Anthony Pym - Negotiating the Frontier : Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History

Negotiating the Frontier Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History

Anthony Pym

First published 2000 by St. Jerome

Publishing Published 2014 by Routledge

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Anthony Pym 2000

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for Juliette and John,
may they find homes where they will

Contents & Arguments

Introduction
Translators, Intercultures, and Hispanic Frontier Society

If we want to know how cultures interrelate, it is worth looking closely at who the intermediaries are and how they work in intercultures (overlaps of cultures, defined by criteria of professionalism and secondness). The frontier society of the Hispanic reconquista contained certain kinds of intercultural groups, the development of which can be traced through later history. The work of such groups can be analyzed in terms of the ways cultural frontiers are agreed upon, and the modes of agreement can be approached through neo-classical negotiation theory and the general concept of regimes.

In 1142 the abbot of Cluny visited Hispania and sponsored a Latin translation of the Quran. This set the scene for later translation activities in Toledo. Formulated on the frontier between Christian and Islamic Europe, the translation project was justified in terms of providing information for a future disputation that would save souls from the heresy of Islam. However, in calling for open debate on the basis of translation, the abbot risked exposing the sacred texts of Christianity to the same examination. In effect this meant siding with the main intercultural writers working on the project, who were more interested in science than religion. The actual translator of the Quran thus did a shoddy job, for which he was happy enough to take the abbots gold. The culture of generalized disputation, which would eventually undo the authority of the church, was then used to remarkably little avail against Islam.

Despite all the talk about a twelfth-century School of Translators in Toledo, the scientific translating that took place there remains a poorly understood phenomenon. Attention to its political dimension suggests that it should not be attached to the state-subsidized work carried out under Alfonso X after 1250 but is better explained in terms of Cluniac sponsorship of the first Latin translation of the Quran in 1142. This approach reveals grounds for potential conflict between the foreign scientific translators and the Toledo cathedral. Such conflict would nevertheless have been smoothed over by certain translation principles serving both scientific and religious interests. The foremost of these principles were literalism, secondary elaboration, the use of teamwork, the inferiorization of non-Latinist intermediaries, the justification of conquest, and the accordance of authority to non-Christian texts. Thanks to this shared regime, the church helped scientific translations to enter Latin.

The mainly protoscientific translations carried out after 1250 for Alfonso X of Castile are among the reasons why the king has been dubbed the Learned. The translations were from Arabic into Castilian, although further translations were made from Castilian into Latin and French. Some historians have wil-fully attached these court-organized activities to the properly twelfth-century translations carried out into Latin for the Toledo cathedral, as if there had been a merely logical transition from church to court. It can be argued, however, that the Alphonsine translations resulted from a nation-building language policy that opposed church power by avoiding the use of Latin for translations from Arabic. Coupled to this was a specific extranslation policy designed to win the king international prestige by translating from Castilian target texts and using Latin when required. These two aspects of the general policy corresponded to two teams of professional intercultural mediators, comprising mainly Jews for the work into Castilian and Italians for translations from Castilian. The policy, and its economic results, can be compared with similarly nationalist language policies operative in Europe today.

Since the introduction of paper-making coincided with the translation teams of both ninth-century Baghdad and thirteenth-century Castile, one might legitimately speculate on the consequences this material technology might have had for medieval translation processes. Attention to the translations commissioned by Alfonso X from 1250 suggests that the use of paper would have allowed intermediary versions to be written out in full and corrected, thus promoting increased bureaucratization and state control of translation activities. Comparison with print culture also suggests that the initial use of paper extended rather than opposed oral-based translation processes, challenging the ideal of the definitive target text in much the same way as computer-based networking is doing today.

In the early fifteenth century the Grand Master of the Order of Calatrava commissioned rabbi Mose Arragel to translate the Old Testament into Castilian and to provide numerous rabbinical glosses, to which Christian glosses were added. The result, known as the Biblia de Alba, is an apparently hybrid document based on a complex negotiation of cultural and religious boundaries. From the rabbis explicit documentation of the negotiation and drafting processes, it is possible to formalize the principles used for the writing of the glosses and, on the basis of selected passages, for the actual translation itself, where key terms are invested with double meanings. The result is a frontier where a profoundly Rabbinic bible was effectively concealed beneath a Christianized surface.

In the course of the fifteenth century the Spanish names for translation changed from the morphology of