Login
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
A few days ago I was showing off the antiquarian books in my library to the distinguished philosopher of physics and scholar of early modern natural philosophy, Katherine Brading, she made herself comfortable and started reading my copy of one (!) of the translations of Fontenelle's (1686) Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (known as Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds). The title-page of my copy announces it is a "new translation from the last edition of the French with great additions extracted from the best modern authors, on many curious and entertaining subjects" (and also proudly announced a glossary for technical terms). The book is dated 1760 and the translator as "A Gentleman of the Inner-Temple." There is also a second 1767 edition of this translation.
Google.books has a scan of this edition from the British Library. Somewhat oddly, despite this prominent location, this translation is omitted when people discuss translations of Fontenelle's Entretiens. So, for example, Wikipedia states: "The first English translation was published in Dublin by Sir William Donville or Domville in 1687, followed by another translation by Aphra Behn in 1688, under the title A Discovery of New Worlds and a third by John Glanvill later in 1688." In the translator's preface of recent translation (p. xlviii), H.A. Hargraves includes these three, and mentions a fourth (1715) by William Gardiner. But seems unfamiliar with this fifth, 1760 translation. There is also a sixth (1803) English translation, as Wikipedia notes, by Elizabeth Gunning that (Wikipedia omits this) includes La Lande's notes.* (The 1803 edition also gives a nice overview of French 17th editions of the work.)
In The Great Chain of Being (1936), Lovejoy exhibits familiarity with all of these, except with 'my' 1760 and the translation by Donville. And he is confident enough to claim that the 1715 by Gardiner is largely plagiarized from Glanvill's (p. 348, note 57 in the 1966 Harvard University press edition circulayed in the UK by OUP). Lovejoy acknowledges his debt to the early polymath and Newton scholar, D. Brewster's More Worlds than One. Brewster seems also unfamiliar with the 1760 translation. (Brewster was also a fine scientist!) I indirectly return to Lovejoy’s interests at the end <hint>.
My friend Helen de Cruz, plausibly treats Fontenelle's work as an early contribution to hard science fiction (that is, a speculative genre that is constrained by scientific knowledge). Often commentators treat the book also as popularization of then recent primarily Cartesian science and cosmology. In both cases the fact that the new science supports the real possibility of alien life forms is part of the recurring interest. In his introduction to the 1803 edition, Lalande gives a history of respectable/scientific speculation on extraterrestrials, and shows ample evidence this can be found all over eighteenth century natural philosophy. Fontenelle's work attracts the attention, in addition, of scholars interested in the role of learned women because the narrator's interlocuter in the book is a woman and the role of women translators of the book.
However, and this is key to what follows, when Fontenelle's book appeared it was arguably also the first book that pulled together a century’s worth of astronomical observations to put these into a coherent framework/narrative provided by the new science, in a wide sense, to be read fruitfully by natural philosophers and the educated public alike. In this latter learned 'Enlightenment' genre the book risked being quickly out of date, first surpassed by the mathematically challenging Principia of Newton and then in the more accessible Cosmotheoros written by Newton's great rival Huygens (and posthumously published by Huygens' brother Constantijn). (I showed Brading my copy of the first edition of the English translation of it, too.) But Fontenelle updated his editions to keep his book in the Enlightenment genre.* And I assume -- I need to check this carefully -- that the 1760 translation is based on the revised 1742 edition (which appeared in Fontenelle's Œuvres complètes). Fontenelle died aged nearly 100, in 1757!
At some point (ca 1700), one may well think that further interest in Fontenelle's work would by antiquarian. However, both the 1760 translation as well as the 1803 updated translation, hybridize Fontenelle's original work with a great deal of additions that reflect new scientific findings (as well as some refutations of Fontenelle's earlier speculations). This can be readily ascertained by the fact that the fifth and sixth English translation are much larger than the original or the modern (1990) English translation (mentioned above) by H.A. Hargreaves, which appeared in a pleasant, slim paperback with University of California Press, and that I used in one of the first undergraduate courses I ever taught back in the 1990s at The University of Chicago. (This 1990 edition is a translation of the first edition and so lacks the sixth evening dialogue that Fontenelle added to his 1687 edition..)
The 1803 edition and translation really are conceived as a kind of popularization (Lalande is explicit on this). But the additions of English translation of 1760 are of a different kind. These consider a wide variety of topics and new findings, and so the 1760 translation (based as it claims to be on Fontenelle's own 1742 edition) is very much in the spirit of the original Enlightenment sense of the work. It competes, in fact, with the ambitious kind of works now shunted aside as 'natural religion' (associated with names like Derham, Nieuwentijt) and works that are now slotted into the pre-history of biology like Buffon. I return to this below. One very nice feature of the 1760 translation is that all the translator’s additions are listed, descriptively, in a table of contents (and, thereby, also reveal many of the translator's non Fontenelle/Huygens/Newton sources, including Boerhaave, Desaguliers, Gravesande, Lovett, etc.).**
I am unsure who the 1760 translator -- "a gentleman of the Inner-temple" — is. But one of the additions by tthe1760 translator has attracted modest scholarly attention. In a footnote (14) to a recent paper by Huib Zuidervaart and Tiemen Cocquyt, they speculate on the following.
Intriguing is the fact – unnoticed so far – that in 1760 a text was published devoted to the optics of the human eye and the properties of light concerning colours, written by “a gentleman of the Inner Temple.” Chester Moor Hall frequently added the phrase “of the Inner Temple” to his family name, for instance in various book subscription lists, so the text (an appendix to a new English translation of a famous French cosmology book by Fontenelle) could be his. See Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds by M. de Fontenelle. A New Translation from the Latest Edition of the French with Great Additions, on Many Curious and Entertaining Subjects by a Gentleman of the Inner Temple (London: R. Whity a.o., 1760), pp. 239–263.
Their paper, "The Early Development of the Achromatic Telescope Revisited," is very much worth reading because it involves priority disputes, court cases, deception, lies of omission, etc.+ These page-numbers (pp. 239-263) are, in fact, part of the translator's addition to the fourth evening. The addition starts on p. 216 with an account of fire. Then a brief digression on dilation. And then on p. 228 starts the material on the "inflexions of the rays of light" with six definitions that lead into the text briefly described by Zuidervaart and Cocquyt (and which I consider an integral part of)!
As an aside, the history of the Inner-Temple itself originated "when a contingent of knights of the Military Order of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem moved from the Old Temple in Holborn (later Southampton House) to a larger site between Fleet Street and the banks of the River Thames." Some readers may well wonder if they have landed on Justin Smith-Ruiu’s Hinternet, but no I am not going to lead you to templar knights. The Inner-Temple was later an inn and law school, amongst many other social functions.
Despite the many bewildering range of additions, the main point of the 1760 edition is actually not hard to discern, especially if one is familiar with eighteenth century cosmology and natural religion. Or so I claim next.
At first sight the 1760 translation ends with the optimistic cosmic economy of nature familiar of the closing paragraphs of the first edition of the Principia: the universe is teaming with life, and comets bring the necessary building and replenishing materials of life (and even suns) to other solar systems (pp. 385-401, "Of Comets.") So, I first thought this book is a kind of Newtonian, deist providential domestication of Fontenelle's more skeptical spinozism. "Of Comets" is added, as a kind of appendix, beyond the translator's additions to the sixth evening.
However, I suspect this is a deceptive ruse. The main part of the book — we are very deep into the translator's additions to the sixth evening — nearly concludes with a short section "of chance." (In the table of contents this is listed as "of chance, applicable to what Mr. Fontenelle mentions in his work.") The translator here denies, in his own words, the so-called 'doctrine of chance' or Epicureanism. So far so good.
Now, during the eighteenth century the doctrine of chance is opposed to doctrine of order. This doctrine of order, is sub-divided between the equally heretical Spinozist doctrine of necessity which creates order immanently, and the ordered doctrine (which comes in deist and theist varieties). This is no surprise because the whole book assumes that nature has order (and often seems to appeal to various versions of the PSR). In fact, our translator goes on to claim that:
Every reasonable perfon will allow that this World, that the Universe, that every thing, we fee or know of which is great or good, was at firft formed, and is yet fupported, by a great and omnipotent Being, which we call GOD: a Being whofe attributes man knows little of, and can only judge concerning from his works, which we fee, and which when compared to what we may guefs of, Worlds unnumbered that float fufpended over our heads, in immenfe unbounded fpace are scarce any thing; therefore, as we know but little of the works of the DEITY, we can know but little of their Author it is therefore impoffible to form an adequate idea of him: here even imagination fails us, and we can only fay, he is great beyond our utmost comprehenfion. This we can judge of him with certainty; we know fufficient to anfwer all our purpofes, and therefore confequently to convince us Chance is a chimera without foundation, and that there is not any fuch thing in Nature. It is felf-evident, and does not require a demonftration: it is like an intuitive truth, as evident to our reafon as that 2 and 2 makes 4. (pp. 378-379--spelling left unmodernized)
This may seem, at first blush, a relatively orthodox Newtonian inductive claim in favor of a cautious species of deism. But extrapolating from the argument of the General scholium and reminding us of the immensity of the university, and our lack of ignorance of it, the translator basically argues we really have almost no inkling of God at all. (And this goes well beyond Newton's own view that we lack knowledge of his inner substance.) In fact, all we can really know of this god is that his existence denies the reality of chance, and so -- despite all the providential language -- Spinozism is slid back in. (This is not a surprise because Fontenelle's own work slides, despite regularly evoking deism, into Spinozism at various points.)
And in case one misses it, in the very next, and formally the last of the translator's explicit additions to Fontenelle's sixth evening, the "modern discoveries concerning the fixed stars," the translator immediately teaches his readers that it is the astronomical consensus that the cosmos is teeming with new stars and stars that go extinct. And then, after a book that has celebrated a universe teeming with life on innumerable planets, this book closes with the following chilling, even shocking line: "It is no ways improbable, that these Stars loft their brightnefs by a prodigious number of spots, which intirely covered, and as it were, overwhelmed them. In what dismal condition must their Planets remain, who have nothing but the dim and twinkling rays of the Fixed Stars to enlighten them." (383) And so, in conclusion, we come face to face with the mass extinction of aliens, and (by implication) the possibility of a very cold death of our own species (if we can't figure our interstellar flight).
*In the preface to her translation Hargreaves notes that the 1708, 1714, The 1724 (seventh), and the 1742 are all expanded editions (p. xli). There is a 1966 critical edition by Calame, which should be consulted by scholars.
**That the 1760 is very much a new hybridized book not of the late seventeenth century but of the middle of the eighteenth century, is, for example, ignored by F.J Tipler in his "A Brief History of the Extraterrestrial Intelligence Concept published in the prestigious" Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1981). Based on Lovejoy, Tipler asserts (correctly) that Fontenelle's Entretiens was a bestseller and "was translated at least three times into English" (p. 127). In fact, Tipler's quotes from Fontenelle are derived from the 1760 translation (and luckily only material already present in the first)!
+If the 1760 translation is indeed by Moor Hall, it would be nice to figure out which translation he repeatedly criticized in his introduction.
Mr. President shows widespread corruption around a fictional Guatemalan dictator. This did not please the country’s real dictators.
The post A Novel the CIA Spent a Fortune to Suppress appeared first on Public Books.
Mexico once cultivated a “special relationship” with death. But cultural globalization and rising violence is weakening that bond.
The post Death in Mexico Means Something Different Now appeared first on Public Books.
It’s only recently that I’ve started to read and become a lot more interested in literature in translation. To be completely trite, a whole new world has opened up for me. That’s why I was drawn to Wei Ting’s piece at Electric Lit in which she explores a little of the history of Eastern translation, looks at the differences between Eastern and Western children’s lit, and advocates for more books to be translated, so that we as readers can understand the world and others just a little bit better.
Translation holds a particular and peculiar power. It is how we come to understand the world outside our own; that is, the world that exists outside of our own language. The Latin root word for translation comes from latus, the past participle of ferre or “to carry”; in Teju Cole’s beautiful metaphor, the translator is a ferry operator, carrying words from one shore to the other. To take this metaphor further: if the translator is the ferry operator, language is a current.
Soon after I gave birth, my writer friends arrived at my house with piles of classic English picture books. Determined to have my children rooted in their own culture, I set out to find children’s books with characters that not only looked like them, but stories that would help them navigate the complex world they will inherit. Just by the act of searching, I came to read wonderful writers from Japan, South Korea, and China with a completely different sensibility from Western children’s literature.
Reading children’s literature again as an adult, the difference between Western and East Asian stories was startling: Western children’s books are often centered on the individual’s journey, while stories by Chinese, Japanese and Korean authors emphasize respecting other people’s feelings, patience, and acceptance. As a child, I found many of these old Chinese stories moralistic and preachy. But to my surprise, I also discovered many wonderful children’s books which conveyed these same values without being didactic, and helped me as a mother understand my own feelings and moderate my response towards my child’s behavior.
The French translator and theorist Antoine Berman has remarked that in a subset of great novels, it is exactly their “bad writing” which makes them rich. They suffer from an overabundance of voices, threatening to explode the form in an attempt to encompass their language of composition in all of its plurality and heterogeneity. The Hive, James Womack’s new translation of Nobel Laureate Camilo José Cela’s La colmena, is just such a work. Set in Madrid during the early 1940s, it is an admirable attempt at the surely arduous, and sometimes paradoxical task, of translating a polylingual novel that is richly rooted in a specific time and place.
True to its name, The Hive is buzzing with characters—over three hundred in all. They weave in and out of the honeycomb streets of Madrid, stopping in cafés, salons, dive bars, bakeries, antique shops, police stations, apartments, and alleyways. Most of them are cast in sharp, jocular detail for hardly more than a page at a time. These descriptions leave the impression that many of them are “types” more than characters proper. A favorite example of mine is a man introduced near the end of the book as nothing more than the father of another man named Fidel:
Fidel’s father, who is a pastry chef as well, had been a brute of a man who ate sand as a purgative and who spoke about nothing apart from folk dancing and Zaragoza’s protector, Our Lady of the Pillar. He thought a great deal of himself as a businessman, was proud of how cultured he was, and had two types of business card, one of which said “Joaquín Bustamante—Tradesman,” and the other said, in Gothic script, “Joaquín Bustamante Valls—Author of We Must Double Spain’s Agricultural Production.” When he died he left behind a huge amount of rough-edged handmade paper covered with numbers and plans: he wanted to double the number of crops each year using a system of his own invention: vast piled-up terraces filled with fertile soil, which would have water pumped into them via artesian wells and sunlight delivered to them by a system of mirrors.
Fidel’s father goes on to give his pastry shop a ridiculous, politically charged name—“The Sons of Our Forefathers”—and then we never see him again. His son complains about the name a bit, and then changes it, and then too disappears into oblivion, along with so many other colorful examples of 1940s Madrileños, after providing us with just a couple of pages of entertainment under Cela’s all-knowing smirk. Cela might have been writing about all of his characters when he comments on another baker, Señor Ramón, that “You could write his biography in a few lines.”
We meet many dozens of people like this before something like a plot begins to flicker into existence under the surface of these vignettes. The first chapter is composed of 46 short scenes, which are almost entirely set within the same café, and arranged in an unclear chronological order within a period of time that’s somewhere between a few minutes and a few hours long. It introduces us to more than twenty of the café’s patrons, employees, and its cruel owner, Doña Rosa. While many of their conversations appear to have no more purpose than to make us smile, or laugh, or frown, eventually something like the threat of a serious, violent event emerges. Other threats, major and minor, are much of what drives the drama throughout the rest of the equally fragmented book, which takes us out of Doña Rosa’s café and through the many shadowy alcoves of Madrid over the course of a few days. These are threats of violence, which is lurking at all times beneath the many characters’ daily toils, and of desperation, as poverty forces nearly everyone in the city to give up something they hold dear, and they seem to culminate in one major threat to one of the novel’s most frequently recurring characters, the down-and-out writer Martín Marco. But this arc is blended in with hundreds of such micro-episodes that have nothing to do with Martín Marco, and which on the surface have little to do with anything else either. It’s clear to the reader that, despite the haunting connections between the vignettes constituting the novel, its primary achievement is these portraits for their own sake. Cela’s ironic presentations of the folk of Madrid curdles into pity, and then love, as those of the best social novelists do.
A favorite irony of Cela’s seems to be the image of the woman who turns to prostitution to support a feeble or infirm male partner, with or without their knowledge or consent. Indeed, women are portrayed as being uniquely vulnerable to the poverty gripping the city, as the few men who have money use it to encourage, or even coerce, women to sleep with them. These and other, less troublesome sexual relations drive much minor action of the novel; the three most common activities we see Cela’s characters engaged in might be eating, complaining about not having enough to eat, and sneaking around at night. The frivolity of these cavalier episodes sometimes gets a little tiresome, and their juxtaposition with darker incidences of sex trafficking and violence is jarring. At its worst, reading them together can make you wonder if Cela, or his narrator, take threats to women’s agency in sexual situations as seriously he should. But as a whole, what emerges from the novel is a scathing critique of the kinds of relations that organize how people approach love, money and sex in 1940s Madrid. Concern with propriety and familial honor appear alongside desperate poverty as the factors that are most likely to leave women vulnerable to abuse, and this is surely one of the reasons that the novel was banned by the censors in Franco’s Spain, a regime which relied heavily on “traditional family values” in its rhetoric of a unified, proto-fascist, Catholic Spain.
Another reason would be the way The Hive foregrounds Spain’s linguistic and cultural heterogeneity. One of the most studied characteristics of the novel is its characters’ social class and cultural background: how much money they have, how they got it, and what they do with it; where they’re from, who their family is versus who it claims to be, and so on. The greatest tell, besides the characters’ material conditions, is their language: how they speak and to whom. Madrileños of various levels of wealth and background are surrounded by Galicians, Catalans, Romani, and other people for whom Spanish is a second language. All characters in The Hive are gently mocked by its narrator, but none are so thoroughly ridiculed as those who believe in the myths of superiority of certain backgrounds. Madrid is ultimately portrayed in a rich diversity that is not an aberrance from Spanish national identity, but rather constitutes it.
This is also where the process of translating the novel must have been the most challenging. How do you represent, in a different tongue, the languages within the language of the original text? The short answer is that you can’t—not exactly. To take an example from the novel, there is no perfect English translation for the idiom “Es que estoy que no me llega la camisa al cuerpo”; to translate it literally would not make its connotative meaning available for the English-language reader, and this is the meaning that is important: The man who says it is not really having a problem with his shirt. We can say the same for Womack’s decision to translate this idiom as “It’s just that I’ve got the heebie-jeebies.” There is no exact translation for “heebie-jeebies” into Spanish, or any other language for that matter; but it is something that someone might say in the same context, to paraphrase linguist Eugene Nida. This technique becomes absolutely essential when translating a novel as rich with colloquialisms as La colmena. It allows for approximations of those characteristics of language we call tone, style, register or voice, and if it does this sometimes at the cost of more direct translations of the sense of the words chosen, Womack deploys these approximations aptly in most cases. The characters of The Hive sing—or occasionally, in more dire conditions, croak—in distinct, lively voices, with great respect for the emotional valence and diversity of register that makes the Spanish-language original so compelling.
Womack has especially nailed what’s possibly the most important voice of all: the narrator’s. Though he never appears in the action, and only very rarely admits to his own existence by means of a personal pronoun, the text is thick with his irony, his judgments, his caresses, and his humor. He is similar to, but not quite the same as, the voice that writes the many prologues of The Hive, which addresses the world—and the book’s place in it—a little more directly. La colmena has had a long and complex publication history, and for at least six of these editions, Cela wrote a separate preface, which are dutifully compiled and translated in this edition. Of these, the most compelling are probably the first and the last, in which Cela enumerates some of the book’s early troubles getting past the censors of both Spain and Argentina, and considers the problem of translating a book written in and about “Spanish as she was spoken in the city of Madrid between about 1940 and 1942” into Romanian a quarter of a century later. In this last preface, written for the first Romanian edition, Cela is pessimistic about the possibility of translation, going so far as to complain that “if there were such a thing as good sense in the world, we writers would be the first and most stubborn opponents of translation.” But after reading this work of Womack’s, I don’t think we need to be. Despite Cela’s potent criticisms of their lives, his characters keep on plodding along, and despite whatever he thinks about the possibility of translation, his books will keep on being translated. Womack’s work in this new edition not only proves that this is possible but in fact desirable, and his work makes available much of what makes this important novel worth reading. I only wish Cela were still around to write a new preface for it.
***
FreshRSS 