Mobility of texts and diversity of languages: Translating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Abstract

The theme of translation is a concern shared today by literary history, textual criticism, cultural sociology, and global history. Initially the article will reflect on the reasons for this convergence. The first is historic and considers translation as the first form of the 'professionalization' of writing. The second is methodological and locates translation studies as an essential element of the 'literary geography' proposed by Franco Moretti and the perspective of 'connected histories' defined by Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Finally, the third is linguisticaesthetic and emphasizes the untranslatable (or texts and authors considered as such). Afterwards three case studies are looked at which can identify three scales of research on translation and three modalities of textual transformations when they migrate from one language to another. The mobility of meaning can relate to the difficulty of translating the same words (for example affetazione or sprezzatura in Castiglione's Libro del Cortegiano), or in the context of the reception of the work how to express the paratexts (as in the case of Las Casas' Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias), or also mutation in the entire meaning of the text (as shown by l'Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia by Gracián transformed into L'Homme de cour by its French translator when the word court (cour) never appeared in Gracián's work).