Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period (review)

The present volume grew out of a conference held at Jacksonville State University in November 2002. Organized in four sections, the collection contains sixteen essays on the interplays between travel and translation in early modern times. Editor Carmine G. Di Biase initiates the volume with a fine introduction presenting a comprehensive overview of the assembled essays, which he successfully unifies with one common theme: the analogy between translation and exile. Basing his work on Bartlett Giamatti and Edward Said, he analyzes the translations made by converso lexicographers Michelangelo Florio and his son John, arguing that both employed translation in order to create a "new, coherent and unique world" comparable to exile (26).

The first section, "Toward the Vernacular," opens with an essay by Russel Lemmons on the critical impact that Martin Luther's visit to Rome had on the latter's development as a theologian and reformer as well as on his translation of the Bible. Erika Rummel considers Erasmus's translations of classical texts and the New Testament as a result of the Dutch humanist's trips to England between 1511 and 1514. Both Stella P. Revard and Anthony M. Cinquemani dedicate their essays to John Milton. Revard explores the role of Latin in the friendship between Milton and Giovanni Battista Manso, with special attention to the English poet-traveler's journey to Italy in 1638-39. Cinquemani shows how Milton "translates" Petrarch's Secretum in the interlocutors as well as in the "indeterminate conclusion" (81) of book 8 of his Paradise Lost.

The second part of the volume, "The English in Italy and Spain," presents contributions addressing the importance of foreign travel experience on some English authors' translations. Joseph Khoury underscores the political intention of William Thomas in translating Machiavelli. Taking into account John Frampton's personal experience as a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, Donald Beecher charts how the English merchant-traveler became a traveler-translator of Nicholas Monardes and Marco Polo. Kenneth R. Bartlett shows that Thomas Hoby was not only a traveler and translator, but also "an instrument in reconnecting the educated, cultured English mind to the traditions of Italy" (139). Brenda M. Hosington compares William Barker's translation of La nobiltà delle donne by Lodovico Domenichi, to a travelogue that merged Italian and English cultures, travel, and translation.

Thirdly, "The European as Other and the Other in Europe" consists of four essays that address the broad issue of otherness and its relationship to translation. Kristiaan Aercke associates the pilgrimage account by a German knight named Konrad Grünemberg with a metaphoric experience similar to "an imitatio Christi in the context of the via dolorosa" (168). Oumelbanine Zhiri explores the power and limits of translation felt in the Descrittione dell'Affrica by Leo Africanus. James Nelson Novoa analyzes the translation that Inca Garcilaso made of Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'Amore, suggesting a kindred spirit shared by the two authors. María Antonia Garcés also presents a study of Inca Garcilaso, this time of the diverse English translations of the Peruvian's Comentarios reales in the Restoration. She concludes that the spirit of transatlantic endeavors that marked English imperial expansion was vital to the translations made.

"Toward Art and Parody" is the final section. Randall C. Davis tackles Roger William's A Key into the Language of America (1643), positing the work as one unusual example of its time that acknowledges the challenges of intercultural communication. Jack D'Amico studies Shakespeare from two different-yet-related angles: language as a complex political, cultural, and psychological possession, and the political implications of translation as an act of taking possession. Howard Miller defines the influence of Persian and other biographical documents of Timur on Christopher Marlowe's creation of Tamburlaine the Great. Finally, Joanne E. Gates associates the life of John Taylor to an intentional parody of the travel accounts by contemporary learned writers, in particular, Thomas...