Introduction*

Abstract

The introduction offers insights into the praxeological approach of the SPP 2130 “Early Modern Translation Cultures”. Translation is considered a central and ubiquitous cultural technique of the Early Modern period, and one that contributed decisively to shaping that epoch. The SPP 2130 takes current translation studies theories as its point of departure, historicizes them, and applies them to Early Modern translation phenomena. It combines philological, anthropological, and societal translation concepts to develop a definition of translation that lends itself well to an interdisciplinary approach and provides a workable basis not only for the study of languages and literatures, but also for the scholarly investigation of images, music, and history. The graduated conception of translation makes it possible to take widely differing translation methods and practices into account and to examine not only inter- and intralingual translations but also intermedial, intercultural, and performative translation processes.

*Translated by Judith Rosenthal

Translator’s note: In translating this text, I have endeavoured to strike a balance between remaining as faithful as possible to the content created by the authors and writing in as idiomatic and fluid a manner as possible in English.

Concepts, methods, and practices of translation are of epochal importance for the Early Modern period.¹ A look at European translation cultures reveals how strongly they are rooted in the philological self-conception of the humanists. From the start, the humanists’ efforts to access and reread classical texts and create a respective canon were linked to translation techniques by way of recourse to the imitatio approach. At the same time, the reception of classical themes was merely one facet that, however central its importance in the sixteenth century, owing to the internationalization of translation increasingly made way for translation activities in other fields in the seventeenth. Within the framework of our field of study, book printing plays an important role as an essential dynamic force that itself sparked a major translation movement: the transfer of bodies of knowledge from the manuscript culture to the new printing medium. Linguistic and medial translation movements were mutually dependent and mutually reinforcing, and developed a strong cultural dynamic in their ongoing reciprocity. Throughout Europe, growing trade relations brought about the intensification and professionalization not only of translation, but also of foreign language instruction with the aid of language textbooks.² The exponential multilingualism and territoriality in Europe naturally spurred these developments, which spread to the far reaches of the globe by way of the Early Modern era’s colonial channels and interacted with other, independent translation cultures, which in turn had an impact within Europe. Translation was a central and ubiquitous cultural technique of the Early Modern period, and as such the object of the interdisciplinary, praxeological approach of the SPP 2130 “Early Modern Translation Cultures”.

2.1 Research on Early Modern Translation

The translations of works by classical and humanist authors that increased exponentially in number in German-speaking Europe from around 1450 onwards have long been the subject of scholarly inquiry with regard to their linguistic, literary, epistemic, and cultural characteristics and the role they played in the history of education, societies, and mentalities. Yet despite the numerous monographic studies on individual works, authors, translators, and regions carried out to date, Early Modern literary translations have yet to undergo thorough investigation. The achievements of translators – not only those of the Early Modern period – were long undervalued, if not devalued. Compared to the authors of the “original works”, translators were accorded only secondary importance. Ideally, they were to remain invisible³ and, far from being honoured for their creativity, productivity, and mediatory function, were criticized when they introduced accents of their own. Cross-temporal, cross-linguistic, and cross-geographical studies of Early Modern translation cultures are still entirely lacking. The urgent need for research on this subject in German scholarship becomes particularly apparent in international comparison.⁴

The pertinent catalogues and databases, for example the British Library General Catalogue or the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des XVI. und des XVII. Jahrhunderts, reveal the wealth of Early Modern translations.⁵ Already in his Deutsche Antikerezeption alone – an index of German translations of classical texts carried out in the period from 1450 to 1550 – Franz Josef Worstbrock lists 63 different translators, 55 translated authors, and 116 works to which altogether 433 sources testify.⁶ The Marburger Repertorium zur Übersetzungsliteratur im deutschen Frühhumanismus, drawn up between 2007 and 2012 with funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; German Research Foundation), covers a different time period and literary category. Focussing on all German translations produced in the second half of the fifteenth century, it registers a total of 144 works that have come down to us in 122 manuscripts and 145 incunabula (existing in approximately 2,500 copies), as well as 273 books printed in the sixteenth century.⁷ The Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, initiated by Paul Oskar Kristeller and meanwhile comprising ten volumes, provides comprehensive documentation of the translations and annotations of classical literature.⁸ For England, Scotland, and Ireland, the online catalogue Renaissance Cultural Crossroads, drawn up under the direction of Brenda Hosington at the University of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, lists more than 6,000 printed translations published before 1641.⁹

Quite recently, the translations of the Early Modern period have begun to attract more notice in the study of languages and literatures. The scientific network “Humanistic Translation of the Classics and Early Modern Poetics in Germany (1450–1620)” organized by Regina Toepfer and Johannes Klaus Kipf, for example, examined the translations of the authors of classical antiquity with regard to their impact on the development of German literature and literary language of the Early Modern era.¹⁰ The potency of Early Modern translation cultures as an emerging field of cultural studies is also documented by other projects currently in progress or recently concluded and the various publications they have produced. Examples are the “Classics in Context”, a DFG project being carried out in Bochum under the direction of Bernd Bastert and Manfred Eikelmann and revolving around Late Medieval and Early Modern Germanization of the classics in medial translation processes up to around 1600,¹¹ the Berliner Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung project “Translation in the Transfer of Knowledge”, which has broadened the focus to include European aspects,¹² or “Narragonien digital”, a Würzburg Kallimachos project that, led by Brigitte Burrichter and Joachim Hamm, is devoted to producing a digital edition of the Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) mirroring the work’s textuality, mediality, and translation history. In a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) project, Seraina Plotke concentrated on Sebastian Brant at the intersection of Early Modern text cultures, and two very recently approved DFG projects will work on making the wealth of Early Modern translation literature more readily available: the “Online Repertory of German Translations of Classical Antiquity 1501–1620” being carried out by Johannes Klaus Kipf and Bernd Bastert, and Vahram Atayan’s “Heidelberg Bibliography of Translations of Nonfictional Texts”, investigating the period 1450–1850.¹³

Publications by Peter Burke, Peter Burschel, Renate Dürr, Antje Flüchter, and Mark Häberlein moreover testify to the increasing attention directed towards Early Modern translations in the fields of historical, musical, and pictorial scholarship. These works span a broad thematic spectrum of different forms of cultural affiliation and practices of intercultural symbolic communication, particularly in “West–East” cultural contacts that came about by way of translation practices in the context of the Jesuit mission, but also the multilingualism of the nobility and the military in the Early Modern age.¹⁴ Further undertakings worthy of mention here are the special edition of the magazine Saeculum on the subject of “Kulturelle Übersetzung” (2017), the contributions to the scholarship on Ovid in Frühmittelalterliche Studien (2019), and the study by Catarina Zimmermann-Homeyer on early printed versions of Latin classics (2018) – the first to research the innovative illustration concepts of the printer and publisher Johann Grüninger of Strasbourg from the art-historical perspective.¹⁵ Also among the recent publications in the field are the collection edited by Achim Aurnhammer and Susanne Rode-Breymann on the development of the German song in the literary and musical-historical context of the Renaissance (2018) and the book Palladio, Vignola & Co. in Translation edited by Christina Strunck and Carolin Scheidel (2020), which examines textual, visual, and intermedial translation processes as exemplified by European art treatises of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.¹⁶ The multifarious research activities, also including collections of articles on the reception of Heliodor, the importance of reception literature for Early Modern education and culture, and translators as discoverers, underpin the approach of the SPP 2130 to describe the period from the perspective of its translation cultures.¹⁷

In view of the findings of both the postcolonial translation school and transfer-oriented analysis of translation in the field of cultural studies,¹⁸ however, the standpoint of older research endeavours prioritizing an emphasis on Western and Central Europe or postulating a European privilege of translation no longer appear sustainable,¹⁹ also with regard to the Early Modern period. In the case of the sixteenth century, for instance, research on Fernão Mendes Pintos has shown how the translation tendencies in accounts of his travels to China put the primacy of his native Portuguese culture into perspective.²⁰ Rather than limiting the geographical focus to a single, exclusively considered translation culture, not to mention a translation monopoly on the part of Europe, the SPP 2130 “Early Modern Translation Cultures” and the compilation hereby coming out of it are therefore conceived without any continental or territorial limitation.

2.2 Concepts of Translation

As an alternative to – and in interchange with – existing concepts of research on Early Modern times from the viewpoint of the history of ideas, events, or societies, the SPP 2130 pursues an approach that, in concentrating on translation, concentrates on a cultural praxis. It conceives of the Early Modern period as one constituted to a decisive degree by its translation activities. And it makes a point of illuminating different cultures of translation with a view to internationalization and globalization. In other words, the scope of the programme’s studies exceeds the bounds of both the core field of research on translations of classical literature and the inner-European transfer processes that play an increasing role in shaping science, politics, and commerce. The European concept of the Early Modern period is thus juxtaposed with other translation cultures all over the world as a means of gaining heuristic impulses for reflection on epoch in the historiography of science, culture, and literature. The inner- and trans-European as well as the global translation movements of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries were highly dynamic, and in many areas still await fundamental research. And the conceptions, theories, and methods of the historical protagonists are as plural, heterogeneous, and complex as the research perspectives on Early Modern translation culture.

2.2.1 Pre-Modern Translation Discourses

The appropriate form of translation was already a subject of discussion in antiquity with a particular emphasis on the dichotomy between sense-for-sense and word-for-word – or literal – translation that has informed the translation discourse to the very present and also figured in the Early Modern era. In De optimo genere oratorum, Cicero stressed that he had translated the works of Plato, Xenophon, Aeschines, and Demosthenes from Greek into Latin not as an interpreter but as an orator, and had adapted the phraseology of the source language to the conventions of the target language. The foremost principle of a translation, he believed, was not to count the words but to ponder them.²¹ St Jerome concurred with this approach, striving not to express one word with another word, but rather one meaning with another meaning, except in the translation of the Holy Scripture, in which even the sequence of the words was a mystery. In a letter on translation theory to Pammachius, he revealed how difficult it is to put these maxims into practice.²² Often he found no equivalent for a Greek word in Latin; what is more, the differing grammars, figures of speech, and, indeed, the two languages’ peculiarities in general required lengthy paraphrases, which earned him the wrongful accusation of having violated his obligation of allegiance to the original.

Early Modern translators built on the theoretical discussions of the classical authors, the majority of them pleading in favour of figurative translation. Among the early German humanists, only one – Niklas von Wyle, the municipal clerk of Esslingen – took a different stance with his aim of adhering “vf das genewest dem latin nâch” (‘with the utmost exactness to the Latin’).²³ Through Martin Luther, the word-for-word principle that had shaped all vernacular translations of the Bible since Late Antiquity dwindled in importance even for this sacred book.²⁴ The growing number of translations from the mid-fifteenth century onwards led to in-depth theoretical reflection that was usually limited, however, to paratexts. Letters of dedication and prefaces became the preferred medium for linguistic-literary deliberations, the place where translators expounded on their motivation, the translational difficulties they faced, and the function and intended interpretation of their texts.²⁵ There were a few authors who wrote on translation theory: Leonardo Bruni, for example, vehemently criticized the quality of medieval translations in De interpretatione recta²⁶ and in his Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen Martin Luther declared spoken German – as opposed to written Latin – the guiding principle of a good translation.²⁷ Even if the humanists did not introduce as radical a change to the history of translation as their own utterances suggest,²⁸ and some research has assumed, their numerous reflections on translation testify to a heightened awareness of the associated problems.²⁹ The dispute over Luther’s translation of the Bible and the extra-European missionary activities of the Jesuits had the effect of further honing translation-theoretical deliberations and reflections on language.³⁰ As translation formed a guiding principle of culture, there was an ongoing need to reflect on and discuss its criteria.

2.2.2 A Change of Paradigm in the Conception of Translation

The ‘literal-versus-sense-for-sense’ dichotomy hardly sufficed even the contemporaries and requires further specification if we are to describe the text products of Early Modern translation cultures adequately.³¹ And the relationship between Early Modern and medieval translation praxis should also undergo thorough review. Scholarship has identified the fundamental difference between the medieval and humanist translation methods, for example, as follows: The medieval authors felt bound only to the content, the materia, and free to shape the form as they liked. According to this conception, it took the humanist authors to assign the highest priority to the faithful reproduction of the original, and devote specific attention to formal aspects. The model the German medievalist Franz Josef Worstbrock developed more than twenty years ago and described as “retelling and translating”³² is heuristically helpful, but reduces the diverse spectrum of medieval translation types to a single possible variant. Worstbrock leaves out of account the interlinear versions, conceived as aids in understanding the original, as well as the closely literal translations of the Bible,³³ while on the other hand defining the “retelling” form that prevails in the fictitious genres as the translational norm. What is more, he constructs a humanistic ideal that does little or no justice to the many vernacular – but also scholarly – translations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.³⁴ Owing to the fact that Early Modern translators made interventions in their pre-texts, modernized and dramatized, shortened and expanded them, their approach deviated from the present day conception of translation and can be characterized as “narrative translation”³⁵ or “interpretative and mediatory translation”,³⁶ whose cultural significance must be determined by way of systematic research. As is the case in German research on the Early Modern period, there is a change of paradigms on the horizon in international scholarship on the subject: from the evaluative (and devaluative) judgment of the lack of stylistic equivalence to recognition of the productive achievements of English and French translators.³⁷

2.2.3 Impulses in the Study of Translation

The complex relationship between the source-language and the target-language text is one object of investigation in translation studies, a field encompassing a range of different research directions. Whereas linguistic translation scholars consider texts fundamentally translatable without limitation of their informational content, proponents of the relativistic approach are sceptical of that practice. In the tradition of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the latter regard thought as an expression of cultural and national identity and doubt that ideas conceived in one language can be analogously expressed in another.³⁸ The former, on the other hand, view translation as a “series of code-switching operations”.³⁹ In their view, translators function merely as language mediators for interlingual equivalences, as a kind of relay station for the transcoding of texts. The 1971 declaration of the Leipzig translation scholar Otto Kade is a case in point: “All texts of a language L_x (source language) can be substituted by texts of the language L_n (target language) without the success of the communication being fundamentally impaired, let alone called into question.”⁴⁰

The universalist translation theorists, who stress the sign character of language and make reference to a tertium comparationis, likewise proceed on the assumption of the fundamental translatability of texts.⁴¹ It is difficult to reconcile either conception with the translation cultures of Early Modern times, which testify to variations of meaning in the transformation process as well as to the introduction of accents of the translator’s own. The linguistically oriented school of translation studies has of course meanwhile developed different shades of the meaning of the term equivalence, for example Werner Koller’s distinctions between denotative, connotative, text-normative, pragmatic, and formal-aesthetic equivalence, whose requirements translators can never satisfy in the same manner.⁴² The SPP 2130, however, builds primarily on those models of translation scholarship that emphasize the hermeneutic, pragmatic, and functional character of translation. It views the relationship between the original and the translation as one of productive tension between identity and difference that is to be established anew in every instance, and that can also vary within a single text. Radegundis Stolze’s proposal to interpret a translation as the “non-other” – because it is neither the same as nor something entirely different from the source text⁴³ – overcomes the traditional translation-theoretical ‘literal-versus-figurative’ polarity and opens new interpretive perspectives.

Translation can be described, to begin with, as a hermeneutic process. As receivers of the message in the source language and transmitters of the same in the target language, translators can only relay the information they have understood themselves and consider relevant. Translation is a subjective “sensemaking process” that progresses in a fundamentally gradual manner.⁴⁴ Hans-Georg Gadamer proposes an understanding of translation as a dialogue between text and recipient, in the course of which a gradual approximation and ultimately a “fusion of horizons” take place.⁴⁵ From the point of view of translation scholarship, of course, this process never comes to a conclusion; translation is never more than a “tentative oscillation between surplus and deficit”,⁴⁶ in that the target text always loses something in some places and gains something in others. Because the understanding of a text neither arises from the sum of individual sentence parts nor can it be nailed down to a single unequivocal interpretation, the text product is always only a hermeneutic draft. Owing to the “suprasummativity of the translation text as a whole”,⁴⁷ the text’s meaning potential can be realized in a wide variety of ways.

Drawing on John Lanshaw Austin and John Roger Searle’s speech act theory of the early 1970s, exponents of the pragmatic school of translation studies point out that translation not only demands understanding but also involves linguistic action.⁴⁸ As illocution cannot automatically be deduced from locution, texts can be open to different interpretations. Depending on the situation, speech acts have different intentions, a circumstance that applies especially to translations, since the source text and the target text are per se embedded in different sociocultural contexts.⁴⁹ Far from merely transcoding words or sentences from one language to another, translation is a complex act in which the source content is transported into a different cultural environment. In 1994, the linguist and translation theorist Hans Jürgen Vermeer of Heidelberg explained this phenomenon as follows:

Action and behaviour are linked to the usages, conventions, and norms of a culture in whose community the respective person lives as an ‘encultured’ being […]. A text is a product of action. A text is thus linked to the overall behaviour of its producer and their culture [...].⁵⁰

The target-language situation determines what function a translation can have and also has an impact on its formulation, as translators take “culture-specific textualization conventions”,⁵¹ text types, and relationships to other texts as their orientation. Vermeer introduces the term “skopos-adequate” for the purpose- and goal-oriented maxims:

It is not possible simply to adopt one culture’s mode of expression as the mode of expression of another. Form and meaning form a unified whole. The problem of translation consists in the balance between the form and meaning of culture_A at the point in time_t1 and the form and meaning of culture_B at the point in time_t2, in what I refer to as culture- and addressee-, in short: skopos-adequate […].⁵²

More recent culture-theoretical translation scholarship approaches, for example the descriptive translation studies, thus direct their attention to the impact of translations within cultural systems and conceive of translators not only in their role and conveyors of culture, but also as agents of cultural evolution.⁵³

A situation- and function-related approach of this kind is fundamental to the aims of the SPP 2130, which has set out to examine the cultural framework conditions and culture-generating impulses of Early Modern translations. The excellent opportunities for links between recent trends in translation scholarship and research into phenomena of cultural translation in the historical humanities have received little notice to date, in part because translation scholarship has devoted itself primarily to translation of the recent past and the present.⁵⁴ In his two-volume study Das Übersetzen in Renaissance und Humanismus, already Vermeer at least alludes to the Early Modern period as a suitable one for studies in the field of translation scholarship.⁵⁵ The SPP 2130 has taken up this thread and is applying the approaches developed for the study of other periods to the text cultures of the Early Modern era. The historicization of current translation-scholarly perspectives and the investigation of pre-modern translation cultures can, in turn, also lead to new findings with regard to present-day translation phenomena.

2.2.4 The Definition of Translation and the Concept of Epoch

In view of the SPP 2130’s interdisciplinary approach it is necessary to distinguish between different notions of translation. Whereas in the fields of language, literature, and translation studies the term ‘translation’ is usually used in a stricter sense and limited primarily to interlingual phenomena, in the historical and cultural sciences it is more broadly defined and applied to widely differing types of cultural, medial, and material transfer processes. In this context, reference can be made above all to the projects and publications of Doris Bachmann-Medick, who proclaimed the translational turn in the study of literatures and cultures, and accordingly conceives of the cultural sciences as translation sciences.⁵⁶ The SPP 2130 is thus based on a graduated conception of translation that ties in with various translation theories and ranges from interlingual to cultural translation.

A translation is the conveyance of a linguistic communication resp. of meaningful signs from a (source) culture A to a (target) culture Z with the goal of reaching new recipients and communicating across linguistic, spatial, temporal, cultural, and/or medial boundaries.

Through its combination of philological, anthropological, and societal concepts of translation, this definition of the term lends itself well to an interdisciplinary approach and provides a workable basis not only for the study of languages and literatures, but also for the sciences of images, music, and history. Within the framework of the SPP 2130, it is thus possible to examine how it was possible for distinctive architectural features to undergo transfer from the French royal court to the English (see Christina Strunck’s art-historical project, realized by Lukas Maier) or how German authors drew on European song literature and transformed melodies, musical compositions, and lyrics (see the Early Modern German literature project by Astrid Dröse), but also the extent to which an Islamic cartographer integrated traditional geometric patterns of the Berber culture into a Christian atlas in the context of his translation (see Sonja Brentjes’s science history project, which is being realized by Victor de Castro León and Alberto Tiburcio).

The period addressed by the SPP 2130 – ca. 1450 to 1800 – is also the outcome of extensive discussion ultimately leading to a transdisciplinary compromise. It is a time span capable of integrating the differences in temporal conceptions of the Early Modern period in the various disciplines of the historical, philological, and translational sciences. Under the influence of the new humanistic-oriented approach to education, a turning point in the history of European literature can be detected in the incipient Early Modern era. Writings by the authors of classical antiquity were rediscovered, edited, and annotated, and from about 1450 onwards numerous translations were carried out in the German-speaking world, with far-reaching consequences for the development of vernacular literature and literary language. It was not until the seventeenth century that the focus began to shift away from the classical authors⁵⁷ – whose works had dominated translation literature until then – and works of the contemporary literatures of other vernaculars came increasingly to be translated.

The invention of book printing played a major role in this context, as it led to an exponential increase in the dissemination of translation literature. The new medium liberated texts from the confined communication scope of the manuscript culture and permitted their flexible acquisition and reception under economic conditions.⁵⁸ Thanks to the various pertinent repertories and catalogues, we have good insights into European book production in the period in question. Yet other regions and translation cultures have also found their way to the SPP 2130, for example the flourishing publishing activities of Early Modern Japan or the Jesuit mission in India and South America. The decision to make 1800 the closing year of the period of study takes account of the epochal turning point established as such in different disciplines, partially with a view to the shift of paradigms in translation theory.⁵⁹ Whether or not this epochal concept of epoch is a specifically European model – and, if so, to what extent – is a matter to be reflected on by the SPP 2130 at a later point in time on the basis of interdisciplinary comparative studies.

2.3 Translation Practices

The graduated conception of translation described above makes it possible to take widely differing translation methods and practices into account and examine the translation cultures of the Early Modern period systematically. The spectrum of research objects addressed within the SPP 2130 ranges from translations of the classics, the fundamental texts of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, and encyclopaedic works to cartographic material, verse techniques, song lyrics and melodies, paintings, spatial arrangements, and architectures. Intermedial, intercultural, and performative translation processes are as much a focus as inter- and intralingual translations.

2.3.1 Basic Forms of Interlingual and Intralingual Translation

Within the scope of interlingual translation in the humanist context,⁶⁰ the first aspect to be emphasized is the translation privilege of Latin as a scholarly language (in the areas of the Church, law, and science).⁶¹ One focal point of translation activities in this context was the translation of classical texts into the native languages. On the other hand, the standards of scholarly language made translations from the vernaculars into Latin imperative. Here Latin sometimes also served as an intercultural ‘hinge’ by way of which a text in one vernacular was translated into another, as in the case of Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools.⁶² Yet Latin also played an intermediate role for other scholarly languages. The majority of works of Greek antiquity, for example made their way into German via Latin as ‘second-hand translations’.⁶³ To reach new readerships, most authors moreover carried out translations of their own works, adapting them to the respective different communication situation in the process.⁶⁴

A further area that gained prevalence in the Early Modern era was that of intralingual translation⁶⁵ between the vernaculars. In all of the above-mentioned fields, translations were carried out from and into different language levels. Apart from the classical texts, there was, for example, the New Latin literature; Middle High German texts were transformed into Early Modern High German ones, Low German versions into High German ones, and vice versa. The Early Modern High German translation of the Metamorphoses by Jörg Wickram, for example, – the object of investigation of Regina Toepfer’s German literature project, which is being realized by Jennifer Hagedorn – is based on a Middle High German version by Albrecht von Halberstadt dating from the period around 1200.⁶⁶ The need for pragmatic scribality led to the formation of new text types such as vernacular arithmetic books that testify to the importance of translation for trade.

Extensive translation activities are also to be observed outside of Europe; in the Middle East, for example, translations from Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman were carried out. Throughout the entire large region of the Sinitic culture, classical Chinese dominated certain genres of text production, and various techniques of conveyance into the regional written and everyday languages were developed. Translations between the East Asian languages as well as those from the European languages take strong orientation from the conventions developed for dealing with the respective classical standard language. Through the ‘discovery’ and the ‘New World’, translation took on a global dimension as far back as the Early Modern period, and was relevant not only for economic contacts but also contributed decisively to shaping Jesuit missionary work.⁶⁷ And translations were also carried out within the framework of inner-European missionization, as we learn from the project on Judaeo-Christian cultural contacts overseen by Rebekka Voss, which looks at transcultural Yiddish translations within the context of the pietist Jewish mission in eighteenth-century Germany (see the contribution by Avraham Siluk in this publication).

2.3.2 Language Work and Literature Transfer

The extensive translation work carried out in Early Modern Europe bears witness to the linguistic analysis and transfer of classical literature as a chief pursuit of the period’s scholars. Initially, the archegeti of humanism had merely set out to reform Latin; soon, however, they applied the principles they had developed to Greek and the vernaculars as well.⁶⁸ Translators face the problem of having to find ways of expressing terms and figures of speech in the source language for which there are no equivalents in the target language. As a consequence of this phenomenon – which was already bewailed in antiquity – translation literature came to serve as a catalyst of change in language and literature.⁶⁹ In fact, Early Modern translations supplied important impulses for the formation of national languages and literatures.⁷⁰ Translators are called upon to strike a fine balance between the source and the target language, adopt foreign terms, create new expressions, and differentiate between different types of texts. Mathematical terminology, for example, evolved in the process of translating Latin and Italian arithmetic books.

Indeed, many sixteenth-century authors set themselves the explicit goal of contributing to the formation of culture and language by declaring their intention to enrich the vernacular with their translations, or even to improve on the pre-texts.⁷¹ They developed genre traditions and explored poetic latitudes. As exemplified not least of all by Martin Opitz’s efforts with German poetry,⁷² to translate means to work on the material of language. Even if other authors voiced scepticism regarding the expressive possibilities of the vernacular, in the long term their translations contributed to overcoming the primacy of Latin as the language of literature and science. Taking these discourses as a point of departure, the SPP 2130 strives to focalize translation as a praxis not only for communicating culture, but also for forming it. The German literature project applied for by Jörg Wesche and being realized by Julia Amslinger, for example, investigates how European verse techniques were adopted and adapted in the German poetics and occasional poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Andreas Gipper’s Romance-languages translation-studies project, on the other hand, – which is being realized by Caroline Mannweiler and Diego Stefanelli – retraces how scientific translations carried out in France in the same period led to the formation of national scientific cultures.

In the Early Modern period, the gradual development of different translation cultures and the possibilities offered by book printing served to accelerate the internationalization of translation flows and the circulation of texts, a process described as increasing literature transfer.⁷³ One prerequisite for this development was the Early Modern era’s expanded conception of literature, which encompassed both functional literature and poetic text types. Transfer, in this context, means an instance of translation that – as has been shown for German-Dutch literature transfer, for example – can always also take place reciprocally and is thus not to be conceived as a cultural one-way street, but as a dynamic phenomenon (e.g. in the form of reciprocal influences).⁷⁴ The change of cultural framework and the accompanying recontextualization lead to a potentiation and depotentiation of the meaning of the source texts, which, through linguistic and medial transfer, are charged with new meanings in the target culture. The Romance-linguistic SPP project on colonial translation strategies on the periphery of New Spain, for example, sheds light on how, in translations into Zapotec, the Christian-theological concept of the Trinity was closely linked to indigenous polytheistic notions which at the same time the Christian missionaries were seeking to overcome (see the contribution by Martina Schrader-Kniffki, Yannic Klamp, and Malte Kneifel). Literature transfer thus not only involves a transmission of culture and knowledge, but invariably also the transformation of the same. What is more, it encompasses every form of text exchange as transmission from one system of communication into another, in which context translation is to be specified as one form of transfer. And finally, both the vertical and horizontal movements of literature transfer (between classes, institutions, domains, territories, etc.) must be considered. The SPP 2130 thus also offers the prospect of making a substantial contribution to the field of literature transfer research.

2.3.3 Intercultural Communication

The diversity of the Early Modern translation cultures can accordingly not be reduced to the aspect of knowledge increase. While it is true that the translations made previously unknown facts and works accessible, the linguistic transfer was always associated with literary, discursive, epistemic, and normative factors, as the translation object had to be integrated into a new cultural context.⁷⁵ Regardless of whether the source text is fully incorporated into the target culture (“domestication”) or its cultural origins are linguistically retained (“foreignization”), the difference in context has an impact on the comprehension of the text.⁷⁶ Gadamer characterizes the relationship between the source text, the translator, and the target text as a dialogical one.⁷⁷ The embedment in a new situation can in turn have a retroactive effect on the original and lead to a different realization of its meaning potential in the source language. Even if the target text claims a validity of its own and is intended to replace the source text, the two are closely interrelated. It is for this reason that translation can be understood as a form of intercultural communication⁷⁸ in which temporal, spatial, linguistic, and medial boundaries are overcome and knowledge hierarchies renegotiated.

The SPP 2130 concentrates, to begin with, on the chief translation flows within Europe, which had a pan-European impact and developed particular intensity in a certain interlingual constellation, for example in the area of the Italian-German and German-Dutch literature transfer.⁷⁹ In part, indirect translation cultures formed by way of relay languages,⁸⁰ and there were also many instances of translations competing in the field of a single target language, in some cases provoking expurgation.⁸¹ Analyzing the sixteenth-century German translations of Homer and Ovid from an intersectional perspective, the project by Regina Toepfer revolves around translation methods in the context of the humanist education movement (see the contribution by Jennifer Hagedorn). In contrast, above all the projects with a temporal focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries examine transfer methods for the translation from one vernacular to another. Whereas Andreas Gipper and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink are investigating translations into French (which developed to become the new European lingua franca) – the former as illustrated by scientific translations and the latter as exemplified by encyclopaedias –, Susanne Greilich is analyzing translations of encyclopaedias into Spanish.

The scope of the SPP 2130 also encompasses translation processes on the European periphery, for instance in Wales: in their Celtic studies project, Erich Poppe and Elena Parina are inquiring into the strategies for the translation of fundamental religious texts into Cymric. Projects on the Jesuit mission in South America (Martina Schrader-Kniffki), India (Antje Flüchter, realization Giulia Nardini), and Japan (Katja Triplett) are taking a look at the colonial context. And also of relevance for the SPP 2130 are translation practices that developed in the Early Modern period independently of European influences. The dynamics that can result from the encounter between two different translation cultures are the subject of Katja Triplett’s religious studies project on processes of exchange between Catholic missionaries and Buddhists in Late Medieval and Early Modern Japan and, in the scientific-historical project of Dagmar Schäfer and Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, as illustrated by the mapping of East Asia by means of indigenous and European cartographic techniques.

Intercultural communication also involves the possibility of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. The repeated failure of the peace efforts in Europe between 1450 and 1789, for example, has been explained as a consequence of inadequate translations and insurmountable differences between cultures and forms of communication.⁸² And an overview of the translation cultures of the Early Modern period would not be complete without a look at the communicational limitations that became apparent in the sixteenth century, for example in Constantinople. Following the introduction of book printing, that city advanced to become a prominent printing centre. This development, however, was hardly capable of overcoming the translation barrier between the Christian-Latin and Islamic-Ottoman writing systems, a circumstance responsible for ‘asymmetrical’ translation relationships in peace agreements.⁸³ The reciprocal cultural translation achievements and their limitations in the context of audiences with persons in authority – a ceremonial that, more than any other, was dominated by symbolic codes and contributed decisively to shaping the ritualized praxis of diplomatic communication between East and West – constitute a virtually ideal–typical example of intercultural translation and its limitations.⁸⁴

2.3.4 The Protagonists of Translation and Their Networks

The research programme not only supplements existing studies with further comparative analyses of individual translations, but also – in keeping with the approach of transfer-oriented translation analysis – explores the protagonists’ historical networks and products as well as their role in shaping culture.⁸⁵ Hermeneutic, pragmatic, and functional translation theories direct their attention to the translators’ individual dispositions, the relevance of the text types, the specific purpose of the translation, and the target readership. A number of the protagonists investigated within the framework of the SPP 2130 prove to have been remarkably mobile in that they themselves repeatedly crossed linguistic, geographical, and cultural boundaries. Among these ‘cultural brokers’ were the foreign wives of European rulers, for example Henrietta Maria – the daughter of Henry IV and Maria de’ Medici –, whose culture-transmitting influence on the English royal family is the subject of the project by Christina Strunck (see the contribution by Lukas Maier), the Italian Jesuit Roberto Nobili, whose translation activities are the focus of Antje Flüchter’s project (see the contribution by Giulia Nardini), and the Syrian Christian Salomon Negri, whose role in the transfer of knowledge and culture from West to East is the theme of the project by Mark Häberlein (see the contribution by Paula Manstetten). Nobili strove to spread the Catholic doctrine in southern India; Negri was active as a scholar, language teacher, interpreter, and translator in places as far-flung as Paris, London, Halle, Venice, and Constantinople. Other translators prove to have remained in one place for the most part, working primarily from their own desks. The so-called “armchair geographers” studied by Renate Dürr and Irina Saladin in their project in Tübingen are a case in point. These translators executed their cartographic works on the basis of extensive collections of material without ever themselves having been to the regions in question, much less explored them.

Again and again, the projects of the SPP 2130 pose questions as to the terminology, ideas, discourses, media, genres, and traditions available in the target cultures for the translators’ work of reproducing the information contained in the source language. These text producers were in turn integrated in intellectual, religious, social, and economic networks that promoted collective forms of authorship and gave rise to entire translation workshops.⁸⁶ In her project, Irena Fliter explores the multifarious business, diplomatic, and cultural contacts of an Ottoman-Jewish family of the eighteenth century and examines how the Camondo family advanced to become a prominent trade dynasty entrusted with all manner of intermediary functions between the Ottoman Empire and Europe. In the case of research projects in which there is a lack of independent sources on the participating protagonists, the paratexts of the translations often permit conclusions to be drawn about the number of persons involved (translators, printers, publishers, customers, recipients, etc.), their origins, social status, gender, and religion, as well as their social relationships to one another, their ties to institutions, the type and intensity of the text work, and the purpose and function of the translation object. The oeuvre of the German scholar Johann Michael Moscherosch, for example – the subject of Dirk Werle’s project –, not only testifies to his polyhistorical and encyclopaedic interests, but also to his confessional origins (see the contribution by Sofia Derer).

This volume is divided into three sections mirroring the structure of the SPP 2130 and its nuanced conception of translation: “Sign Systems and Medial Transformations”, “Anthropology and Knowledge”, and “Cultural Affiliations and Society”. Whereas in the first, semiotically and medially oriented section, the chief emphasis is on translation itself, the second is devoted to the importance of translation for concepts of individuality and humanity and the epistemology of the Early Modern period. Finally, the third section broadens the focus to encompass the field of interaction between cultural translation and societal transformation. Even if the three sections overlap in places, it is possible to distinguish systematically between their different emphases, allowing the study of Early Modern translation cultures from the interlingual, epistemic, and cultural perspectives.