An Age of Translation: Towards a Social History of Linguistic Agents in the Early Modern World

Abstract:In 2007, Peter Burke reformulated L.P. Hartley's oft-cited phrase from the 1953 novel, The Go-Between: "If the past is a foreign country, it follows that even the most monoglot of historians is a translator" (Burke, "Cultures of Translation" 7). Certainly, any historical enterprise is a work of translation—the bringing of a text, an idea, an object, an experience—out of one context and into another. This process is far from passive, for either the bearer of translation or for the meaning of translation. In 1994, Ruth Evans defined translation as a "metaphor and a practice, since it is in and through actual translated texts that human subjects are contained and constructed, and enact their resistance to various forms of power."1 The source of the English word, from the Latin translatio, conveys the physicality of such a transfer, of meaning and value moved from a specific site and context into another. With translation comes both displacement and an inevitable transformation. Indeed, any enterprise of translation—over time, over space, across linguistic or cultural codes—is also, to some degree, a work of interpretation in the sense of the exegesis and explanation conveyed by the Latin interpretatio through which meaning is made anew in a distinct context.