Translating Arabia in Enlightenment Edinburgh: Compilation, Comparison, and Robert Heron

In the eighteenth century, commercial translation was an audience-focused practice. It was less a technical word-for-word conversion than a fundamental transformation of a work that altered its meaning by transplanting it into another linguistic and cultural context, in a different material form, and addressed to a new community of readers.¹ Because this was so, Madeleine Dobie has suggested that scholars pay closer attention to the "intersecting sites of translation and reception."² Charles Withers and Paul Wood have similarly advocated a focus on "geographies of knowledge" in the Enlightenment, especially on "how ideas moved between sites."³ They encourage further studies of "the book trade and print culture" to address "questions about how the works of foreign authors translated—in the geographical and epistemological senses of that term—into enlightened circles."⁴ This article advances this research agenda by analyzing how people in a late-Enlightenment capital came to read and make comparisons about a "remote" place: Arabia. It draws on Edinburgh booksellers' records for 1770–1810, as well as various published and unpublished writings by the prolific translator and miscellaneous writer Robert Heron (1764–1807), to better understand: 1) the relationship between translators and booksellers, and especially the role of "hack" translators in commercial publishing at this time; 2) how and why different kinds of books containing information about Arabia were produced, sold, bought, and used; and 3) the role of translation and compilation in the intellectual culture of Enlightenment Edinburgh.

The focus on Enlightenment Edinburgh does not mean that the books discussed herein—principally Heron's translations of Arabian Tales (1792) and Carsten Niebuhr's Travels Through Arabia (1792), along with other relevant compilations and editions—were only read or produced in Edinburgh. Such works were often (co-)published by booksellers in Perth and London, and they were widely sold and read elsewhere.⁵ Nor does it mean that this article offers a "city-scale" analysis. Rather, it begins with a bookshop, and the focus sharpens on the life and work of an individual employed by the proprietors of that bookshop. The case is made here for individual-scale analysis of a hitherto understudied "hack" translator (i.e., Heron), and for understanding the ideas about the Arabic language and about translation by which he was influenced. Heron's role in disseminating Niebuhr's observations has generally been overlooked, and major studies of Arabian tales in translation during this period have entirely ignored his contribution.⁶ These valuable grand-scale accounts can overlook the precise moments, places, materials, and people through which important translation happens. It is difficult, of course, to identify the "one or more anonymous 'Grub Street' hacks" who translated Antoine Galland's Arabian Nights from the French between 1705 and 1717,⁷ but the archival material about Heron is rich and worthy of study as it sheds light on bigger questions of Enlightenment epistemology. As Chi-ming Yang suggests, by uncovering and scrutinizing the "often ghosted figures of go-betweens [and] translators" of eighteenth-century East-West ("not-quite"-)encounters, a richer history of Enlightenment reasoning can be written and the "paradigm of Western modernity" can be better contested.⁸ Focusing more "locally," at the level of individual and institutional relationships within the city, allows for a better understanding of the highly contingent reasons that particular translations were proposed, produced, and circulated.

The intention here is also to emphasize the diverse social and institutional contexts in which different material configurations of Heron's Arabian translations were read and used. Drawing on Bruno Latour's conceptualization of translation as a series of stages, with compilation at the end of the scale, the article demonstrates how Heron's translations were by no means entirely (or even primarily) linguistic: the effect of his commercial repackaging of literary material, and of his juxtaposing it relative to other sources of information, was to change the patterns and forms in which it circulated, and to enhance its "mobility, stability and combinability."⁹ Through Heron's translations, particular conceptions of Arabia circulated as factual claims. This was true for the travelers' observations he...