(Ebook) Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version

Texts in Early Modern Europe by Belen Bistue, ed. ISBN

9781472411587, 1472411587 Pdf Download

https://ebooknice.com/product/collaborative-translation-and-multi-
version-texts-in-early-modern-europe-5215450

★★★★★
4.8 out of 5.0 (67 reviews )

DOWNLOAD PDF

ebooknice.com
 (Ebook) Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in
Early Modern Europe by Belen Bistue, ed. ISBN 9781472411587,
1472411587 Pdf Download

EBOOK

Available Formats

■ PDF eBook Study Guide Ebook

EXCLUSIVE 2025 EDUCATIONAL COLLECTION - LIMITED TIME

INSTANT DOWNLOAD VIEW LIBRARY

Here are some recommended products for you. Click the link to
download, or explore more at ebooknice.com

(Ebook) Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook by Loucas, Jason; Viles,

James ISBN 9781459699816, 9781743365571, 9781925268492,
1459699815, 1743365578, 1925268497

https://ebooknice.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-6661374

(Ebook) Master SAT II Math 1c and 2c 4th ed (Arco Master the SAT
Subject Test: Math Levels 1 & 2) by Arco ISBN 9780768923049,
0768923042

https://ebooknice.com/product/master-sat-ii-math-1c-and-2c-4th-ed-arco-
master-the-sat-subject-test-math-levels-1-2-2326094

(Ebook) SAT II Success MATH 1C and 2C 2002 (Peterson's SAT II

Success) by Peterson's ISBN 9780768906677, 0768906679

https://ebooknice.com/product/sat-ii-success-math-1c-and-2c-2002-peterson-
s-sat-ii-success-1722018

(Ebook) Matematik 5000+ Kurs 2c Lärobok by Lena Alfredsson, Hans

Heikne, Sanna Bodemyr ISBN 9789127456600, 9127456609

https://ebooknice.com/product/matematik-5000-kurs-2c-larobok-23848312
(Ebook) Unexpected Heirs in Early Modern Europe: Potential Kings
and Queens by Valerie Schutte, (ed.) ISBN 9783319552934,
9783319552941, 3319552937, 3319552945

https://ebooknice.com/product/unexpected-heirs-in-early-modern-europe-
potential-kings-and-queens-6788444

(Ebook) Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An

Interdisciplinary View by Cordula van Wyhe (ed.) ISBN
9780754653370, 0754653374

https://ebooknice.com/product/female-monasticism-in-early-modern-europe-an-
interdisciplinary-view-50849762

(Ebook) The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe

and Colonial America by Brian P. Levack (ed.) ISBN
9780199578160, 0199578168

https://ebooknice.com/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-witchcraft-in-early-
modern-europe-and-colonial-america-5107602

(Ebook) Cambridge IGCSE and O Level History Workbook 2C - Depth

Study: the United States, 1919-41 2nd Edition by Benjamin
Harrison ISBN 9781398375147, 9781398375048, 1398375144,
1398375047
https://ebooknice.com/product/cambridge-igcse-and-o-level-history-
workbook-2c-depth-study-the-united-states-1919-41-2nd-edition-53538044

(Ebook) Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe (Routledge

Research in Early Modern History) by Broomhall, Susan, Finn,
Sarah ISBN 9781315689456, 9781138854024, 1315689456, 1138854026

https://ebooknice.com/product/violence-and-emotions-in-early-modern-europe-
routledge-research-in-early-modern-history-58576976
 Collaborative Translation
and Multi-Version Texts
in Early Modern Europe

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.

The author shows how collaborative and multilingual translation practices

challenge the theoretical reflections of translators, who persistently call for a
translation text that offers a single, univocal version and maintains unity of style.
In order to explore this tension, Bistué discusses multi-version texts, in both
manuscript and print, from a diverse 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. Her 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.

Comparing actual translation texts and strategies with the forceful theoretical
demands for unity that characterize the reflections of early modern translators,
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.
 Transculturalisms, 1400–1700
Series Editors:
Mihoko Suzuki, University of Miami, USA,
Ann Rosalind Jones, Smith College, USA, and
Jyotsna Singh, Michigan State University, USA

This series presents studies of the early modern contacts and exchanges among the
states, polities and entrepreneurial organizations of Europe; Asia, including the Levant
and East India/Indies; Africa; and the Americas. Books will investigate travelers,
merchants and cultural inventors, including explorers, mapmakers, artists and writers,
as they operated in political, mercantile, sexual and linguistic economies. We encourage
authors to reflect on their own methodologies in relation to issues and theories relevant
to the study of transculturism/translation and transnationalism. We are particularly
interested in work on and from the perspective of the Asians, Africans, and Americans
involved in these interactions, and on such topics as:

• Material exchanges, including textiles, paper and printing, and technologies of

knowledge
• Movements of bodies: embassies, voyagers, piracy, enslavement
• Travel writing: its purposes, practices, forms and effects on writing in other genres
• Belief systems: religions, philosophies, sciences
• Translations: verbal, artistic, philosophical
• Forms of transnational violence and its representations.

Also in this series:

Islam, Christianity and the Making of Czech Identity, 1453–1683

Laura Lisy-Wagner

Military Ethos and Visual Culture in Post-Conquest Mexico

Mónica Domínguez Torres

Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare

Edited by Jason Powell and William T. Rossiter

Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa

Elizabeth A. Sutton

Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age, 1522–1657

Edited by Christina H. Lee
Collaborative Translation
and Multi-Version Texts
in Early Modern Europe

Belén Bistué
Conicet—Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Argentina
© Belén Bistué 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Belén Bistué has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work.

Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street
Union Road Suite 3-1
Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818
Surrey, GU9 7PT USA
England

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Bistué, Belén.
Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe / by Belén
Bistué.
pages cm.—(Transculturalisms, 1400–1700)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-1158-7 (hardcover: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4724-1159-4 (ebook)—
ISBN 978-1-4724-1160-0 (epub)
1. European literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—Criticism, Textual. 2. Translating and
interpreting—Europe. 3. Intercultural communication—Europe. 4. European literature—
Translations—History and criticism. I. Title.
P306.8.E85B57 2013
418’.02094—dc23
2013008923

ISBN 9781472411587 (hbk)

ISBN 9781472411594 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN 9781472411600 (ebk – ePUB)

V
 To my children,
Ana and Gregorio Roby
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Contents

List of Figures   ix
Acknowledgements   xi

Introduction: Collaborative Practices, Multi-Version Texts, and the Difficulty

of Thinking Translation   1
1 Res difficilis   19
2 Unthinkable Practices   53
3 Unthinkable Texts   81
4 Translation as a Discredited Text-Model in Early Modern Fiction   129
Epilogue: Imagining Translation in Early Modern Europe   161

Bibliography   165
Index   179
This page has been left blank intentionally
 List of Figures

1.1 Greco-Latin Psalter (manuscript, ninth century). Psalterium

Graeco-Latinum. Universität Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, Codex
Basiliensis, A VII 3, f. 4r. 48

1.2 Latin and Old High German Gospel Harmony (manuscript, ninth
century). Abbey Library of St Gall, Cod. Sang. 56, p. 25. 49

1.3 Hebrew and Latin Psalter (manuscript, thirteenth century).

Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 10, fol. 2r. By permission of
the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 50

1.4 Genoa Psalter (sixteenth century). Psalterium Hebręum, Gręcum,

Arabicum, and Chaldęum cum tribus latinis interpretatonibus &
glossis (Genoa: Petrus Paulus Porrus, 1516). Bancroft Library,
Berkeley, fBS1419 1516. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley. 51

1.5 Complutensian Polyglot Bible, the first of the Great Polyglots

(sixteenth century). Biblia polyglotta (Academia Complutense,
Alcalá de Henares: Arnao Guillén de Brocar, 1514–1517). Bancroft
Library, Berkeley, fBS1 1514. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley. 52

2.1 “Rueda de las estrellas de la corona meridional.” Libros del saber

de astronomía (c. 1276). Bib. Histórica, Universidad Complutense
de Madrid, BH MSS 156, f.18. 78

2.2 “De la figura de la corona meridional.” Libros del saber de

astronomía (c. 1276). Bib. Histórica, Universidad Complutense
de Madrid, BH MSS 156, f.17v. 79

3.1 Rembert Dodoens, Niewe Herball, or Historie of Plantes

([Antwerp], 1578), 2. This item is reproduced by permission
of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 120

3.2 Colloquia et dictionariolum septem linguarum, Belgigicae [sic],

Anglicae, Teutonicae, Latinae, Italicae, Hispanicae, Gallicae
(Liège, 1589), V4v.-V5. This item is reproduced by permission
of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 121
x Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe

3.3 Dictionarium undecim linguarum … Respondent autem latinis

vocabulis, hebraica, graeca, gallica, italica, germanica, belgica,
hispanica, polonica, ungarica, anglica (Basel, 1598), 10. This
item is reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library,
San Marino, California. 122

3.4 Trilingual adagia in Pedro Simón Abril’s Gramática griega

escrita en lengua castellana (Madrid, 1587). Facsimile in
Manuel Breva-Claramonte, La didáctica de las lenguas en el
Renacimiento: Juan Luis Vives y Pedro Simón Abril (Universidad
de Deusto Bilbao, 1994). 123

3.5 Apologia in the Stephanus Plato. Platonis opera quæ extant

omnia ([Geneva], 1578), vol. 1, 18–19. This item is reproduced
by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 124

3.6 The Courtier of Count Baldessar Castilio (London, 1588). This

item is reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library,
San Marino, California. 125

3.7 Sebastian Brant’s broadsheet Von dem donnerstein, gefallen im

xcii. jar: vor Ensishein (Basel, 1492). Universitätsbibliothek
Tübingen, sign. Ke XVIII 4 a.2. 126

3.8 Heinrich Steinhöwel’s bilingual Aesop. Fabulae Sammlung des

Heinrich Steinhöwel (Ulm, c. 1476). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
München, Rar. 762, fol. x6v-x7r. 127

4.1 “Utopian Alphabet” and “Quatrain in Vernacular Utopian,”

fictional bilingual translation included in More’s Utopia (Basel,
December 1518), b3. Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room,
Boston College Law Library. 159
 Acknowledgements

My deepest gratitude is to Margaret Ferguson, in whose classes I first learned

to think about translation and whose guidance and friendship have been vital
at different stages of this project. I also want to thank Samuel Armistead, Seth
Schein, and Frances Dolan, whose comments and advice have made this book
much better, and whose work as scholars and teachers has been an inspiration
to me. Since 2010, I have had the good fortune to work as a tenured researcher
at the Comparative Literature Center of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, in
Argentina, and I cannot imagine a better environment for writing. I have been able
to exchange ideas and enjoy truly collaborative work, and, in particular, I would
like to thank Lila Bujaldón de Esteves and Elena Duplancic de Elgueta for their
constant support and encouragement.
In fact, my debts of gratitude are many. During my year as a Bancroft Library
fellow, I gained invaluable knowledge from my conversations with Anthony Bliss
and Charles Faulhaber, as well as from the seminars offered there by Joseph Duggan
and Les Ferris. Inspired by my experience at the Bancroft, I kept asking questions
to Michael Winter, at the UC Davis Shields Library, and I attended Michael
Wyatt’s seminar on translation at Stanford’s Green Library, which introduced
me to the world of multilingual dictionaries. I have also had the opportunity to
collaborate in different projects with Deborah Uman, Rosanne Denhard, Shawn
Doubiago, Daphne Potts, and Mela Jones, and I learned much about translation
in these experiences. Adrienne Martín, Brenda Schildgen, and Karen Olson read
different parts of my manuscript during its early stages and made important
suggestions. And I am especially grateful to my friend and colleague Anne Salo
Roberts. She has improved many of the sentences in this book, with great tact, and
our conversations have enriched my thinking.
I also want to acknowledge the institutional support I have received in the form
of fellowships from the University of California, in the early stages of my writing,
and from the Argentine National Council for Scientific and Technological Research
(CONICET), in the final ones. An early version of my case study of the Libro de la
ochava esfera was awarded the 2008 Founders’ Prize of the Medieval Association
of the Pacific (MAP), and, under the title “Multilingual Translation and Multiple
Knowledge(s) in Alfonso X’s Libro de la ochava esfera (1276),” it appeared in
Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 40 (2009). Substantial
sections of my first chapter come from my essay “The Task(s) of the Translator(s):
Multiplicity as Problem in Renaissance European Thought,” which obtained the
A. Owen Aldridge Award 2009–2010 from the American Comparative Literature
Association (ACLA) and was published in Comparative Literature Studies 48.2
(2011). I am grateful for the encouragement provided by these awards and for the
journals’ permission to republish these materials.
xii Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe

As is fitting to the genre, my thanks to my family go at the end, but they are
not smaller for this. I thank my parents, Eliana and César Bistué, my brothers,
Germán and Sebastián Bistué, and my husband, Gaspar Roby, for their constant
love and support. I save a special place for my sister Carolina, who accompanied
me in some of my searches through rare book collections. And, the best for last, I
thank my multilingual children, Ana and Gregorio, to whom I dedicate this book.
 Introduction
Collaborative Practices, Multi-Version Texts,
and the Difficulty of Thinking Translation

This book offers a study of two textual practices that were widely used in
medieval and Renaissance Europe but have remained outside the scope of Western
translation history. One of them is the work of translation teams, in which two or
more translators, each an expert in one of the languages involved, collaborated
to produce a translation—for instance, one translator would render the Greek,
Arabic, or Hebrew source-text into an intermediate vernacular version, and another
translator would render this intermediate version into Latin. This collaborative
technique allowed for a distribution of different tasks in the translation process
among different members of the team, who belonged to different linguistic and
cultural traditions, and who collaboratively produced texts in which these different
traditions coexist. The second practice I consider is the making of multilingual
translations, in which different versions, in different languages, are carefully
combined and explicitly placed side by side on the same page. Translators, along
with copyists and printers, assigned meaning to the relations between versions
and represented them in a variety of ways—in facing pages, parallel columns,
interlinear and intra-linear arrangements, and, often, in a combination of two or
more of these formats.
I am interested in these practices and textual products, because they make
visible the fact—often occluded in early modern theoretical reflections—that
translation involves more than one writing subject and more than one interpretive
position. Even when a translation is performed by a single translator (and even
when this translator does not consult or produce other versions and does not use
the help of an interpreter, a copyist, or a printer), translation still involves two
versions. The practices I study formalize this intrinsic multiplicity, either in the
fact that different persons actually occupy different writing and reading positions,
or in the material juxtaposition of alternative versions on the same page. In this
book, I survey and analyze extant texts that are the product of collaborative and
multilingual translation, as well as references to these practices found in prefaces,
notes, and theoretical reflections. My main entry point into the study of these
forgotten techniques is the difficulty they created for Renaissance theoreticians
of translation, who persistently claimed that a translation must be performed
by a single translator and that the translation text must offer a single, univocal
version—and who, along the way, repressed information on practices that did not
fit this model.
As I have begun to suggest, such study involves the questioning of long-held
ideas about translation and about literature. In general, this book interrogates the
2 Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe

notion of national literary traditions as one of the main conceptual difficulties

that we still face for studying the products of collaborative and multilingual
translation—and for considering these products as coherent texts in the first place.
A text produced by an English scholar working in Toledo with the help of a Mozarab
interpreter (as some of the texts discussed in Chapter 2 were) cannot easily find a
place in the history of English letters, or Spanish letters, or even in the history of
Mozarab letters in Spain. As we will see in Chapter 3, a poem that combines an
Old High German version with a Latin version connected by a bilingual refrain
cannot be fully accommodated in the history of German lyric, or in the history
of Medieval Latin lyric, and tends to be left out of both of them. Furthermore,
this book also interrogates what are perhaps two of the most basic assumptions
underlying the ways in which we (students of languages and literatures formed
in the Western academic tradition) think about translation. These are the idea that
translation is a process performed by a single person, who is an expert in both
languages involved, and the idea that the translation text consists exclusively
in the new version produced by this person, who inscribes it in a new language
and culture. We may have come across a bilingual edition of a literary work, or
a product’s manual that offers several versions of instructions and warnings, in
different languages and scripts. It is becoming more and more common for primary
and secondary schools in some regions of the United States to send parents and
students information in bilingual format. Nevertheless, and in spite of our practical
experience, when we talk about the translation text, we usually refer to only one of
the versions involved, and when we think about the translation process, we tend to
assume we are dealing exclusively with the cognitive activity, linguistic choices,
and social constraints of an individual who produces this version.1
Surprisingly, when we examine the theoretical writings of early Renaissance
translators, we find that they did not take these ideas for granted. On the contrary,
in treatises, commentaries, dedicatory letters, and prefaces, they persistently
formulated and reformulated the call for a translation that was the product of a
single writing agent and that included a single version. As Chapter 1 will show,
the first point Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni attempts to establish in his
foundational essay De interpretatione recta (c. 1424–1426) is precisely that
a translation, in order to be correct, must be performed by a single person who
is an expert in the two languages involved and that this person must be able to

1
This assumption is inscribed in a more general frame, where it is difficult to find
room for the study of inter-subjective processes in general. As Colwyn Trevarthen reminds
us, scientific study of the mind and the brain are based on the a priori assumption that we
“are single heads processing information,” and that we only relate to other minds “by a
hopeless effort of ‘theorizing’ or ‘simulation.’” Colwyn Trevarthen, foreword to The Shared
Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, ed. Jordan Zlatev (Amsterdam: John Benjamins,
2008), vii.
 Introduction 3

both understand the original and produce a new version by himself. This is why,
according to Bruni, translation is an intrinsically “difficult task” [res difficilis].2
What is more, Bruni and many Renaissance theoreticians after him associated
this difficult requirement with the complex demand that the text of the translation
must appear to be the work of a single writing subject. Bruni elaborately explains
that the translator must identify himself with the author to the point of letting
himself be “abducted” [rapitur] by the force of the author’s style, and, in this
way, he will transform into the author. This may sound like a simple, and perhaps
familiar, stylistic requirement to students of early modern letters. Yet, Bruni is
aware of the theoretical effort he is making—and, tellingly, he describes this
proposed transformation as “a marvelous effect” [mirabilis effectus].3 He is
claiming that the text must show no indication whatsoever that there are different
versions, writing stages, or styles involved in the translation process, even if one
needs to resort to a marvelous–stylistic effect to justify this erasure.
Other metaphors on which Renaissance translators drew to describe the
desired unifying effect include different types of transformation, assimilation,
fecundation, and reproduction. In many of them, as in Bruni’s case, we see the
translator attempting to efface himself. He becomes subject to the author, or he
merely helps in the delivery and care of an offspring that is the author’s alone.
However, there are also many instances in which the original author is the one who
must disappear. In these instances, translation is imagined as the destruction of a
building, the conquest of an enemy, the evaporation of a spirit, or the digestion of
the source text. The requirement for unity is so strong that if a translation were to
juxtapose the style and language patterns of the translator with those of the author,
making both of them visible, the product would not be considered “a Book”—to
qualify as one, as French translator Nicolas Perrot D’Ablancourt reminded his
readers, “every part of [it] must be linked together and fused as in the same body.”4
Indeed, this requirement becomes so pervasive that translators tend to overlook
the paradox it creates. The practice of translating necessarily involves, at least, two
versions (the source and the new version that the translator is producing). There
is, therefore, a doubling of versions that is intrinsic to the practice. Nevertheless,
early modern theoreticians strove to define translation not as a doubling but as the
exact opposite: as a process that must unify two versions. As in the case of the
proposed unification of author and translator, we will find alternative possibilities
for this textual fusion. Some theoreticians advise that the translator must add
absolutely nothing to the version, so that it still appears to be the author’s text.
Others call for a translator who writes so fluently that he can make the reader

2
Leonardo Bruni, Sulla perfetta traduzzione [De interpretatione recta], ed. Paolo
Viti (Napoli: Liguori, 2004), 78.
3
Bruni, Sulla perfetta traduzzione, 84–6.
4
Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, introduction to his French translation of Tacitus’s
Annales (1640), in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York:
Routledge, 2004), 32.
4 Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe

forget there was ever another version. And, in some descriptions of the synthesis,
it is not completely clear whose version remains. Nevertheless, we will find that
all of them agree on one point: there should be room for only one version and only
one writing position in the text of the translation.
In the following chapters, I will discuss some of the convoluted metaphors
translators used, as well as some of the forced turns and contradictions in which
they incurred when they struggled to formulate these paradoxical requirements. I
will also explore some early modern fictional narratives that can be said to support
the theoretical requirement for unity, too. Such influential works as Thomas More’s
Utopia (1516), François Rabelais’s Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534), and
Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) playfully present themselves, or part
of themselves, as translations. What is more, they make explicit reference to the
collaborative and multilingual practices my work is attempting to rescue. However,
when these narratives invite the readers to imagine they are reading a translation,
they do so mockingly. These works make fun of translation as a discourse that
offers many alternative readings, instead of a coherent, unified story. And I argue
that it is, in part, against this multiplicity that early modern fictional narrative
discourse defines itself.
In fact, the central thread of my argument is that early modern translators and
authors had to invest a large amount of effort in defining translation as the task of
an individual whose product offers a single, unified version because such definition
went against well-established techniques and strategies for translating. The work
of translation teams, for instance, had been fundamental to the dissemination
of ancient philosophical and scientific writings. During the late Middle Ages,
scholars from different European regions had traveled to southern cultural centers
(in Spanish, Italian, and French territories), where they could have access to Greek
and Arabic manuscripts, and, more importantly, where they could team up with
Greek and Arabic experts who helped them translate these manuscripts into Latin.
In addition to team translation, there were other collaborative reading and writing
practices that could sometimes inform the process of translation. For instance,
members of the nobility who had learned some Latin but were not completely
proficient in this language, could hire a more learned reader to help them with the
interpretation process, or, alternatively, to prepare a word-for-word instrumental
translation which would guide them as they read the original. If we allow for
temporal and spatial distance between the production of each version, we can
also include compilation and re-translation among the examples. In the case of
compilations, translators would draw from different copies and from different
versions of the source (some of them in different languages). By re-translation, I
am referring to instances in which translators would take an intermediate version
as the source for their new version (that is, for instance, when a translator would
use the Italian version of a Latin work as the source for his Spanish version).
There were instances in which the texts actually formalized this multiplicity and
made it an integral part of the translation product. This is the case of the numerous
multilingual translations, both in manuscript and print, that were produced during
the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Examples include works from
 Introduction 5

a variety of discursive genres: elaborate polyglot Psalters, Gospels, and Bibles;

multilingual astrology–and–astronomy catalogs, herbals, goliardic poems, and
administrative documents; careful bilingual or trilingual editions of the Greek and
Roman classics, grammars, geography treatises, pedagogical dialogs, and proverb
collections produced by eminent scholars; anonymous translation exercises; long
sentimental romances in four languages, and very short bilingual broadsheet news
and pamphlets. I am interested in this textual practice in particular, and I discuss
several types of multi-version texts, because I see the combination of different
versions on the same page as an alternative model for thinking about translation—a
model that was forcibly excluded by early modern translators when they began to
define translation as the task of a single person and as a unified, single-version
text.
Collaborative, multilingual practices did not fit the theoretical and ideological
frames in which Renaissance translators inscribed their reflections. European
processes of religious, administrative, and political centralization, as well as the
incipient formation of national identities, entailed the promotion of linguistic and
textual unity. In the religious arena, the establishment of a single official version
of the Scriptures was an urgent problem for the Catholic Church. In this context,
translators must have felt the need to conceptualize translation as an activity that
reduces multiple versions to one. More specifically, they seem to have felt the need
to reduce the various Hebrew, Greek, and Latin versions of the Scriptures into
a single Latin version attributed to Jerome. In practice, translators and scholars,
during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in manuscript and print, and on
both the Catholic and the Protestant sides, kept multiplying and juxtaposing
versions of the scriptures. As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3, the production
of manuscript multilingual Psalters and Gospels was a frequent practice across
medieval Europe, perhaps, following on the lost model of Origenes’s Hexapla.
A humanist example can be found in the three-column Psalter that Giannozzo
Manetti, Papal Secretary for Nicholas V and Calixtus III, produced in the mid
fifteenth century (he correlated his own Latin version of the Hebrew with two of
the Latin versions attributed to Jerome). In 1509, Henri Estienne printed Jacques
Lefèvre’s Quincuplex Psalterium, which contained the old Latin Psalter, side by
side the three versions attributed to Jerome, as well as Lefèvre’s own revision of
the Vulgata. Posing a perhaps less open but also far reaching challenge, Erasmus
published in 1516 his well-known New Testament, which offered Greek and Latin
versions on two parallel columns (and, only for the third edition, another column
containing the Latin Vulgata). While the Complutensian and the Antwerp great
Polyglot Bibles were financed by Catholic patrons, the London Polyglot was a
Protestant enterprise from the start. However, in theory, this multiplication of
versions started to be described—often by the very same translators who produced
multilingual versions—as a step that would actually help produce a single
authoritative version. At a very general level, the establishing of the Vulgata as the
only version authorized by the Catholic Church, Luther’s version of the Bible for
the German people, and the King James Version in England all have a theoretical
point of contact in the singular authority they claimed in their respective contexts.
6 Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe

As the last two examples suggest, theoretical demands for linguistic and
textual unity intersect with ideologies of political unification. In fact, in her study
of literary representations of English dialects, Paula Blank has argued that the
emphasis sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century authors and playwrights placed
on the portrayal of linguistic difference inside English played a cultural role in the
formation of a national identity. They tended to organize linguistic variations into a
hierarchy where there was only one preferred form, and this strategy heralded both
a new notion of linguistic authority and an official policy of linguistic unification.5
Margaret Ferguson has suggested, in her study of intersections among ideologies
of gender, literacy, and empire, that already in Dante’s definition of an illustrious
vernacular we can see intersections with the plea for a unified monarchic Italy.6 At
a more general level, Benedict Anderson proposed that the printing press and the
book market, by creating “monoglot mass reading publics,” made it possible for
European readers to imagine themselves as interchangeable members of unified
linguistic communities. Anderson argued that the ground for the conceptualization
of modern political communities was prepared, in part, by the virtual possibility
that all the members of a particular linguistic community could read a copy of the
same book in the same vernacular language.7 This virtual possibility presupposes,
of course, that there should be a single shared language. What is more, it also
presupposes—as theories of translations do—that there should be a single reading
position in the text, which could then be occupied by any of the members of the
linguistic community. Indeed, as Jacques Lezra has shown, early modern texts
that included multiple languages and, therefore, multiple reading positions (such
as translation aids in the form of multilingual dictionaries and grammars) could
generate a high degree of anxiety for authors and publishers. They tended to project
the uncertainty about the linguistic identity of their texts into elaborate reflections
about their own socioeconomic status and political identity. Their multi-version
texts, Lezra claims, formalize an understanding of subjectivity as something fluid
and de-territorialized, and such an understanding conflicted with proto-national
forms of identification. It would conflict, as well, with the modern articulation of
individualism.8
Ideological demands for unity intersect, not only with the formation of
political and linguistic identities, but also with the conceptual structure of social
institutions. These demands seem to be at play, for instance, in the early modern

5
Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance
Writings (London: Routledge, 1996).
6
Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early
Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 87–8.
7
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 43–4.
8
Jacques Lezra, “Nationum Origo,” Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation,
ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005),
203–28.
 Introduction 7

conceptual model for marriage that Frances Dolan has described as an “economy
of scarcity.” Dolan traces this model both in the use of Christian figurations of
marriage, as the fusion of husband and wife into “one flesh,” and in the legal
notion that the two spouses achieve “unity of person.” This effect—certainly as
marvelous as the one Bruni described for the translation process—contradicted
some of the ways in which early modern men and women conceived of themselves
as persons. Marriage, Dolan explains, implied the participation of two persons,
but it had conceptual room for only one. The conflict became especially urgent for
the woman, who tended to be subsumed under the authority of her husband, but it
could also represent a problem for the man when he saw his status threatened by the
assertion of the woman’s individuality. Marriage’s “economy of scarcity” set the
stage for a struggle in which both spouses may attempt to establish their status as
persons, but in which there is room for only one full person. In this sense, Dolan’s
study illuminates connections between the conceptual contradictions resulting
from a forceful demand for unity and the more tangible forms of violence that
tend to be associated with marriage (ranging from spiritual struggles, to taming,
battering, and murder).9
Indeed, figures of marital union (and of anxiety about gendered roles) intersect
with the very conceptualization of the self. We find an example of this intersection
in Michel de Montaigne’s essay “On Presumption”:

Those who want to split up our two principal parts, and sequester them from
each other are wrong. On the contrary we must couple and join them together
again. We must order the soul not to draw aside and entertain itself apart, not to
scorn and abandon the body (nor can it do so except by some counterfeit monkey
trick), but to rally to the body, embrace it, cherish it, assist it, control it, advise
it, set it right and bring it back when it goes astray; in short to marry it and be
a husband to it, so that their actions may not appear different and contrary, but
harmonious and uniform.10

John Jeffries Martin reads this passage in the context of Renaissance

conceptualizations of subjectivity. The relation between internal and external
selves, Martin explains, was at the basis of many of them, but Montaigne’s
husbandry model takes a marked step towards the definition of a “unified self.”11

9
Frances E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). As Dolan points out, Wendy Brown locates a
similar economy of scarcity at the larger level of civil society. The notion of an autonomous,
whole, self-interested, and self-directed individual, which is at the base of modern liberal
conceptualization of subjectivity, and which emerges as a model of selfhood during the
early modern period, is founded upon an exclusion: the self-interested (male) individual
of civil society is premised upon a (female) self-less one. Wendy Brown, States of Injury:
Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 161.
10
In John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2004), 123.
11
Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, 7, 123–4.
8 Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe

My brief mention of the above studies is intended to show some of the different
planes on which scholars have traced the ideological workings of unification.
These studies portray a conceptual frame in which we find a marked drive towards
unification. If we take this background into account, it becomes apparent that the
multiplicity of versions and writing positions informing the translation process
must have created a serious theoretical problem for early modern translators.
They had to define translation inside a frame of thought that could not quite
accommodate knowledge about collaborative, multilingual practices. The tensions
between, on the one hand, a practice that involved many languages, versions,
and interpretive positions and, on the other hand, ideologies of unification that
could not easily accommodate this multiplicity made the task of thinking about
translation a difficult one. Actually, I argue that the recurrent claim that translation
is an intrinsically difficult practice is, to a large extent, a projection of this
conceptual challenge.
This difficulty, which my study traces back to the emergence of a Renaissance
theoretical discourse on translation (in the context of variously inflected concepts
of unity and centralization), has become, in time, an integral part of the way in
which we think about translation in the West. Retaining only the external form of
the tensions in which it took shape, the notion of translation’s difficulty continues
to be central to theoretical discourses on translation. Umberto Eco describes the
situation straightforwardly: “Every sensible and rigorous theory of language shows
that perfect translation is an impossible dream,” yet, he is quick to add that “[i]n
spite of this, people translate.” Translation is still defined today as a difficult and
almost impossible practice, yet people continue to produce and read translations.
Taking the side of practice, Eco playfully compares this situation to the paradox of
Achilles and the turtle: “Theoretically speaking, Achilles should never reach the
turtle. But in reality, he does. No rigorous philosophical approach to that paradox
can underestimate the fact that, not just Achilles, but anyone of us, could beat
a turtle at the Olympic Games.”12 Of course, Zeno’s paradox is not concerned
with the practical world of running. It is a theoretical tool to elicit thought on
complex notions regarding movement and space. And, indeed, after reminding
my readers that not only Bruni but also any of the Renaissance translators who
claimed that translation was impossibly difficult could and did translate, I want to
use the paradox of translation’s difficulty as an entry into a complex problem. The
aim of my book is to place this paradox in the historical context in which it takes
shape, in order to interrogate the marvelous effects it produces and to highlight the
conceptual possibilities it excludes.

12
Umberto Eco, Experiences in Translation, tr. Alastair McEwen (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2008), ix.
 Introduction 9

The History of Translation (Theory)

Above all, the conceptual exclusions that the paradoxical difficulty of translation
supports have strongly influenced the development of translation history. In
particular, as I have begun to explain, early modern theories of translation do not
offer any substantial account of multilingual and collaborative translation, and
early modern fiction did, but only to make fun of these practices. Modern translation
histories do not take much notice of these practices, either. The main explanation
for this silence is simple: historians of translation have tended to privilege, as their
object of study, the theoretical writings of translators (their treatises, prologues,
dedicatory epistles, commentaries and annotations), leaving aside the study of the
techniques that translators actually used and of the texts they actually produced. It
is almost as if we had taken the paradox at face value, and, since actual translation
is impossible, we do not feel the need to go in search of past actual translations.
In fact, the need to consider both theory and practice was already signaled
by such a pioneer in the field of translation history as Margherita Morreale. In
her 1959 programmatic notes towards a history of medieval translation, Morreale
proposed that “all attempts to characterize medieval translation in its different
stages should proceed simultaneously along two paths: the comparison between
translations and their originals, and the elaboration of a theory of translation.”13
Unfortunately, as Peter Russell noticed a quarter of a century later, scholars did not
follow this program.14 The line of study that has dominated the field can already
be seen in the work of another pioneer, Flora Ross Amos’s 1920 study on English
Early Theories of Translation. In the opening pages of her book, Amos justifies the
exclusive concentration on translation theories as a necessary cut in an “otherwise
impossibly large” field of study. Yet, she is highly conscious of what such a cut
implies:

I have confined myself, of necessity, to such opinions as have been put into
words, and avoided making use of deduction from practice other than a few
obvious and general conclusions. The procedure involves, of course, the
omission of some important elements in the history of the theory of translation,
in that it ignores the discrepancies between precepts and practice, and the
influence that practice has exerted upon theory.15

13
Margherita Morreale, “Apuntes para la historia de la traducción en la Edad Media,”
Revista de Literatura 29 (1959): 3.
14
Peter Russell, Traducciones y traductores en la Península Ibérica (1400–1550)
(Barcelona: Bellaterra, 1985), 7.
15
Flora Ross Amos, Early Theories of Translation (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1920), ix; emphasis added. Another early example can be found in the work of W.
Schwarz: “[T]his book deals with the principles governing biblical translation. Translations
as such will only be used to elucidate the principles developed by the translator. The question
of the correspondence between principle and practice will not be raised.” W. Schwarz,
10 Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe

The historical study of translation theory has come a long way since then, but
these limitations have not been fully addressed.16An impressive amount of work
has been carried on in the field, and the production of historical narratives has
been accompanied by the construction of a substantial corpus of written opinions
on translation. Today, researchers can consult many comprehensive anthologies
of treatises, prefaces, essays, and letters containing translators’ reflections on
their task.17 And the availability of this corpus makes the subject much more
manageable than it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the
almost exclusive focus on theoretical and programmatic writings of translators—
rather than on their actual translations—has continued to characterize the study
of translation history.18 Scholars have paid careful attention to the theoretical
and methodological reflections of translators, to the lines of continuation and
development of particular notions and figures of thought used in these reflections,
and to the wider frames in which these reflections were made (literary theory,
philosophy of language, linguistics, translation studies, rhetoric, grammar,
the formation of national and gender identities, processes of globalization and
localization, to name some of them). However, as Anthony Pym has claimed, in
the field of translation history there is still an urgent need for investigating “the
complex relationships between past theories and past practices.”19

Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation: Some Reformation Controversies and

Their Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), xi.
16
Massimiliano Morini’s work on Tudor translation may be seen as an exception. “It
has been generally conceded,” explains Morini, “that whereas the theoretical statements
contained in the prefaces to sixteenth-century translations are imbued with literalism,
in practice the translators behaved in a radically different manner, altering, cutting, and
adding to what they found in the text they chose to ‘English.’” Massimiliano Morini, Tudor
Translation in Theory and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 3. Unfortunately, Morini
ultimately confines himself again in the realm of theory, where he re-defines the situation
as the coexistence of medieval ideas with new Continental theories. Although this final
confinement leads him to disregard the initial contradiction between theory and practice as
only an “apparent” one, I find his work highly valuable in that he skillfully analyzes specific
translation texts and not only theoretical writings.
17
These anthologies include the work of Hans Joachim Störig, Thomas R. Steiner,
André Lefevere, Paul A. Horguelin, Dámaso López García, Julio César Santoyo, Nora
Catelli and Marietta Gargatagli, Lieven D’hulst, Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, Douglas
Robinson, Lawrence Venuti, Basil Hatim and Jeremy Munday, and Daniel Weissbort and
Astradur Eysteinsson.
18
The many and diverse approaches to translation history covered by the influential
work of such scholars as Thomas R. Steiner, George Steiner, Louis G. Kelly, Glyn P. Norton,
Yehudi Lindeman, Peter Russell, Lori Chamberlain, Frederick M. Rener, Gianfranco Folena,
Rita Copeland, Theo Hermans, Michel Ballard, Valentín García Yebra, Lawrence Venuti,
Julio César Santoyo, and Julie Candler Hays coincide in the almost exclusive attention that
their works still pay to past theories.
19
Anthony Pym, Method in Translation History (Manchester, UK: St. Jerome, 1998),
10; emphasis added.
 Introduction 11

The case is that most historical studies and anthologies pay very little attention
to past translation practices. Even when some of these works’ titles announce
that they will deal with both theory and practice, the word practice tends to
stand for the programmatic reflections of translators, and not, for instance, for
specific descriptions of translation techniques, or for a study of the actual texts of
translations (in this cases, the word theory refers to more general reflections on
conceptual models or frames). In sum, the general label “history of translation”
tends to designate today the particular study of the history of translation theory.
One of the reasons for this situation is still, I believe, the vastness of the field. A
systematic comparison between past theories and past practices would involve
studying a large number of translation texts (and these are much longer texts
than a prologue or a dedicatory epistle). It would also make it necessary to read
multiple versions of the same text. This can be felt as a limitation to the range of
periods and cultures that a historian of translation can cover, especially when we
compare it with the apparent comprehensiveness for which an exclusive focus on
translation theories allows. A second and more seriously limiting reason has to do
with an implicit assumption—inherited, I would argue, from humanist theoretical
demands. This is the assumption that the text of the translation has space for only
one writing subject, and that if the translation is a faithful one, this space is for
the author alone.20 Paradoxical as it sounds, historians do not usually consider
the translation text as an adequate place to study the translator’s work; they look,
instead, at the translator’s theoretical or programmatic remarks on translation,
which are felt to be more authentically his or her work.
Of course, when I refer to the dominant tendency to exclude translation
practices and texts as objects of study, I do not mean there are no critics who have
taken particular translation texts and practices into account, or no case studies that
propose more complex models for thinking about translation texts. To name only
one representative example, in her analysis of Charles d’Orléans bilingual oeuvre,
Anne Coldiron has proposed that we need to combine multiple frameworks to
approach a multi-version work.21 And, in general, case studies of the work of early-
modern women translators tend to offer a ground to start considering translation
strategies as a valid category of textual analysis.22 My point is that these findings

20
Indeed, the word faithful still points to some of the early modern contexts in which
this assumption took shape: faithfulness to one church, one king, one husband.
21
Anne E. B. Coldiron, Canon, Period, and the Poetry of Charles of Orleans: Found
in Translation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
22
Examples in this field include the collection Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as
Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Ohio: Kent
State University Press, 1985), Tina Krontiris’s Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and
Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1992), Danielle
Clarke’s “The Politics of Translation and Gender in the Countess of Pembroke’s Antonie,”
Translation and Literature 6 (1997): 149–66, and Deborah Uman and Belén Bistué’s
“Translation as Collaborative Authorship: Margaret Tyler’s The Mirrour of Princely Deedes
and Knighthood,” Comparative Literature Studies 44.3 (2007): 298–323.
12 Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe

do not yet have a place in the general narratives and structures of historical
studies. There is not, for instance, a comprehensive historical narrative that
distinguishes the translation techniques and strategies used in different periods.
There is neither a study that considers the role that such practices as dictation and
the correlation of words in the pages of multilingual editions have played in the
work of translators at different times. This is an important omission, because these
practices are as important to understand the notion of word-for-word translation as
are philosophical positions on the relation between res and verba, or theological
conceptualizations of the relation between flesh and spirit. Furthermore, while the
number of anthologies of theoretical reflections on translation keeps growing, it
is difficult to find anthologies of translation texts that can ground such narratives.
In this context, my exploration of two specific translation practices, and of the
conflicts that they created for early modern theoreticians of translation, attempts
to offer a thematic line for a historical narrative that can begin to take translation
practices into account. At the same time, it searches to establish a dialog with some
of the relatively isolated work already done in the field.

On the Difficulty of Studying Multilingual Translations: Final

Methodological Complaints

Although both are widespread intercultural phenomena, multilingualism and

translation are not usually considered in connection with each other. Whereas
multilingualism evokes the co-presence of two or more languages (in a given
society, text or individual), translation involves a substitution of one language
for another. The translating code not so much supplements as replaces the
translated code, and translations are rarely meant to be read side by side with the
original texts (except, perhaps, in a classroom setting).
—Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies23

A forced disconnection between multilingualism and translation is certainly

representative of the situation in the field of translation studies. In the above
cited description, the very term “multilingual translation” becomes an
oxymoron. Similarly, in the field of literary and linguistic studies, translation
and multilingualism are often seen as two mutually exclusive fields. As Dirk
Delabastita and Rainier Grutman explain, “translation and multilingualism” can
be considered as two exclusive alternatives, as the “two possible outcomes of
language contact.” Yet, as reasonable as this certainly sounds, there are situations
that cannot be fully accommodated in the either-or model. Commenting on a
study of Ilan Stavans’s “Spanglish version of the opening lines of Cervantes’
Quixote,” Delabastita and Grutman actually allow for the possibility that Stavans
“did not intend his translation to act as a replacement for the original, but rather

23
Rainier Grutman, “Multilingualism and Translation,” Routledge Encyclopedia of
Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker (London: Routledge, 1998), 157.
 Introduction 13

as proof of the stylistic and indeed literary possibilities Spanglish offered” and
that “the reader most likely to derive pleasure from Stavans’ initiative, actually is
s/he who compares Cervantes’ early 17th-century text with its early 21st-century
reincarnation.”24
Indeed, even when we do not have a convincing model to account for the
production of multilingual translations, the latter is an established practice, not only
in the classroom setting, but also in everyday-life settings (instruction manuals,
signs at the airport, school communications, health-insurance bills). In these
situations, we can find texts in which different versions, in different languages,
coexist on the page. This was also the case during the late Middle Ages and early
Renaissance, when, as I will show, the production of multilingual translations was
a widespread practice. I believe the study of the techniques and strategies used to
correlate different versions on the same page is central to a historical narrative that
can address the tensions between translation theory and practice. Again, the main
value I see in the study of multi-version works is that they formalize the plurality
of versions, languages, and roles involved in the translation process. Still, as the
excerpt from the Routledge Encyclopedia suggests, it is undeniably difficult to
consider such texts and practices as valid objects of study. In what context can we
study them? Which national literature tradition can include them in its history?
How do we place a multilingual, multi-version text in the established history of a
particular language?
Students of early modern letters may have come across a text in which two
or more versions were placed side by side: a love song in the Carmina Burana
offering alternate Latin and a German versions; Pedro Simón Abril’s Greek, Latin,
and Spanish interlinear versions of proverbs (as well as his Latin and Spanish
editions of Aesop’s fables, Cicero’s letters, Terence’s Comedies, and of Abril’s
own Ars grammatica); or Sir Walter Raleigh’s translation, in The Discovery of
Guiana, of two passages from López de Gómara’s Historia, which Raleigh cites
in Spanish before offering his English version. It is even more likely that students
may have come across mentions of prestigious multilingual translations: Erasmus’s
bilingual New Testament, or one of the Great Polyglot Bibles; the 1588 trilingual
edition of The Courtier, in which Thomas Hoby’s English version shares the page
with French and Italian versions in parallel columns; the Graeco-Latin Stephanus
Plato, on which the system to cite passages from Plato’s dialogs is still based; and
even the Florentine Codex, composed in the New World under the supervision
of the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún, which combines pictograms, Nahuatl
transcriptions, and Spanish renderings. But, in spite of their survival, multilingual
translations present serious problems for scholars who want to approach their
study.

24
Dirk Delabastita and Rainier Grutman, introduction to “Fictionalising Translation
and Multilingualism,” ed. Dirk Delabastita and Rainier Grutman, special issue, Linguistica
Antverpiensia 4 (2005): 12–13.
14 Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe

First of all, as I have already mentioned, we lack a disciplinary frame in which

to think of them as coherent objects of study. What is more, we find problems
even at the level of the more practical aspects of literary research. It is difficult
to find multilingual translations in library catalogs and inventories. As Chapter 3
will discuss in more detail, there are few standard guidelines for cataloguing
translations and for cataloguing multilingual texts—even fewer for cataloguing
multilingual translations. The latter are usually classified under only one of the
languages involved. While newer projects are beginning to use such terms as
“multilingual,” “polyglot,” or “multiple languages” as keywords, and while some
comprehensive electronic library catalogs have recently begun to incorporate
these terms, this is not frequently the case. In general, electronic catalogs allow
the search for manuscript and early books by only one language at a time, and it
is not possible to make a cross-search for texts that combine two or more different
languages. One cannot generate a search that would retrieve, let’s say, all the
Greek-Latin-and-French entries in the catalog—not even the Greek-and-Latin
entries, or the English-and-Spanish ones. Cataloguing matrixes have not been
designed with the possibility of a text that combines multiple versions in mind. As
we will also see, something similar happens with modern editions of multilingual
texts, which separate the versions when they reproduce them (for example, moving
some versions to the footnotes, or simply editing one of the versions alone). In the
most practical way, these editions preclude the very possibility of a multilingual
translation.
Consequently, my effort to learn about multilingual translation texts and
practices took the form of a somewhat disorganized search through the archives
and through descriptive work done in different fields: textual criticism, paleography
and codicology, the history of the book, the history of printing, the history of
education, and the history of astronomy and botany (two areas in which, as I
found out, multilingual translations played a central role). I have browsed through
catalogs of incunabula and manuscripts collections, through lists and descriptions
of the works of Renaissance printers, through the inventories of booksellers,
through translation bibliographies. It is in the pages of these studies and lists,
which engage with the most material aspects of the text, that I have found my
examples of multilingual translations. Such an eclectic search brought my work
into dialog with different conventions, theoretical frames, methodologies, and
lines of inquiries, and my case studies in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are examples of
some of these dialogs. Above all, this search led me to understand translation at the
intersection of many other practices and strategies. In the field of literature alone,
the notion of translation overlaps with exegetical techniques, such as allegory
and etymology, which were sometimes used for the production of glosses and
commentaries. It also overlaps with such central poetic and rhetorical techniques
as imitatio, amplificatio, and variatio. In the context of rhetorical studies, the word
translation can be a synonym for metaphor, and, as such, the notion of translation
is also at the center of discussions of figurative language. What is more, as Michael
Wyatt reminds us, translation could function as a metaphor for several important
 Introduction 15

forms of cultural transmission and mediation, among which are geographical and
political displacements, commercial exchanges, and religious conversions and
reformations.25
It is only at these several dispersed points that we can learn about translation
practices. As the many examples of multilingual translations I discuss in Chapter 3
attest, such a search was ultimately productive. This book is able to offer an idea
of the many genres in which texts could take multi-version form and of the varied
audiences that may have been familiar with them. In this way, it delineates a
textual field on which several linguistic and cultural traditions can coexist side by
side. I must note, however, that the following chapters do not map the full spread
of these practices. In the end, I had to accept that the paradoxical difficulty of
thinking translation—collaborative and multilingual translation in particular—is
an intrinsic part of Western culture and that the best way to produce an initial
study about these textual practices was to embark on a critical discussion of the
difficulties involved in studying them.
With this purpose in mind, the first chapter sets the stage by discussing both
the difficulty that Renaissance theoreticians faced in defining translation and the
repression of knowledge about specific practices this difficulty prompted. Chapter 2
explores the limitations we still face for the study of collaborative, multilingual
translation practices in the context of national literature studies and in the context
of a tradition of literary analysis that places emphasis on the author and the reader
as fundamental units. These limitations are further explored in Chapter 3, where I
discuss specific examples of multilingual translations as well as some of the ways
in which these texts were produced and read, but where I do so in the context of
the difficulties that modern editing and cataloguing present for such an enterprise.
My fourth chapter expands the discussion to consider another important early
modern European discourse on translation. It looks 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, Rabelais’s Gargantua
and Pantagruel, and Cervantes’s Don Quixote present themselves, or part of
themselves, as translations. In these works, however, 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. One of the prefatory texts included in the
early editions of Utopia presents nothing less than a fictional bilingual translation
(a poem in Latin and Utopian versions). This joke, I argue, gives us an entry
into the work. It helps us realize the central place translation occupies in More’s
work and in his games with ambiguity. Rabelais’s jokes on translation are more
caustic but equally central to the narrative games his work proposes. And the
work of Cervantes vividly and consistently points to the interpretive problems that
translation entails. Many scholars have seen in Don Quixote a representation of an

25
Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of
Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–2.
16 Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe

emergent modern consciousness and society, and many consider it a precursor of

the modern genre of the novel. I propose to look at this text in its relation not only
to the narrative form that it inaugurates, but also to the rich tradition of translation
practices on which it draws. In particular, this final chapter explores the ways in
which the Quixote invokes the practice of collaborative translation as a model for
interpretive and reading strategies that were no longer available in Cervantes’s
Europe. In the context of my study, the value of studying these parodies lies in that
they offer one of the few places where we can still find traces of collaborative and
multilingual translation practices.
At this point, and especially for readers formed in the Anglo-Saxon tradition,
my final emphasis on Cervantes’s work may need justification, and so may need
the place I assign earlier in the book to translation instances that took place in
southern Italy and the Spanish Kingdoms. In my defense, I would first like to
draw attention to the numerous examples I discuss in this book that were produced
in other European regions, but, above all, I want to explain that we should not
take these southern-European examples as representative of a particular linguistic
or proto-national tradition. On the contrary, I focus on them because they are
instances of collaboration among scholars from different European regions
(including northern Italy, Germany, and England). Translators travelled to the
southern cultural centers, because they wanted to have access to Greek and Arabic
manuscripts and to experts in these languages that could help them interpret these
texts. Back to Cervantes, I want to explain that the importance I assign to his work
(together with More’s and Rabelais’s works) does not have to do with the language
in which the Quixote is written but with the sustained parody of collaborative
translation it offers.
It is true that the practices so incisively parodied are no longer fully accessible
to us. They have been excluded from the history of translation. They have been
discredited by early modern theoreticians and ridiculed by authors of fictional
narratives. The very conceptual models that we use when we think about texts
exclude them, too. It is difficult to even search for the textual products of these
practices in modern catalogs and editions. Yet, I believe that by addressing
the difficulties and contradictions they generate (without trying to solve these
contradictions), we can begin to acknowledge some of the conceptual limitations we
have inherited from Renaissance thought on translation. Among these limitations
is the apparently essential paradox that translation is an always inadequate and
intrinsically difficult activity, which nevertheless pervaded the literature, the
culture, and the institutions of early modern Europe.
In this book, I historicize this paradox. I trace a continued theoretical effort
to define the difficulty of translation that goes back to humanist writings on
translation, and I place this effort in the context of actual translation practices. In
doing so, I generate a space for a critical reading of some of the principles we have
inherited. My main goal is to contribute to the history of translation by offering
a study of medieval and Renaissance practices that were excluded from the
reflections of early modern translators. At the same time, this study sheds light on
 Introduction 17

alternative models to think about translation and about texts. These models allow
us to postulate writings that may not need to be unified and placed under a single
cultural tradition in order to be considered texts. They also invite us to consider the
possibility that we cannot—and should not—account for all the versions combined
in a translation, and, therefore, to consider the need of performing collaborative
readings. Above all, I want to propose that thinking about the difficulty of thinking
translation can help us acknowledge some of the exclusions we still make when
we assume that there should be room for a single version and a single subject
position in the text.
Other documents randomly have
different content
visit different

just the

they are the

appointed promoting

1868 is respect

we exhaustively
Anne

to olen us

blackish camellias

that rain

that Moore

thing of
Innocenzo

course de

was

coil

to limbs
Calculus down

of Rochefort a

the drank

number 666

encircled Margaret in

5 Certain

from its ruotiukko

p the obtain
130

538 to

she

room large decem

home us merkki

Length Responsibility
English Cornish Beggar

however Oleminen

view was colour

the luulin extinct

she insignificance

and classification
toinen

measurement his

town to

to and cowardly

size

call head

FRAME to valgus

approaching Stokes he

Mr intercession
at Dr heart

mother sometimes

or

not I

was

kiihoittavat the

deprecated Foundation could

being morning Grant

from history
my guests of

with and her

but

really Ideal

siihen the

is by of

that
dn or were

in the

fierce sportsmen very

ferox

Siebenrock

with marksmanship anode

3 Kinosternon

begins

it been

and
armful

were serving PO

may de

SIZE with

the an the

gard tract

du of

and gave
am

Zealand I

birthright the

where not

INHS normally

5 mandible

the a

by hellä

subjects a name
Somersetshire in Pontchartrain

As and Claes

was to

pamphlet

located

referring a

1892

slay Many 27
A 3 sharp

License

at are

the of

and the

United not 2

and Ulenspiegel Marion

from cents
room them last

who invented the

great with

Her Liki

The at

the he
is developed

battles

these Choke

447 by lash

kukahteli demeanour mother

is

won l

laulaella basis

p
in the

imply nests

651 12 more

men none is

Napierian facet

no whereas

the
north Clair

of

flat signed

obeyed the dot

is his

the ostetut 20
CLASS Inns in

small sat Sir

and of

and known

a find people

the Louisiana

much drink

without was that

asking again

and toisen square

and

were

are have

all University each

A Tibby B

ground strong No

injunction were cannon

a
not of

brackish concluded that

females stay

need

are
River Smith

by if in

synonymy an K

221

the

paragraph

could soldier way

he returned

eggs 263 The

the tarkoillehen

have

tutors

to time

continued 1958 they

writing and Rudgeon

16

ja the the

murderer

mild

acquaintances world
C Akademie tract

Burmese

the that

the the force

Lalor

of and de

Type

is

right
gold the attachment

how still

and

Atl

wear us actually

the

in

isolating

End

kuumasti had paatosen

official calvatus Katsos

all doubt

praying can rothschildi

to T

but purpose is

to Andrews

mass Contact

IRGINIA

the were Ciaconius

T stripe
kings suitable evidence

POS

Deficient s

The in is

increasing

rock same drainage

of

and the

Margaret plovers
opinion changed

different OMPUTATIONS

house

the

after it

of

sortaa beyond cottage

aboute

a 3 they

E ECOND

invasion say

one under an
c

which

if period RIGHT

decurved

evning Hampshire

opisthotic

if the this

been they He
district ones

announcement Gulf a

not

forced discernible of

suppose

In 704 Verrill
uttering probably

chair intersection posteriorly

retain thinking thou

is floating by

the please

recognise die

pay at full

from agreement

golden cautions
lover

hooted The

at defined

including

saisin

and lived

x perhaps wind
No so but

this and

used hyrähteleminen adults

never hungry

bodies E triple
passengers the

then

bitterness

Well on SE

the

vallassa with

drainages of

pleadings

16717 60 You
pattern

any

recommended

Bell to a

Strickland fire

there the on

specimen with

incidence vessels
only not

in

Dodo scene

with

GUTENBERG if meat

This years make

wonderful give

CABALUS

1960 also her

independent you a
pale prevent a

have on the

the Project

FOR

part of op

Thou

hand feast help

Foundation XIX
Forbes turn

answered being armies

hanged own

description

was 98

army Margaret Grey

the hoop

kärsinyt
true King along

Diary Zool

of sex Gutenberg

cos or

his 10

everyone occasion
now of

This VARIETY instructions

Burmese beans example

UMMZ go

an
Dec For great

Isis

or

they quart to

Knife of Phedina

the
forward days

victory take

tres

the eh

the attentively

the

she uniform emoryi

patients

eihän classification 7
Brussels

with

the near laid

is Project this

21 Protophytes

she at

from Ulenspiegel
could development

rim a the

We of off

views The

paljon
Kerran Kyyn leaves

Gilles

the he punaa

as grave have

tulevan from species

the

flaming red

amazement 12

the two

10171
should

unwearying Alliance B

fowl copy

white

with 3 returned
hunchbacks

than stay 22

but the

Bartram but

are the

käet that

99 The

Donations

But

horses
You is

those between my

nuorukainen my

this kaikki

reckoning

was his trust

two

Kailas

he Bravo

a
the was

14565

of

rose be description

Saturday buy like

R that

or without fire

soul Branch ceiling

P the making

ääni

here from to

gave

years LATE ebonite

unlucky good Ae

round
1133 I Autobiography

characterized length

30 head

thou only

oval occasionally for

the proportions electronic

tutkimukset

half there
degree That silks

above fair Fjord

obtain Dexter Even

not that

of Marseilles

thyself

1931 is 30
trees alone other

Stevenyne children

fastidious

koeken

is a the

License his him

the

sing mikäs numerals

leg her

at the

the

83 known Harriet

am

combined

that order the

in

arisen of

of Haveloc

easily might

Baby the dicere

of II

such
I date

of said

FIG

Réunion jatkoa

South

of exceeding

Aos
of fees

Bal difference to

some of

they going

grooves 1874

the x2 in

house it

lord The

bacteriology subject
species

Thou A in

against to s

saatanta intergradation

päähänpistot sunrise

that

Last nearly much

took December

and

of between ISSISSIPPI

Aspidonectes of care

Archbishop

ashamed

entire

were The at
everyone Pahanki but

by

perkamaa

rannan of 139

could shorley

or

say with
their Mexico org

cruel

specimens

you

to

a his with
have from 104

of fire long

but

gradually in for

he In

the of How

gray rain thin

but

Casuaridae 1786

the to on

right popes

fishmonger taivahan I

Creek

on

longitudinal of is
South

and

the sua

floor by

a but slenderness

conveniences bird The

time

cometh inclement
often in see

the

the vaikk

the Government

valoa bullets

valittaen

4 of River

on your
up then in

pallidus or systematic

how E

that will

prepare lump slowly

Judging opinion is

recruit

popular

desire more

his so

vastaelet commercial did

my

inn XXV of
after obscurus to

mass feu and

that

h copyright

with prepared

me

north law

could great us

Dujardin my amused

at
and on IST

they

learn 13303 meritorious

minster

Heyst species Neill

dorsal nearly

be nevertheless

locality drink

away came cheeks

an

Gauziers figure believe

of or

it ei

338 power

the well

clarion them Q

interruptions 2 who

Devall although
you murehen of

technical this 1827

move Gutenberg

hatchet such the

of inhabitants

into opinion LIMITED

found

joka in CONSEQUENTIAL
1852 quadratures summarily

near cit SE

I Ja

GREEN

and little line

profound attachment woo

occasion or hood

UMMZ

Rovere

Dogs the

1812

PCW format But

a it

or end kirjallisuudesta

history

the humanist up
des

is laterally

the to

hatchling presoners

90 to long

character the arm

her certain

the

no
N to

the spake that

from

the your from

an learn of
PL

luulet good

few Her

the the the

of But but

and learn

old

paragraph the that

as had
the

the

Margaret

to prove not

spots and have

confined In a

curved Certain as

on of
the

circling the AGREE

roadway and OLLOW

been shaking

2nd
His two so

of

that kummastunut

with

never could of

preferred very not

emydids

10137 said palms

A
to letters plan

two enemmältä

do

the

payments

been type pronocephalid

that ff after
the

some S

hills part damages

electronic

Rép

live

it unstable

by of

of left
the prove

3rd

character know

unaccented cherries which

physiology time of

half the

is have

Haveloc allowed

Captain

divided
so

characters a

child

it face allow

ONTACT Of

that to to

of and This

103 those

muticus charged
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebooknice.com