[Last modified: March, 25 2019 03:51 PM]
Translation as a change of substance…
Welcome to the Library.
We have the chance, in this room, to feel, even virtually, the aura of a great book. The first English translation of the Elements of Geometry by Euclid, published in 1570.
This leads us to reflect on the process of translation, while relating it to the idea of change in objects.
Translation… Translation is quite a mysterious thing, and one with great importance. As stated by the translation theorist Lawrence Venuti, “Translation changes everything”.
It is a form of manufacture prompted by humans enabling the transmission of ideas that goes beyond language barriers. The work behind that transmission is quite complex, and considered in various, sometimes divergent, ways. One of the golden rules of translation could be: non verbum e verbo sed sensum de senso (which, translated quite literally means “not word for word but sense for sense”). This idea already reveals the difficulty, the subtlety, of translation. It is not a change that simply and roughly takes a word and finds its equivalent in another language. This thoughtless act could destroy a text. But then, what happens? How can a text be changed, while being preserved? Are words and meanings always opposed and if so, what should one prioritise? This sentence by Eugene Nida, a linguist that worked on translation studies, might be able to help us: “A translator’s purposes may involve much more than information. […] a translator is not content to have receptors say, “This is intelligible to us.” Rather, he is looking for some such response as, “This is meaningful for us.”’
It is worth noting that Euclid’s book differs from other types of literature as it is a scientific work. Translation, in that case, is less concerned by preserving a specific writing style, with its distinguishing particularities. Commonly, scientific literature is known as more neutral, its aim being to express as clearly as possible a mathematical concept. The history of Euclid’s elements transmission is however remarkable, and quite interesting to look into.
The original text is said to have been written around the start of the 3rd century BC. It was then transmitted by many manuscripts in Greek, translated and commentated since the Antiquity but especially during the Middle-Ages where translations in Latin, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Armenian, started to emerge. A very complex succession of interventions makes difficult the task to reveal the work that is originally from Euclid from the later additions. Some even say that the statements of the Elements are from Euclid when the majority of the demonstrations could be credited to Theon of Alexandria, that lived during the 4th century AD. In the present book, the 16th element is an addition by François de Foix, a bishop that was born in 1502.
It is clear that translation is what made possible the development and preservation of geometry, a set of internalised rules today used today to perceive the entire world. Translation represents a change of substance, of meaning and words that can interestingly be considered as a sort of metamorphosis, a reincarnation or even a resurrection, especially when dealing with translating languages that are extinct.
Studying this particular book illustrates how translation embodies a clear form of change and is what can make ideas survive. This then leads to consider a book as an object that has a life, a history, and, most importantly, an afterlife, a term that can be used “with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity”, to quote the wonderful work of Walter Benjamin on translation.
Indeed, translating always obviously comes after a text is written, and sometimes much later, as there needs to be time to find a translator interested and capable in working on a text in a faithful way. A translation can be seen, in a way, is the afterlife of a text. This afterlife is necessarily a change of state, but also a continuation of a previous life, its preservation. A book sometimes owes its existence, its continuation of life, to a translation Translating means making choices, sacrificing a formulation for linguistic purposes. It is a dangerous balance between faithfulness to the original text and its adaptation to be understandable and reachable to other cultures. Translation plays with the very limits of language and its implications, carefully considering its logic, symbolic values, and most importantly how it is directly linked with a culture, a whole form of perceiving the world that is something untranslatable and shouldn’t be appropriated in any way.
Courtesy of UCL Rare Books Collection / Accession number: UCL0033476 /
Period: United Kingdom (1570) / Collection: Rare Books, Euclid Collection /
Material Composition : Paper, ink, leather, animal glue /
Dimensions : about 17cm by 33cm, about 10cm thick, numeration of 464 leaves
Object Label
The book dates back from 1570 and was printed by a controversial printer, John Daye, a Protestant that had been imprisoned when Queen Mary was in power because of his faith and habit of printing some very religiously engaged texts. John Graves, an important donator to UCL Library, was in possession of the book until his collection was bequeathed to the university when he died, in 1870. A page in the end contains a watermark, a drawing engraved in the paper that indicated by who the paper was produced. The final page shows an engraving of the publisher himself, dated from 1562. The book contains a long and explicit preface written by the mathematician and magic-enthusiastic John Dee, in 1570. Lastly, as seen in the pictures above, this work has the incredible particularity of containing 3-D pop-up figures that have been carefully constructed presumably in order to make the understanding of these new scientific principles more approachable. Interestingly, this represents a strong pedagogical will as well as a change in dimension, that is extremely modern for the time, given how printing was still a difficult and slow process at the time.