Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (review)

That so broad a geographical and linguistic scope should lead to so narrow a focus is an understandable but regrettable function of the editors’ and most of the authors’ learned concentration on high-culture texts. Peter Burke, for example, in his superb essay on translations from European vernaculars into Latin restricts his survey to the translation of printed books: specifically, printed books that were translated into another language and printed in that language. The figure of 1,140 “published translations of substantial texts by known authors between the invention of printing and the year 1799” (65) is indeed substantial. As Burke admits, that figure excludes manuscript works (whether the source or the translation was manuscript) as well as most Central and Eastern European production. A res publica litterarum thus continued well past the Reformation and European elites continued to communicate with each other to some extent across linguistic lines in the old lingua franca of Western Christendom. Burke also contributed a shorter piece on the translation of works of history and collaborated with Hsia on the erudite and wide-ranging introduction.

Hsia’s fascinating and comprehensive essay surveys Jesuit and other translations into Chinese, with a passing glance at translations in the other direction, demonstrating that the bulk of translation from Western (Christian) texts into Chinese occurred in the seventeenth century, well before the ban on further conversions of 1724. Hsia notes that the Bible itself was not translated into Chinese in this period, though many devotional as well as scientific works were. Again, we see the interaction of elites through translation. On page 50, Hsia writes “collaborated” for “corroborated,” an example of how translation and sound-equivalents can work in contemporary contexts.

In “Language as a Means of Transfer of Cultural Values,” Eva Kowalksá explores the place and significance of formal Czech Bible translations for the Slovak Lutheran communities that used this “authorized” Lutheran version of Holy Scripture from the early seventeenth to the middle of the twentieth century even though it was in a different dialect from the one they spoke. In “Early Modern Catholic Piety in Translation,” Carlos Eire (re)traces the influence of the late medieval devotional works that Ignatius of Loyola claimed had inspired him to leave soldiering and take up the cross, the Legenda aurea of Jacobus de Voragine and the Life of Christ of Ludolf of Saxony. Eire deconstructs the conventional narrative according to which “medieval devotional literature from the Rheno-Frankish tradition [mysticism and Devotio moderna] caused a flowering of mysticism and devotional fervour in [sixteenth-century] Spain, and the Spanish-Rheno-Flemish literature, in turn, gave rise to an even more dramatic outpouring of mystical fervour in seventeenth-century France” (97). This genealogical approach assumes that texts and their contents are transmitted whole across cultures and across centuries, and it ignores vast numbers of anonymous devotional texts and their translations. Here Eire touches on a point the other authors either ignore or explicitly bracket out: beyond the world of known authors and printed books, there is a vast and untapped reservoir of “derivative,” secondary, popular, occasional, ephemeral and non-canonical texts. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke furnishes the only essay on a less canonical genre, focussing on The Spectator, a short-lived but influential periodical of the early eighteenth century. But the scope of this collection excludes, for example, fifteenth-century books (I avoid the term incunabula, which arbitrarily and misleadingly refers to books printed before 1500 as though they were somehow different from those printed for the next quarter-century or so), the vast majority of which were on religious topics, and which included dozens of editions of the Bible in the vernacular — twenty-four editions of the full Bible in German and Low German alone were printed before Luther’s 1522 September Testament. Peter Burke writes “Translations of Scripture were published in fifty-one languages between 1456 and 1699, including classic versions such as...