Download PDF | Iberian Babel: Translation and Multilingualism in the Medieval and the Early Modern Mediterranean, Edited by Michelle M. Hamilton, Brill 2022.
211 Pages
Notes on Contributors
Jason Busic
is Assistant Professor of Spanish in Modern Languages at Denison University. He works on medieval and early modern Iberia with a focus on two religious minorities: the Mozarabs (Arabized Christians) and the Moriscos (New Christians of Muslim descent). He participates in conferences and has publications spanning these areas, including the “Between Latin Theology and Arabic Kalam: Samson's Apologeticus contra perfidos and Hafs b. Albar alQiti’s Extant Works” (Medieval Encounters, 2019) and (“From Medieval to Early Modern, from Christian to Muslim: Difficult Boundaries in the Arabic Gospels and Paul's Epistles of Biblioteca Nacional de Espafia ms. 4971” (Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2018).
John Dagenais is Professor of Medieval Iberian Literatures and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1981. His publications include The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen amor (Princeton, 1994), a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, co-edited with Margaret Greer, “Decolonizing the Middle Ages” (2000), and “Medieval Spanish Literature in the Twenty-First Century” for the Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, edited by David Gies (2004). He wrote the chapter on “The Crown of Aragon’ for Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 (Oxford uP, 2016).
He has also edited and translated Ramon Llull’s Doctrina pueril: A Primer for the Medieval World (Barcelona/London: Barcino/Tamesis, 2019.) He is currently at work on a book on Anselm Turmeda/‘Abd Allah al-Tarjuman and on research into Junipero Serra’s study and teaching in Mallorca prior to his missionary journey to the New World. His current digital humanities project is a real-time virtual reality reconstruction of the Romanesque cathedral and town of Santiago de Compostela as it was at the time of its dedication in April 12. In 20u, he was awarded the Josep M. Batista i Roca Prize by the Institut de Projeccié Exterior de la Cultura Catalana.
Emily C. Francomano is Professor of Spanish Literature and Senior Scholar for the Digital Humanities at Georgetown University, where she also is a core faculty member of the Comparative Literature and Global Medieval Studies Programs. Her research on the history and theory of translation parallels her work as a translator of medieval Spanish texts into English for modern audiences. Recent publications include the bilingual translation and edition of Three Spanish Querelle Texts (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series, Iter Press 2013, reprinted 2016), Juan Rodriguez del Padrén’s Triumph of the Ladies / Triunfo de las Donas (Medieval Feminist Forum, 2016) and The Prison of Love: Romance, Translation, and the Book in the Sixteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2018).
Marcelo E. Fuentes
is Assistant Professor of Spanish at New Jersey City University. His dissertation, “An Empire of Two Religions: Muslims as Allies, Enemies, and Subjects in the Literature of the Iberian Christian Kingdoms” examines the connections between the imperial ambitions of Peninsular Christian rulers and the ambivalent depictions of Muslims in texts from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. He has published on medieval and early modern expressions of imperialism, Islamophobia, and racism in Castilian epics and Portuguese chronicles.
Claire Gilbert
is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at Saint Louis University. She trained in late medieval and early modern European history at UCLA and has since pursued work in the social history of translation and linguistics, with an emphasis on the western Mediterranean between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her publications include a book, In Good Faith: Arabic Translation and Translators in Early Modern Spain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), and a variety of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters exploring translation and language politics in Europe and North Africa.
Michelle M. Hamilton
is the Director of Medieval Studies and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is author of two monographs, Beyond Faith: Belief; Morality and Memory in a Fifteenth-Century Judeo-Iberian Manuscript, (2015) and Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature (2007), as well as several articles on medieval literature and culture. She is also the co-editor/organizer of a volume of essays on Iberia and the Medieval Mediterranean (In and of the Mediterranean 2015). Her areas of specialty include the Arabic, Hebrew, and Romance literatures and cultures of medieval Iberia.
Roser Salicri i Lluch is Senior Researcher (Investigadora Cientifica) of Medieval Studies at the Department for Historical Sciences at the Mila i Fontanals Institution (IMF) of the Spanish National Research Council (csi1c) in Barcelona. She holds a PhD from the University of Barcelona (1996) and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Genoa (Italy) in 1996- 97, and Editor-in-Chief of the Anuario de Estudios Medievales (2010-19). Since 2009 she has been PI of CAIMMed (The Crown of Aragon, Islam, and the Medieval Mediterranean), a consolidated research group of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Her research interests include trade, navigation, and shipbuilding; travel and travelers; and captivity and slavery in the Mediterranean world, with particular focus on the relations between Christianity and Islam in the Iberian Peninsula and the Western Middle Ages, especially between Granada and the Crown of Aragon.
Anita J. Savo is Assistant Professor of Romance Studies at Boston University and holds a PhD in Spanish from Yale University. Her research explores the topics of authorship, multilingualism, and language anxiety in the literatures of medieval Iberia. She is currently working on a book project about authorship and the rhetoric of authority in the works of Juan Manuel.
Noam Sienna
is a research associate of the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His work focuses on the Jewish communities of the Islamic world in the medieval and early modern periods, with particular interests in art history, material culture, interfaith relations, magic and demonology, and translation and Jewish languages. His current monograph in progress examines book culture among North African Jews in the early modern period.
Nuria Silleras-Fernandez
is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on cultural and intellectual history, gender, and literature in Medieval and early modern Iberia, Europe, and the Mediterranean. She is the author of two scholarly monographs, Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna (Palgrave, 2008 and in Spanish csic, 2012) and Chariots of Ladies: Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Cornell uP: 2015). She has also coedited In and Of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies (Hispanic Issues, Vanderbilt, 2015) and Teaching Gender Through Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Texts and Cultures (Sense Publishing, 2015). She is currently working on two book projects: one relates to gender, grief, politics, and emotions, and the other one to cultural exchange, polyglossia, patronage, and gender.
Iberian Babel: An Introduction to Translation and Multilingualism
Michelle M. Hamilton and Nuria Silleras-Fernandez
la mejor lengua era la que se entendia
1606 Quran in aljamiado eee
me parece que el traducir de una lengua en otra, como no sea de las reinas de las lenguas, griega y latina, es como quien mira los tapices flamencos por el revés, que aunque se veen las figuras, son llenas de hilos que las escurecen, y no se veen con la lisura y tez de la haz; y el traducir de lenguas faciles, ni arguye ingenio ni elocucién, como no le arguye el que traslada ni el que copia un papel de otro papel. Y no por esto quiero inferir que no sea loable este ejercicio del traducir; porque en otras cosas peores se podria ocupar el hombre, y que menos provecho le trujesen.
CERVANTES, Don Quijote, 11, chap. 62
Translation and multilingualism form an integral part of the Iberian past and have shaped its literary traditions and cultural production for centuries. These were fundamental forces in the transmission of knowledge and texts, and in the formation of the religious, linguistic, and ethnic identities that came to define medieval and early modern Iberia. Nevertheless, there are few comprehensive studies that bring together an analysis of multilingualism and how it evolved in the pre-modern period that also include the role played by translation. This is in part due to the secondary role traditionally given to translation in literary studies. As Itamar Even-Zohar notes, “As a rule, histories of literature mention translations when there is no way to avoid them, when dealing with the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, for instance.”! This prejudice — the qualification of translation as a minor and derivative art compared to “original” texts — has also obscured the importance and complexity of translation and marginalized it in histories of literature.
This tendency has been aggravated by the fact that translated texts tend to be difficult to fit within the narrow disciplinary boundaries of “national” languages and literatures — modern, anachronistic categories that are projected uncritically on the past, thus obscuring the multilingual character of authors, readers, and regions.
Etymologically, “to translate” is “to move something from one place to another” — a process that entails negotiation and exchange. Moreover, translation is not static; it has a history and has evolved over time. Every period has developed its own set of strategies, rules, and conventions — what Peter Burke defines as a specific “culture of translation.”? Translation is also a key element of the “cultural borrowing” that, according to Edward Said, defines the history of any culture.? Thus, translation not only involves moving between languages, but moving between cultures; and, as such, it has become the subject of growing critical interest, to the point that translation studies has emerged as a field unto itself.4 Scholars focusing on translation as process and on translations as products have made both visible as sites where issues such as originality, audience, authority, markets, politics, and the relationship between source and target languages shed light on the political and social attitudes of a given culture. As Lawrence Venuti notes, translation is the “reconstruction of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs and representation that pre-exist in the target language.”> Thus, the translator might follow a strategy of “domesticating” a text through a process of cultural translation or of “foreignizing” it by introducing words and expressions into the receiving culture or by trying to reproduce the syntax of the original language, thus emphasizing the foreign origin of the text.®
Medieval and early modern scholars were aware of the dilemmas implicit in translation. Many chose not to produce “faithful” reproductions, which is to say, they did not aim to translate word-for-word from one language to another, and sometimes they took great liberties with sense and meaning. Thus, we see full adaptations of works that were not only translated, but also cut, glossed, or expanded to serve the needs of the author/adaptor/translator and the expectations of the intended audience. Iberian intellectuals debated for centuries what constituted the best form of translation. For example, in the twelfth-century Moses Maimonides wrote to Shmuel ibn Tibbon about the futility of attempting verbatim translations that strove to maintain the word order and syntax of the original. Such a translation, he states unequivocally, Tw Ox pwn PAA? Toy Dax , 12 nivyd an pri ania nwawn inpeya nxa wo Wa RIAD pywA wan yr! Na inix 707 12 INN}, Ayn pawn prw (2: 551-52; will be faulty and untrustworthy. This is not the right method. The translator should first try to grasp the sense of the subject thoroughly, and then state the theme with perfect clearness in the other language).”
Debates over the merits of various approaches to translation continued through the Middle Ages and beyond. In Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espanola (A Treasury of the Castilian or Spanish Language), the first monolingual Spanish dictionary (1611), Sebastian de Covarrubias acknowledges the complexity of translation, citing the Roman poet Horace (65 BCE-8 BCE):
If the [translation] is not done with care and prudence, knowing both languages equally, and translating in some parts, not literally, but according to meaning, it would be what a wise and discerning man said, that this is to dump it out, meaning to spill and lose its contents. This was well noted by Horace in his Ars Poetica when he said: As a true translator you will not translate word for word.®
1 A Multilingual Approach
Understanding the various processes involved in translation in premodern Iberia requires us to step out of the binary models that tend to underlie modern notions of translation, such as “original” versus “target language,” and “domestic” versus “foreign.” Rather, one must take into account the multilingual character of the Peninsula — a region that has been the home of a diversity of languages and literary cultures, including Arabic, Hebrew, Amazigh (Berber), Latin, Castilian, Catalan, Galician/Portuguese, Navarrese, Basque, Aragonese, and Occitan.? Moreover, one must keep in mind that many or most authors identified or had a facility with more than one of these. Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “contact zone,” where people of diverse backgrounds and languages establish relationships through the negotiation of language and the values of corresponding literary cultures may be helpful for Iberia. Here the definition of a contact zone as comprising “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” is particularly suggestive as a model for both the cultural and linguistic dynamics that can be observed within the peninsula and the courts and ports that served as nexuses between peninsular and extra-peninsular linguistic traditions.
Although this history of multilingualism might seem obvious, it has remained largely unacknowledged until recently. As was the case in much of the rest of Europe, late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century Spanish literary scholarship tended to focus on the supposed origins of the “Spanish nation,” thus privileging Castilian linguistic and cultural history.!! However, the multilingual past simply could not be ignored; thus, scholars such as Ram6n Menéndez Pidal, Américo Castro, Josep Maria Millas Vallicrosa, Marti de Riquer, Manuel Mila i Fontanals, and Emilio Garcia Gomez grappled with the impact of non-Castilian literary cultures, whether Arabic, Hebrew, or Catalan. What role these “foreign” elements should play in the modern national narrative of Spain, however, was disputed.!? Recent scholarship, such as that of Jean Dangler, Julio-César Santoyo, Brian Catlos, and Sharon Kinoshita, however, offer models and methodologies that move away from these earlier essentializing, nationalistic debates and suggest larger frames within which the multiple linguistic traditions of the Peninsula can be considered.!3
In sum, as Francesca Orsini has recently suggested, the reality of Iberian multilingualism demands “an approach to literature and space that takes multilingualism within society and literary culture as a structuring and generative principle and holds both local and cosmopolitan perspectives in view.’* Such a perspective could serve to broaden established Anglo-European methodologies and theories of world literature that “end up making nine-tenths of the world (and its literature) drop off the map entirely or appear hopelessly ‘peripheral.”!5 For Orsini, studies that focus only on “single-language archives,” such as, for example, Latin or Castilian texts in Spanish archives, “often tend to reproduce the literary and social biases of each archive,” whereas “a multilingual approach is inherently comparative and relativizing; it highlights authors’ and archives’ strategies of distinction, affiliation, and/or exclusion, and makes us look for what other stories and actors existed.”!6 This is precisely what the essays in this collection do. Our approach is informed by new models of network theory, and by expanded notions of geographical and cultural categories that look at Iberia as part of the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.
Both Iberian and Mediterranean studies require a “trans-national” perspective that undermines the notion that either the multilingual literary cultures or the authors that worked in them can be adequately understood within the narrow structure of an idealized national culture. For Brian Catlos, “mutual intelligibility” can be observed on the cultural level across the premodern Mediterranean.” This intelligibility was rooted in the common cultural and religious foundations of the region and lubricated acculturation and exchange among Christians, Muslims, and Jews of various ethno-cultural orientations. Medieval identity was not tied to knowing and writing in only one language or literary tradition, or to staying fixed in a specific court or kingdom. This was true not only for a cultural elite that was literate and intellectually sophisticated, but even among “common folk” who out of the necessities of moving within ethno-religiously diverse social environments spoke or read more than one language. Indeed, this can be observed even today, when Spaniards frequently speak one language at home or at worship, and another in their professional or public life. In sum, the Iberian Peninsula manifests the broader characteristics identified by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell as essentially Mediterranean, such as connectivity of lands and people, mobility, portability of cultural products, and segmentation.!® We have argued elsewhere that Iberia is — to use Horden and Purcell’s distinction — not only in the Mediterranean, but also of the Mediterranean: “a coherent region in terms of economic, social, political and cultural development from late Antiquity to the Early Modern period.”!9 By broadening our focus in this way, we can incorporate Iberian translation into “the discursive Mediterranean” as described by Karla Mallette — a space “that literary historians have yet to chart.’2° Thus, acknowledging the premodern inhabitants of the Peninsula as producers of literary, political, legal, and religious texts in various languages opens up new avenues of inquiry and allows us to hear voices otherwise obscured.”! A comparative approach that incorporates the region’s various linguistic traditions and discerns how authors adopted literary forms and figures from one language tradition to another can highlight the shared strategies of affiliation and exclusion that Orsini notes.
Translation is essential to these processes and lies at the heart of this multilingual approach. Multilingualism not only invites translation but demands it. As Pratt has observed
multilingualism is translation’s mother but also its definitive other: the multilingual person is not someone who translates constantly from one language (or cultural system) into another, though this is something multilinguals are sometimes able to do. But to be multilingual is, above all, to be one for whom translation is unnecessary because one lives in more than one language.??
For Pratt, multilingualism and creolization are preferable terms to “translation” because, “a translation paradigm is too blunt an instrument to grasp the heterodox subjectivities and interfaces that come out of entanglements sustained over time.”?? In our volume, we have opted to explore the combination of translation and multilingualism because in medieval Iberia, translation provides an entrée into the complex multilingualism of both the producers and the audiences of the premodern texts of the Peninsula, as the essays collected in this volume show.
2 The Essays in this Volume
This volume contains eight chapters written by scholars working on history, literature, and cultural studies who focus on various aspects of multilingualism and translation involving one or more Iberian medieval languages. They also connect Iberia with the broader Mediterranean and Europe. The first, “A Clear Book, ¢4 €&: Translating the Latin Psalter and Christian Identity into the Language of the Quran in Ninth-Century Cordoba,’ by Jason Busic, provides an example of how methods and forms of translation developed by Andalusi scholars in Arabic in the ninth century continued to shape how Iberian scholars approached the Bible in the fourteenth. While the analysis of Christian-Arabic texts of al-Andalus has focused on the Islamization of the Mozarab community, Busic’s contribution considers the intentionality of Islamization in Hafs b. Albar of Cordoba’s Arabic translation of the Latin Psalter. He argues that Ibn Albar approximates the Other in order to preserve Latin Christian identity. Busic shows that Iberian intellectuals like Ibn Albar looked not only to the classical Greek and Latin past to shape their cultural patrimony as did contemporary scholars in the Latin West, but also to the Arabic scriptural tradition. Busic’s essay provides an entrée into the subsequent chapters by establishing the importance of studying medieval Iberian translation as part of larger conversations regarding the medieval Arab Mediterranean, as well as Western Christendom.
In Chapter Two, “Translation as Transaction in the Poema de Alfonso Onceno,’ Anita Savo examines a Castilian text, the Poema de Alfonso Onceno. Savo focuses on how language use and translation are depicted in this poem written c. 1348. In the work, an omniscient narrator presents the dialogue of all of the characters in Castilian, whether they are supposedly speakers of Portuguese, French, English, Granadan or North African Arabic. This and similar devices position Castilian at the center of a multitude of vibrant encounters between languages. Savo reads this not only as situating Castilian as a unified ideological language, but also as part of a process of exchange with other languages, particularly Latin and Arabic.
Marcelo Fuentes’ contribution, “From Great Muslim Warriors to Good Christian Subjects: Translating and Converting the Iberian Legend of the Infantes of Lara,” explores the legacy of the Alfonsine corpus in the Portuguese tradition. Fuentes shows how versions of the oral legend of the Castilian nobles known as the Infantes de Lara that were included in Alfonso X’s Estoria de Esparia and the Portuguese translations of the latter unsettle some of the chronicle’s ideological foundations. The Estoria inherited the idea of a translatio imperii that connects the Leonese and Castilian kings to their alleged Roman and Visigoth forebears from its clerical sources in Latin, while excluding Iberian Muslim rulers as illegitimate invaders to be resisted. The story of the infantes, instead, presents Andalusi Muslims as heroic figures that selflessly protect and avenge the victims of a family feud among Christians. Although a rewriting known as the versién critica of the Estoria de Esparia had already Christianized the main Muslim hero in the narrative, a more radical transformation takes place as the story crosses political and linguistic borders. The Livro de linhagens and the Crénica geral de 1344, both attributed to the Portuguese Count of Barcelos, Pedro Afonso (c. 1289-1350), utilize a Galician translation of the Estoria de Espana and other unknown sources to completely reconfigure the legend of the Infantes according to new values and goals, eliminating or reversing all the elements in the Castilian narrative that contested the superiority of Iberian Christians in the process. While the first Alfonsine text highlighted alliances among various Iberian communities, their political and cultural differences notwithstanding, the Portuguese adaptations recast the story as triumphalist propaganda that celebrates the Christian kingdoms’ increasing hegemony in the Peninsula. Translated back into Castilian, this much-altered account was later disseminated through early modern theatrical adaptations and printed chronicles and became the better-known version.
While Fuentes shows how a single tale moves and flows via translation across linguistic and temporal borders, Emily Francomano’s “Translation in the Libro de buen amor and the Libro de buen amor in Translation” discusses the Libro de buen amor as a text that absorbs and adapts texts from other linguistic traditions — a phenomenon that reflects a multilingual Mediterranean perspective. The Libro de buen amor emerges, among its many other identities, as a series of translations and adaptations — a treasury of translatio that carries an inherited store of cultural narratives into the vernacular present of fourteenth-century Iberia, and one that illuminates the very nature of translation. Francomano suggests that we think of the Libro de buen amor’s author as a master of translation and translatio, an interpreter of the poetic tradition for whom literary invention, commentary, and translation were indivisible activities. This has contributed, as Francomano shows, to making the work very difficult to translate. It seems that other than a fragment translated into Portuguese, translating the Libro de buen amor has been a modern concern. Francomano concludes with a reflection on how the many translations of the Libro de buen amor into English, dating from 1833 to the late twentieth century, are emblematic of the challenges of translating the medieval Mediterranean and its culture of translation for contemporary readers.
Chapter Five, “Ask Now the Beasts and They Shall Teach You: Qalonymos ben Qalonymos and his Hebrew Translation of the Epistle of the Animals,” by Noam Sienna, also examines the complex interaction of the languages and legacies of the Iberian tradition in the fourteenth century. Sienna does this from the perspective of the Hebrew translation movement in Provence — one that was central not only in the transmission and preservation of medieval Andalusi learning and culture, but also in the formation of an Andalusi Jewish identity in the diaspora. This chapter presents a window onto this important historical moment through a case study of a Hebrew rendering of the “Epistle of the Animals” — one chapter of a medieval Arabic philosophical encyclopedia, the Rasa@il Ikhwan al-Safa’ (The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity). Here, the work of the translator, Qalonymos ben Qalonymos, sits at the intersection of Iberian, French, and Mediterranean contexts. Sienna examines his Iggeret Ba‘alei Hayyim (the Hebrew rendition of Epistle 22 of the Rasa@il), the context of its composition, and its relationship to the Arabic text that it presents to its Jewish audience. In particular, Sienna considers what we might learn through Qalonymos’ Introduction to the Iggeret. The latter offers rare insights not only into Qalonymos’ techniques and methodologies as a translator, but also to his understanding of the philosophical context of this chapter of the Rasa’il.
As Sienna shows, Qalonymos appeals to his readers to see past the divisions of arbitrary political and religious structures, and to find spiritual unity in the shared power of intellect. Qalonymos’ translation of the Iggeret was his contribution to a Hebrew reading curriculum based on the intellectual and philosophical legacy of medieval Iberia.2+ His work represents the complexity of the medieval Mediterranean and its open-ended transmission of knowledge between and across civilizations and cultures.
Archival evidence supporting this interaction of cultures in the Mediterranean is the subject of Chapter Six, Roser Salicrt i Lluch’s essay, “Between Trust and Truth: Oral and Written Ephemeral Diplomatic Translations between the Crown of Aragon and Western Islam in the Late Middle Ages.’ Working from a political and diplomatic perspective, Salicrt i Lluch studies translators who worked between the Crown of Aragon and Western Islamic territories. Approximately two hundred documents created by such translators have been preserved at the Archive of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona. Salicrt i Lluch analyzes these translators, who came from prominent Mudéjar and Jewish families, or who were Christian officials, mercenaries, and merchants appointed by the Crown, as cross-cultural characters. Salicri i Lluch also explores what qualities Mediterranean rulers looked for in professional translators of Arabic official documents, and shows that the ability to provide a utilitarian translation in Romance vernacular was valued by monarchs.
While Salicru i Lluch examines several Aragonese translators whose work was destined for diplomatic purposes, in Chapter Seven, “Translation as the Sincerest Form of Plagiarism: Translation and Linguistic Repatriation in ‘Abd Allah al-Tarjuman’s Disputa del ase,” John Dagenais examines a translation undertaken by a single Mallorcan intellectual. Anselm Turmeda (1355-1423) converted from Christianity to Islam, becoming ‘Abd Allah al-Tarjuman and working as a translator and polemicist in Tunis. The apostate Turmeda, who had forsaken his vocation as a Franciscan, nevertheless continued to draw on his intellectual training to produce both translations and original texts in Catalan. Dagenais shows how in the Disputa del ase (The Dispute of the Ass) Abd Allah al-Tarjuman transforms a chapter from The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity into a popular Catalan text. He concludes with an exploration of the legacy of ‘Abd Allah al-Tarjuman’s version in the French Rabelaisian facetiae and of modern attempts to restore the lost medieval Catalan text by “repatriating” and re-translating from Renaissance French into pseudo-medieval Catalan.
Claire Gilbert’s contribution, “Empire of Translation: Multilingual Administrative Dynasties in Habsburg Spain,” rounds out the collection. Gilbert highlights the centrality of translation in the functioning of the multilingual early modern Spanish Habsburg Empire (1517-1700). In the latter, Charles v’s Secretaria de Interpretacién de Lenquas (Secretariate of Language Interpretation) became a site for a new discourse centering on the professional expertise of translators. Gilbert focuses on how family strategies (inheritance, marriage, reputation, and other real or fictive kin relations and their consequences) shaped this newly founded office in its various iterations across the emperor's Mediterranean territories. Using print and manuscript relaciones, correspondence, appointments, and translation work, Gilbert compares “translator dynasties”: the Gracian family, who held positions in the Secretaria from 1527 until 1734, the Jewish Cansino family, and the “old Christian” Sotomayor family — the latter two appointed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as Arabic translators in Spain’s North African presidios. Gilbert's essay complements the preceding ones in the collection in that it shows how the various traditions and forces at work in Iberian translation from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries served as a foundational ethos for Spanish expansion across the Mediterranean and Atlantic.
All together the essays in this volume bring Iberian Babel to life, through its languages, texts, documents, and traditions. However, contrary to the traditional interpretation of the biblical tower, understood as a source of confusion and punishment, we seek to underscore cultural exchange and discovery, or — as Roland Barthes put it, the joy of linguistic coexistence and of languages that work side by side: “Alors le vieux mythe biblique se retourne, la confusion des langues n’est plus une punition, le sujet accéde a la jouissance par la cohabitation des langages, qui travaillent cdte a céte: le texte de plaisir, c'est Babel heureuse.”25 As such we hope that the breadth and variety of these essays will appeal to scholars working on Iberian history and literature, as well as fields as diverse as medieval and early modern history and literature, religious studies, translation studies, Jewish studies, Arabic literature, Catalan literature, European, and Mediterranean studies.
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