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©
Anthony Pym 1999
Introduction:
Translators, Intercultures,
and Hispanic Frontier Society
Clashes and
overlaps of cultures have produced many strange and wonderful
things in the Hispanic world. Our stories here will include
a Latin Qur’an addressed to readers with no Latin, a defence
of Aristotle translations by a critic who knew no Greek,
the use of children to bring down an entire civilization,
speculation on why Columbus’s statue in Barcelona is pointing
straight to Israel, as well as sundry observations on the
gold, paper, hides, coins, coffee beans, conquering armies,
priests, and poets that moved from culture to culture. Our
case studies will go from the twelfth-century Christian,
Islamic, and Jewish exchanges right through to the not unrelated
complexity of training today’s translators in Spain, mining
a history rich in both anecdote and lesson. One could probably
just tell the stories and trust their entertainment value
to carry all else. Yet amusement is not our only purpose
here. These studies also seek to address issues of a more
general nature, beyond the concerns of diversion or even
of historical representativity.
At its loftiest
level, our motivating question is how cultures should interrelate.
It is no doubt a pretentious question; it certainly asks
about rather more than the past of Hispanic cultures. In
fact, the question more directly concerns our own age of
moving geographical and professional borders, the ones that
are fought over not particularly due to economic imbalances
but because of the conflicting ways people seek to belong
together. The question strictly concerns cultures as cultures;
it is wider than the politics of states or nations. And
it is undoubtedly ethical in ambition, requiring a speculative
mode of thought and at least two cultures to think about.
Further, any applicable or liveable answer to that question
must work through models of how cultures have actually interrelated;
any substantial ethical answer requires at least some historical
knowledge. This means entering the decidedly imperfect world
of complex social interactions and generally asymmetric
power relations; we must leave behind the platitudinous
ideals of non-intervention, necessary progress, or retribution.
If we are doing history, it is because we do not yet know
how to answer our fundamental question.
What is perhaps
most surprising about our question is how little can really
be said to answer it. The accumulated methodologies and
findings of anthropology, sociology, and comparative cultural
studies offer remarkably little consent about the ways cultures
can interrelate, about the ways they have historically interrelated,
about the ethics of such processes, nor even about what
cultures are in the first place. There is no ready framework.
In the absence of established guidelines, the purpose of
this book must be to reflect on these problems as directly
as possible, close to the material, to see how history might
help answer our question.
How this will
be attempted, and the basic terms and concepts involved,
may warrant brief explanation.
Why Translators?
Although frequently
sidelined as a technical problem of interest only to linguists,
the activity of translators should be a privileged field
for the problem of how cultures interrelate. The simple
fact of translation presupposes contact between at least
two cultures, and does so in relation to language, the social
activity that perhaps most effectively and insidiously weaves
complex relations of cultural identity. To look at translation
is immediately to be engaged in issues of how cultures interrelate.
Yet idealized translation, minimally understood as a mapping
problem involving two texts, is an inadequate and even deceptive
object of study. Its blinding-spot lies in the way, in presupposing
relations between at least two cultures, it surreptitiously
excludes the space where the contacts are made and manipulated.
Paradoxically, translation eclipses or at best misrepresents
the place of the translator, and thereby all mediation.
This exclusion
is discursively operative in utterances such as ‘I am translating,’
where the first person cannot possibly belong to a translating
translator. Even when taken as an ideal relation between
texts and thus perhaps between cultures, translation actively
covers over the subjective conditions of its own production.
Of course, this is by no means true of all actual translations,
nor of all ways of reading translations. Yet a narrow focus
on idealized translation nevertheless incurs the constant
risk of simplifying the space in which our ethics and history
might be elaborated. The conceptual task of our research,
in this regard, must thus be to go from translation to something
slightly more human, something a little more active. We
must seek the place of translators and their kind.
Although the
conceptual shift from translation to translators may seem
rather trivial, it changes almost everything. If we force
ourselves to think, from the outset, that relations are
not directly between one culture and another, and that translators,
as intermediaries, also have a space to live in and an active
role to play, we are obliged to ask questions that reconfigure
the terms of reference.
First, where
are these intermediaries? Since no abstract argument can
happily situate them in one culture or the other, we must
admit the working hypothesis that translators operate from
the intersections or overlaps of cultures, in what we shall
call ‘intercultural’ space. This space is to be distinguished
from relations or transfers that go from one monoculture
to another, which are better labeled ‘cross-cultural.’
Second, we might
ask across what translators actually translate. The answer
is deceptively simple: translators work across the boundaries
between languages or between cultures (the difference is
not yet germane to our concerns). If there were no such
boundaries, there would be no translators. Yet history complicates
the matter. For one thing, we have just hypothesized the
existence of intercultural space, which must somehow be
sitting on or inside the borders. What conceptual geometry
can comfortably configure that space or populate it with
intermediaries? For another, the borders, lines of reference,
are in constant movement themselves. For instance, the exact
limits of ‘Spain’ or the adjective ‘Spanish’ depend very
much on the period in question and the inclinations of the
historian. The lines move, and many of those movements are
partly due to whatever happens in intercultural space, where
the cultural status of borders may be both created and displaced.
In fact, since close inspection shows gradations blending
the frontier regions of almost all languages and cultures,
it may well be that there are no lines of cultural demarcation
except as defined in intercultural space. If there were
no translations, would there be definable boundaries between
languages?
Our third question
is also deceptively simple: How do translators live, beyond
the fact of having their names associated with translations?
Here even the most superficial historical scratching shows
that translators frequently do far more than translate.
They are also people, with multiple aims, loyalties, and
activities that may include anything from gazing at the
stars to investing in the international wool trade (we will
be meeting cases of both). When one considers the range
of those related activities, often associated with specific
professional networks or ethnic groups, it becomes reasonable
to ask to what extent the associated social relations weave
a sense of intercultural identity, be it real or imagined.
That is, in each historical context there is conceivably
a range of professions associated with the role of the mediating
person; there are networks not only connecting culture with
culture but also interlinking the various intermediaries
themselves. Translators need not be central figures in such
groups; the problematic of translators may still allow us
to investigate the general features of all intermediaries.
We might thus find specific groups or communities where
most members are aware of being cultural intermediaries
and interrelate on the basis of that understanding. Such
groups might be very small, as was the case of the translators,
technical writers, and astronomers working for Alfonso X
in the thirteenth century. The groups could be diffusely
extensive, as might be presumed for the intellectual and
mercantile sectors of Hispanic Jewish communities, both
before and after expulsion. Whatever the dimensions, the
identities of such groups may provide ballast for recognizable
patterns of activity, for something like a small highly
professionalized ‘culture’ in itself, or better, for something
that might even become a culture were it not necessarily
based on cross-cultural transfers. The things that such
intermediaries have in common would then make up what we
shall call an ‘interculture,’ about which there is more
to be said.
What is an
Interculture?
These lines
of questioning quickly create problems for any immediate
response to our ethical problem. Indeed, there is a very
real danger of carrying the questions too far. For the kind
of theory that does no more than theorize, it would be facile
to conclude that since there are no ontological boundaries,
all linguistic work is translational and all cultures are
actually intercultures. The argument is possible, even plausible.
In historical terms, we might freely concede that all languages
are formed from translation, and that all cultures come
from intercultures, loosely defined. Yet if translation
and intercultures were thus always everywhere, we could
no longer formulate our fundamental question about relations
between cultures in anything like radical terms. If we do
want to ask that question, and if we do not presume to already
know the answer, we are obliged to insist on a few operative
restrictions on our notions of cultures and intercultures.
This is perhaps best explained through an example.
The first half
of this book was written in a village called Calaceite
in Spanish, Calaceit in the Catalan spoken there.
Movements between Calaceite and Calaceit are
performed in the village all the time, from one street corner
to another, one social class to another, one side of a secretly
remembered Civil War to another, and on periodically defaced
and refaced roadsigns, since the village is in a part of
the franja or ‘fringe’ of Aragon settled by speakers
of Catalan. This is a diglossic border community, located
within any line that would separate Catalan from Castilian
(the name we shall be using for what others term the Spanish
language). Within that line there is even a sense of identity
expressed in the non-names for the local language, which
is syntactically a variety of Catalan but is depreciatively
referred to as xaporiao (‘patois’ or even ‘slapped
together’) or ‘what we speak’ (‘Ja parles com nosaltres’,
they say. ‘So you now speak like us.’). The variety within
the border has no name; it might be a candidate for intercultural
status.
This village
certainly has a border status, mixed languages, and a corresponding
sense of unnamed identity. It is certainly quaint. But does
it have any professional intermediaries? Does its livlihood
actually depend on cross-cultural transfers? Could it usefully
be called an interculture simply because of the border?
Those three questions
must be answered in the negative. Although people in this
village are certainly moving between languages on a daily
basis, everyone understands both languages well enough to
obviate any developed need for remunerated intermediaries.
There are no professional intermediaries as such. No one
is engaged to produce a discourse where the first person
of ‘I am from here’ does not refer to the producer of the
utterance. Nor is there any evidence that the village produces
translators, no matter how metaphorically we take the term,
simply because of its border status. It is an agricultural
community; its olives, almonds and wine are sold in whatever
language the buyer wants. To be sure, it has its separatists,
who believe that authentic language and culture is on the
Catalan side of the border; it has its regionalists, who
identify more with the traditions of Aragon; and it has
its nationalists, who call themselves Spanish. Yet there
is nothing in this mix that particularly needs the name
‘interculture.’ More to the point, if the village were an
interculture, most of the villages, towns and cities of
Spain would have to be called intercultural as well, with
various weightings of the same picturesque hybridity. True,
this might usefully remind English-language readers that
the world’s societies are generally multilingual and subject
to cultural overlapping. But the scope of our term ‘interculture’
would quickly become too powerful to answer our specific
question.
If interculturality
is to be used in a usefully restrictive way, it requires
at least two definitional constraints. First, it must be
related to some professional status. It must refer to groups
of people who, for reasons of institutionalized livelihood,
are somehow engaged in the transfer of cultural products
across borders. At this most general level, interculturality
would thus be found underlying a vast array of professionals,
from what our now called relocation and multilingual text
managers through to the language workers associated with
multinational scientific research, perhaps with various
mercenary armies, spies, most obviously the social paraphernalia
of direct and indirect diplomacy. Interculturality would
be what is common to the people who transfer knowledge,
entertainment, security, and their opposites, across what
are recognized as lines between cultures. Further, these
people are minimally professional in that they exchange
their services for material or social value, be it gold,
prestige, or the saving of souls.
Our second restrictive
criterion is that this interculturality should be derivative
or dependent on some apparently more primary cultural division.
An interculture must have what Peirce might have called
‘secondness.’ The work of our professionals is thus only
intercultural because it assumes there is a line to be crossed,
and that something is to go from one culture to another.
As soon as the line between cultures becomes non-operative,
as soon as there is no functional barrier to overcome, interculturality
loses its derivative status and becomes indistinguishable
from general cultural practice.
Let this suffice
the purposes of bare definition: for us, interculturality
requires professionalism and secondness. Beyond that, there
remain many hypotheses to be tested, particularly as concerns
the paradoxical ways the diversity of individual provenance
reinforces the professional identity of the intercultural
group, or the way agent-principal relations loosen as the
group develops its own networks, or even the way specialized
communication technology accrues effective power to the
interculture. But for the moment, our two loose criteria
should be enough to save the term ‘intercultural’ from hapless
dispersion. It should also help steer our thoughts away
from any universalist common base shared by different cultures,
such as one occasionally finds in descriptions of the three
coexisting religions of medieval Hispania. Interculturality
describes the quality of intersectional spaces in which
professionals work on transfers between cultures. It is
neither a universalist nor a relativist notion. The rest
remains to be unearthed.
Intercultures
and Frontier Society
Let us return
to our village. The name of the place is actually neither
Catalan nor Castilian; it derives from the Arabic Kalat-Zeyd,
‘the castle of Saïd.’ Not that much is known about
Saïd. Translations to and from Arabic belonged to the
Christian conquest and colonization in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, when things went backward and forward for a century
or so. The area around the village was part of the long
border between the Christian and Islamic worlds. It was
very much a frontier region, with a sense and a set of consequences
that have since been lost. This means that, even though
the area is not now intercultural in any sense that particularly
interests us, it might once have been. In fact, it could
have been an intercultural space of a rather engaging kind.
How might the
specificity of a frontier society change the way we think
about translators? Consider, briefly, some of the sociological
features of the frontier between Islam and Christendom in
twelfth-century Hispania (cf. Ruiz de la Peña 1983,
García de Cortázar 1983, Bartlett 1989, Ledesma
1993).
Once the battles
had been won, the land had to be settled. Christians were
given incentives to move into the new spaces, effectively
as colonizers. Criminals often chose the path of colonization
because they could officially have all their crimes absolved;
no questions were asked about the marital status of women;
a new life was offered to all settlers, especially those
who were tough and presumably belligerent enough to keep
fighting for the lands they were granted. Settlement thus
gave rise to frontier towns that were relatively unstructured
in terms of feudal relationships between lord and vassal,
since the settlers were given the right to raise livestock
and cultivate land more or less for themselves. Frontier
society was also militarized, effectively dominated by the
warrior on horseback, then by the warrior ‘monks’ of the
military orders. Economic activity in the frontier town
was based on agriculture and incursions into Muslim territory.
Yet there was an acute shortage of agricultural labour,
requiring serious efforts to have Muslims stay in Christian
lands. This brought about prolonged contact with the ‘half-way’
social groups known as Mudejars (Muslims living under Christian
rule) and Moriscos (Muslims who had adopted Christianity).
For similar reasons, there were few highly developed trading
or artisan activities among the settlers. Yet trade across
borders could be a major source of wealth, so measures were
also taken to encourage the presence and continuity of Jewish
communities, many of which moved into Christian lands to
escape the less tolerant society of the Almohades. The result
was a multicultural and multi-ethnic urban structure within
a militarized society. That kind of society, more than the
calm hybridity of contemporary Calaceit(e), was eminently
suited to the development of intercultures.
The intercultural
activity associated with trade did not necessarily involve
any cultural mixing. The laws of all of the main cultural
or ethnic groups—Christians, Muslims and Jews—were kept
separate to at least some degree. Even within Christian
communities, the regulations and punishments for settler
Christians were significantly more liberal than those applied
to foreign Christians. The function of the monarchy was
not so much to impose a common law as it was to protect
the rights of each individual group. Power was thus significantly
fragmented. Within the Christian structure, there were constant
trade-offs between the monarch, a few lay nobles, and the
church, particularly the Clunaic order, which played a significant
role in the organization of the conquest. Toward the end
of the twelfth century the colonization process was more
actively controlled by religious militia including the Knights
Templar and the order of Calatrava, the latter becoming
the masters of Calaceit(e) and much else as well.
This, then, was
the kind of fragmented social structure that could house
intercultural activities of a professionalized and secondary
status. The transfers it propitiated were not only those
associated with the Toledan translators of the twelfth century
but also those of the many other translators working in
other parts of Hispania, at least through to the sixteenth
century, when we shall find a Jewish rabbi translating the
bible for the order of Calatrava. This was also the remarkably
open and rough social structure that welcomed the many foreigners
who actually carried out translations. Hispanic frontier
society was not an interculture in itself; it was a loose
social structure that facilitated intercultural activity.
Considering all
these factors, the surprising thing is perhaps that such
a frontier society apparently generally held together for
so long. Admittedly, numerous local variants must be allowed
for. Toledo was very exceptional in that it had a substantial
community of Mozarabs (Christians who had lived under Islamic
rule). Yet there was general coexistence for over a century.
And the reason is fairly clear. Multicultural and as fragmentary
as you like, all the diverse social elements were united
in their common opposition to the space, be it experienced
or imagined, on the Islamic side of the frontier. Only when
the border moved further away, when the region was no longer
properly defined by the border, did the bonds between the
groups unravel, tensions were unleashed, and some kind of
monoculture ensued form the various struggles. The Spain
of the great expulsions and the Inquisition could only be
triumphant once the frontier had moved outward.
What does this
have to do with cultural intermediaries, or with their variants
regulated as translators? Just think of all the box-and-arrow
diagrams that assume the existence of ‘culture A’ and ‘culture
B,’ or ‘source language’ and ‘target language,’ all conveniently
represented as separate entities in their own spaces, usually
with a translator located one side or the other, in a nice
homogeneous space. If we believed the diagrams, translation
would logically be a fact of sedentary cultures, of situations
where borders are stable and things stay in place for a
long time. The translator, it seems, is mostly seated at
some kind of table, looking at two or several texts separated
on an empty and meaningless desktop, engaged in an activity
defined by the symmetry of two separate sides. Translation
also appears to require time, calm, stable knowledge, and
patrons who have the resources and foresight to ensure such
conditions. Translation might be expected to belong to periods
of peace and political stability. It should have little
to do with frontier society.
But what happens
when translation does take place in frontier society? Where
are the separate spaces? What side is the translator on?
How should a diagram represent a translation project that
brings together two or three or four redactors, all from
different cultural groups? More important, what should we
say if translative activity was richer and more intense
in Hispanic frontier situations than in any relatively homogeneous
Spanish culture? One might imagine there was something wrong
in the way we currently think about translation.
Our case studies
here will show that many cultural intermediaries were indeed
active in frontier societies, in situations of great turbulence
and political unrest. After all, why should translators
not be stimulated by a mix of cultures, by intense trade,
rapid transfers of wealth, the proximity of war, of conflict,
of the languages of action? A frontier town, be it Toledo
or Calaceit(e), could benefit greatly from its position
of apparent peril, from the fluidity of its social relationships,
from the relative freedom allowed by fragmentary power structures.
Part of the benefit could be properly cultural.
The studies in
this book generally see the context for intercultural activity
as being a frontier society of one kind or another. This
involves not just the opposition between Islam and Christianity,
where the model is fairly clear, but also the more abstract
borders of the history that followed. Our general model
can thus offer a perspective on translative relations between
such things as medieval scholasticism and Italian humanism,
between church and empire at the beginning of Hispanic colonialism,
or between Castilian nationalism and international modernism.
The frontier model can be taken well beyond its initial
historical location. It no doubt gains a certain metaphorical
status in the process, yet this need not diminish its explanatory
power. Even in our own day, when the borders have moved
to the multicultural city and to the links and non-links
of the internet, the fluidity of frontier society remains
a stimulating model for thought about how cultures should
interrelate.
Negotiating
Frontiers
We are gradually
building up a model where translation takes place alongside
related modes of professional mediation. These are all potentially
parts of intercultures, which in turn may be framed by the
loose structures of frontier society. This is the broad
scheme that structures what we shall be looking for in our
case studies. Yet that model in itself does little to answer
our fundamental question about how cultures interrelate.
The notion of
the frontier society limits the kinds of relations we shall
be looking at. Most of our translators are far from the
ideal of the ‘mediating person,’ understood as someone who
would suffer derision and self-sacrifice in order helpfully
to build bridges between cultures (cf. Bochner 1981). Our
selected intermediaries have remarkably few of the nurturing
virtues implied by such a vision; they are rarely motivated
by altruism; or better, there is no reason to assume such
motivation on a systematic basis. Frontier society was moved
by converging and conflicting self-interests. Perhaps significantly,
there are virtually no women among our translators, although
the significance of the fact may belong not just to subjective
limitations (we have not set out to counter gender bias)
but also to historical practices of exclusion associated
with the tasks we are considering. For better or for worse,
our intermediaries are men; they mostly belong to male-dominated
professional groups; they tend to mediate in the interests
of themselves or their groups.
As we have noted,
intermediaries exchange their services for material or social
value. We can actually trace the gold or the favours with
which intercultures were rewarded. Such exchange means that
most intermediaries act to some degree as agents for power
groups whose location is not necessarily intercultural.
They are thus technically in a relation between agent and
principal; intermediaries work for non-intermediaries. When
the abbot of Cluny ordered a Latin Qur’an, or Alfonso X
ordered his Jewish advisers to translate astrological treatises,
they did so as effective non-intermediaries, without knowledge
of Arabic, and thus with only indirect means of controlling
the services they received. Intermediary agents who appear
to be ‘acting on behalf of’ may thus in fact be ‘acting
in dialogue with,’ or even, if the adages about translators
are to be believed, ‘betraying.’ In theory, the more specialized
the interculture, the greater the effective decision-making
power that may be shifted to the intermediary.
However, this
neo-functionalist view is of more importance for the intercultures
of our own age than it was for Hispanic frontier society.
In the specific fields that concern us here, effective power
is more consistently directed by the better defined social
groups—mostly patrons and classes of readers—that impinge
on frontier society. Translation must thus be seen as a
process highly conditioned by the way these quite particular
principles interact. And it is those interactions that then
define the borders at the centre of the intercultural groups.
The neo-classical
view adopted here will be that these power groups work together
to attain some kind of mutual benefit. This may involve
interaction with institutions like church and crown, with
particular grandees who commission translations, or indeed
with intercultural groups located in other countries, as
shall be envisaged for the transfer of fifteenth-century
humanism. These major players, the social groups with interests
in cross-cultural transfers, are presumed to be able to
reach understandings about what translation is and how it
should be carried out. They have many differences, but they
also have benefits to gain from cooperation and exchange.
They thus negotiate—in some cases working through translators
as negotiators—to organize those differences. They agree
on some things, disagree on others, and may agree to disagree
on still further points.
For example,
in the twelfth century there was disagreement between religious
and protoscientific thinkers about the truth held in non-Christian
texts. However, this discord was considered less important
than the overriding agreement that Christendom would benefit
from translations of those texts, either so that Muslims
could learn the error of their ways (for church ideologues
like Petrus Venerabilis) or so that Europeans could recover
the practical science of the classical past (for empiricists
like Adelardus de Bada). So there was agreement on the most
important principle (practical benefit to the target culture),
some kind of agreement to disagree on a fundamental background
principle (the authoritative value of pagan texts), and
repressed disagreement on what were considered minor points
such as the value of eloquent Latin. The translators worked
accordingly, with the church actually financing protoscientific
translations with which it could not have fully subscribed.
The strategies
of mediation can thus be seen as the outcome of negotiations.
Without going into details (for which see Pym 1992, 1995,
1997, 1998), we are borrowing the general cooperation model
of neo-classical negotiation theory and using it to organize
data in quite a different field. The central idea is simple
and well known: mutual benefits can ensue from situations
where all actors operate out of self-interest. This does
not imply that mutual benefits are always attained, nor
that the social iniquities and material causes of history
can be overlooked. Yet it does assume that the main power
players were rational in their own terms, an assumption
that in our case is partly supported by the fact that the
groups tend to be within Hispanic culture or at least in
touch with similar value systems.
The negotiation
model might well turn out to carry so many presuppositions
as to be non-enlightening in many cases. Yet here it is
used as a convenient way of thinking through the problems
of cross-cultural relations without accepting any timeless
separation of cultures. The idea of negotiation certainly
should not be taken as a rigid schema with slots that have
to be filled in the same way with each application; it cannot
give us fixed locations for the groups with conflicting
interests in translation processes. Sometimes they are rivals
with in the same geopolitical space, as is the case of church
and crown; sometimes they are in different but interrelated
spaces, as might be the situation with the movement of Renaissance
humanism from the Italian peninsula to Hispania. Further,
the negotiation model cannot happily locate ‘the’ intermediary
in one exclusive slot. Sometimes we find intermediaries
actually doing the negotiating, coming up with solutions
acceptable to conflicting interests (this might be the case
of Rabbi Mose Arragel translating the Hebrew Bible for Christians,
in chapter five); sometimes the intermediaries belong to
active social groups with interests beyond those of intercultural
space (as would be the case of the twelfth-century translators
of Islamic science, who were also the people most directly
interested in using that science). It is thus with a certain
amount of play and leeway that the negotiation model is
applied to specific translation situations.
A few words are
probably necessary on the principles listed as summaries
at the end of some of the chapters. These principles are
given in the form of ‘regimes,’ broadly understood here
as hierarchical sets of understandings that allow negotiations
to proceed. If two social groups agree on some aspects of
cross-cultural exchange but disagree on others, their shared
regime will ideally have the agreed-upon points at the top,
potentially outweighing the points of greater discord down
at the bottom. In this way, dialogue can proceed without
abolishing difference; major understandings can be attained
without homogenizing knowledge.
There must always
be doubt as to the historical existence of the principles
as they are presented here. No one is suggesting that when
people met to talk about translation they first sat down
and elaborated lists of things they agreed and disagreed
on. Yet historians should seriously consider that, since
intercultural history is a long dialogue across and between
many cultural groups, some such mode of understanding must
have been involved at certain points. Indeed, negotiated
understanding may be the kind of model needed in our cross-cultural
relations in the present. Regimes would then be little less
than one of the ways the past can help answer our fundamental
question.
There is nothing
simple or automatic about the regimes presented in the following
pages. In all cases they have been derived bottom-up, from
interaction with the historical material itself. They are
the result of repeated questions about what the actors would
they have agreed on, what would have been non-negotiable,
what concessions were possible, and what mutual benefits
were to be gained. In some instances these questions allow
the hierarchies of principles to be arranged with relative
confidence; in most contexts, however, we find examples
and situations that suggest alternative arrangements of
principles. This means none of the regimes are stable blocks;
all incorporate contradictions; and any regime, falsely
isolated by the historian, must be expected to evolve into
another. There is always something very artificial about
the way historiography has to find summaries for its chapters.
Yet it might be hoped that, in peeping in on Hispanic translation
history at a series of key points, the principles drawn
from the material will fall into regimes with a certain
historical continuity. Of little consequence that the summaries
fail to match up neatly; they do not really allow any kind
of all-embracing overview. In fact, the main lesson they
teach may be that the core problems of translation, the
areas of significant disagreement, never find lasting solutions.
The problems may sink down to the lower levels of regimes
in one period (target-language eloquence, for example, was
a subject of very limited dispute in the twelfth century)
and then reappear as major points of contention in another
(target-language eloquence was one of the things that Cartagena
and Bruni were arguing about in the fifteenth century).
Rather than definitively solve such problems, each age selectively
forgets or sidelines whatever is necessary, overlooking
some points in order to facilitate agreement on others.
That said, not
all the studies undertaken here strictly concern negotiation
theory as such. There is also a general interest in the
social forces that help configure intercultural space, forces
such as the transfer of wealth (gold, in the case of chapter
one), changes in communication technologies (paper, in chapter
four), the movement of education practices (chapters six
and twelve) and migrations of people (missionary priests
and intellectual exiles, in chapters seven and eight, and
almost throughout). Few of these more material concerns
can really be modeled in terms of negotiation, yet all of
them share the same basic geometry. In all cases, these
studies configure a world where people move, where virtually
everything is being displaced, and where the passages of
wealth, people, technologies, and prestige not only take
place through the overlaps of cultures but also contribute
to the fluctuating substance of intercultures. This is indeed
the geometry of frontier society. In a sense, the studies
of things moving should help set the social scenes where
negotiations can then take place.
Our fundamental
question, perhaps like all our questions, can be seen as
a problem formulated in our own age of globalization then
projected back onto the past. The focus on intercultures
certainly ensues from the priority of our present, where
mobility is inescapable. For this, no apologies are offered.
The purpose of doing history is to help address the problems
of the present. Indeed, this general aim, to question the
past in terms of the present, may explain why the studies
here range from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries,
with huge gaps in between. Only an amateur could allow their
interests to become so dispersed. As an amateur, I claim
no expertise in any particular domain. I am certainly not
interested in presenting exhaustive descriptions of particular
themes or periods; the lists of names and dates can be found
elsewhere. Here I seek merely to delve into particular cases
and to follow the leads, taking some broad ideas and seeing
how far they can be developed, what modifications they require,
and ultimately, what the past might say about the cultural
relations of our present.
- Last update
9 February 1999
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