thought
on the nature of globalization itself.
References
Index
Acknowledgements
