Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

Focusing on team translation and the production of multilingual editions, and on the difficulties these techniques created for Renaissance translation theory, this book offers a study of textual practices that were widespread in medieval and Renaissance Europe but have been excluded from translation and literary history. It shows how collaborative and multilingual practices challenge not only early modern theorists´ efforts to stabilize and codify translation but also modern critical efforts to read translations in certain ways (as bearers of unified meaning, as products of singular agency, as "invisible"). The author presents as chief evidence multilingual, multi-version books, in both manuscript and print, from a wide-ranging variety of genres: the Scriptures, astrological and astronomical treatises, herbals, goliardic poems, pamphlets, the Greek and Roman classics, humanist grammars, geography treatises, pedagogical dialogs, proverb collections, and romances. The analyses pay careful attention to both European vernaculars and classical languages, including Arabic, which played a central role in the intense translation activity carried out in medieval Spain. The last chapters expand the discussion to consider another important early modern European discourse on translation. They look at romances and at fictional narratives that offer representations of translation´s multiplicity. Such central works in the history of prose fiction as More´s Utopia (1516), Rabelais´s Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534), and Cervantes´s Don Quixote (1605) present themselves, or part of themselves, as translations. In these works, translation practices become a source of humor. They are portrayed as processes that can create ambiguity, interrupt the narrative, and, in some cases, make the reader uncertain about the veracity and coherence of the story. Comparing actual translation texts and strategies with the forceful theoretical demands for unity that characterize the reflections of early modern translators and underlie the fictional representations of translation, the author challenges some of the assumptions frequently made in translation and literary analysis. The book contributes to the understanding of early modern discourses and writing practices, including the emerging theoretical discourse on translation and the writing of narrative fiction--both of which, as Bistué shows, define themselves against the models of collaborative translation and multi-version texts.