Won in Translation: Textual Mobility in Early Modern Europe

By Roger Chartier

In Won in Translation Roger Chartier, one of the world's leading historians of books, publishing, and reading, considers the mobility of the early modern text and the plurality of circulating versions of the same work. The agent for both is translation, for through their lexical, aesthetic, and cultural decisions, translators always assign new meaning or new status to what they translate.

Won in Translation proceeds by way of four case studies, three dedicated to works originally in Spanish, the fourth to a Portuguese dramatic adaptation of Don Quixote. Bartolomé de Las Casas' Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, first printed in 1552, was a powerful instrument for the construction of what was later called the "black legend" of Spanish monarchy. Baltasar Gracián's Oráculo Manual, published in 1647, became the most famous courtier's manual in Europe. Both traveled more widely and were translated more often than any other books of their era. For Chartier they illustrate the great power of translation, which allowed Las Casas' account to be placed in multiple and successive contexts and enabled Gracián's book to take on a range of meanings it had not originally had. Chartier's next two chapters are devoted to plays, one by Lope de Vega, the other by Antônio José da Silva. In the case of Lope's Fuente Ovejuna, the "translation" was one from historical chronicle to dramatic performance. In Antônio José da Silva's Vida do Grande D. Quixote, the textual migration is twofold, as Cervantes' hero moves from Spanish to Portuguese and from novel to play.

In an Epilogue, Chartier moves three centuries forward to consider the paradox that it is the absolute immobility of the text, "reinvented" word for word, that creates its mobility in Jorge Luis Borges' fiction "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Works are transformed through changes of genre or language, to be sure; but even when the texts remain fixed, their readers give them different or inverted meaning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9780812298444

Book preview

Cover Page for Won in Translation

Won in Translation

Material Texts

Series Editors

Roger Chartier Leah Price

Joseph Farrell Peter Stallybrass

Anthony Grafton Michael F. Suarez, S.J.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Won in Translation

Textual Mobility in Early Modern Europe

Roger Chartier

Translated by John H. Pollack

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8122-5383-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8122-9844-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chartier, Roger, author. | Pollack, John, translator.

Title: Won in translation : textual mobility in early modern Europe / Roger Chartier ; translated by John H. Pollack.

Other titles: Material texts.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022] | Series: Material texts | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021042948 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5383-2 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Casas, Bartolomé de las, 1484–1566. Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias. | Gracián y Morales, Baltasar, 1601–1658. Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia. | Vega, Lope de, 1562–1635. Fuente Ovejuna. | Silva, António José da, 1705–1739. Vida do grande D. Quixote de la Mancha e do gordo Sancho Pança. | Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547–1616. Don Quixote. | Spanish literature—Classical period, 1500–1700—Translations—History and criticism. | Spanish literature—Classical period, 1500–1700—History and criticism. | Literature—Translations—History and criticism. | Translating and interpreting—Europe—History.

Classification: LCC PQ6066 .C47 2022 | DDC 468/.04—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042948

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1. Publishing: The Seven Lives of the Brevísima relación de la destruyción de las Indias

Chapter 2. Staging: Fuente Ovejuna

Chapter 3. Translating: From Oráculo manual to L’Homme de cour

Chapter 4. Adapting: Don Quixote and the Marionettes of Lisbon

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Preface

The four chapters of this book address the same topic: the mobility of texts, or, put another way, the plurality of texts that circulate the same work. In early modern Europe, such mobility was the result of different decisions or choices made by all those individuals who not only made the books but also, and more fundamentally, made the texts. These actors included copyists, who established fair copies of authors’ autograph manuscripts; censors, who suppressed or corrected texts as they thought necessary; publishers (who were at that time both printers and booksellers), who made the decision to publish and chose format, layout, and fonts; copy editors, who prepared the copy text for the printer; and compositors, whose habits and preferences gave material forms to printed texts. In some cases, the chain of interventions that produced the forms and meanings of texts was still more complex. This was true of translations. Through their lexical, aesthetic, and cultural decisions, translators were able to assign new signification or new status to the works they translated. It was also the case with all the texts that were spoken before they were printed, such as speeches, sermons, or plays. The case studies gathered in this book are devoted to textual migrations moving from one language to another, or from one genre to another: for example, from historical chronicle or prose narrative to dramatic plays.

Three out of these four chapters are dedicated to Spanish texts, and the fourth one to a Portuguese adaptation of Don Quixote. This attention to Iberian materials continues studies I have previously devoted to the French translation and editions of Francisco de Quevedo’s Buscón; to Lope de Vega’s Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo; to different chapters of Don Quixote; and to English and French theatrical appropriations of Cervantes’s "historia," beginning with the lost Shakespearean Cardenio. The prominence of these texts here is grounded in powerful historical realities. In early modern Europe, the Castilian language was considered by many writers (for example, Ronsard) as the least imperfect of all modern languages, and it became the vehicle for the most exciting literary novelties: chivalric romances, picaresque autobiographies, the new "comedia," and a work that trespassed all the conventional genres, the history of the errant knight who named itself Don Quixote of La Mancha. Read in Spanish by all those who learned the language, translated for those who could not, and imitated and adapted by many, this textual repertoire had only Petrarch, Ariosto, or Tasso as serious competitors.

Paradoxically perhaps, the two Castilian works whose translations are analyzed in this book are neither romances nor plays. But they traveled throughout Europe and were translated more often than any other books. Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación, printed in 1552 in Seville, was the most widely circulated denunciation of the tyrannies and cruelties committed by the Spaniards in the New World. The text was a powerful instrument for the construction of what was called much later the black legend of the Spanish monarchy. Across Europe, translating, commenting upon, and illustrating Las Casas’s short book was a way of warning all peoples threatened by the Spanish power and showing them that they could be, in their turn, the Indians of Europe. Reading Las Casas was necessary to ward off such mortal peril.

Baltasar Gracián’s Oráculo manual, published in 1647 in Huesca, did not have the same immediate success. It is only with its French translation in 1684 that the book became a European steady seller. Itself then translated into several languages, the French translation transformed Gracián’s aphorisms, addressed to those few who could understand them, whatever their social condition, into a courtier’s manual. Gracián’s three hundred maxims became, therefore, the indispensable guide for all those who desired to know, to practice, or to imitate the behaviors governing the court society. These two works are examples of the great power of translations. They gave new relevance to Las Casas’s Relacíon by relocating it in multiple and successive contexts. They attributed a radically new meaning to Gracián’s Oráculo.

Two chapters are dedicated to plays, one by Lope de Vega, the other one by Antônio José da Silva. The textual migrations that are at stake here are different. Lope’s Fuente Ovejuna, printed in 1619, allows us to understand how the same story could be moved from historical chronicle to dramatic performance, and how this shift permitted, or required, the imposition of reconstructed representation of a past event. Lope’s play also allows us to analyze two fundamental textual trajectories: from the composition of a play by a dramatist to its production by a theatrical company, and from the staged performance to the printed publication. Both processes were characterized by constraints and competitions, rivalries and ruses, that were not unique to Golden Age Spain.

Antônio José da Silva’s Vida do grande D. Quixote provides another example of migration between genres. This play, performed by the puppets of the Theater of the Bairro Alto in Lisbon in 1733, is one of the numerous theatrical adaptations of Cervantes’s history of Don Quixote, in this case, of the second part of the book. As in the case of Lope’s play, the shift from one genre to another allows the playwright to introduce new motives, to reinterpret famous passages, and to show inventiveness within the obligation of imitation. However, Silva’s Don Quixote demonstrates not only mobility between genres: the play was also the first translation of Cervantes’s book into Portuguese, sixty years before the genuine translation of the work.

It is with Don Quixote that this book concludes: Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote. The fiction written by Jorge Luis Borges presents us with a more radical formulation of the different modalities of textual mobility proposed by the works of Las Casas, Lope de Vega, Gracián, and Silva. In the case of Menard’s Don Quixote, it is the absolute immobility of the text, reinvented word for word, comma for comma, that creates the condition for its spectacular mutation, or even the complete inversion of its meaning. A work changes over time, of course, because none of its texts is perfectly identical to other ones. In early modern Europe, these differences concern the modes of attribution of the work, its textual variants, its materiality, its genre, or its language. Borges’s literary hypothesis reminds us that even if a work could always remain the same, from Cervantes to Pierre Menard, it would nevertheless change because the world of its readers changes.

* * *

The essays gathered here are largely based upon books and manuscripts in the University of Pennsylvania Library. The collections assembled by Robert Dechert and by Henry Charles Lea enabled my study of the translations of Las Casas’s Relacíon and allowed me to consult documents from the Portuguese Inquisition that persecuted Antônio José da Silva. The important collection of Golden Age comedias—including sets of printed plays gathered by the Count of Harrach, the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor to Madrid in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and autograph manuscripts of two of Lope de Vega’s plays—were essential to my analysis of Fuente Ovejuna. Finally, the library’s important collection of editions of Gracián, in Spanish and in French translation, made it possible for me to follow the trajectory of a work that became the most famous courtly manual in early modern Europe, even if the word court did not appear in the original text.

We must stress the essential role played by libraries in scholarship for two reasons. First, even (or especially) in a world where digital reproduction and online consultation permit us easy and rapid access to texts, it is necessary to recall that only the precise analysis of printed or manuscript objects themselves allows us to understand how the materiality of books shaped the meanings of texts they communicate. It is only by studying the books themselves, and not only their digital surrogates, that we can comprehend the multiple existences of the same work. Its intended audiences and constructed meaning may be transformed by changes in its format, by mutations of the modalities of its publication, or by the introduction of illustrations. Thus, the 24mo first printing of Gracián’s Oráculo manual is quite distinct from the large quarto format of its French translation. The same comedia could circulate as a separately printed pamphlet, or be inserted in a collection of plays by different authors, or appear in a volume of plays all by the same author. And the introduction of illustrations into the translations of Las Casas’s Relacíon profoundly changed how European readers read this text.

I would like also to stress the importance of the work of librarians and curators for scholarly research. This research is always characterized by unexpected discoveries, bibliographical findings, and new interpretations made possible only thanks to their knowledge and experience. This book is the result of such a collaborative work, developed over the years with John Pollack. He guided my research in the rich collections of the Library of the University of Pennsylvania; he assisted with the presentations of these textual studies when I gave them as lectures or seminars; and, finally, he was their translator. His friendly and learned presence has accompanied each stage of the composition and publication of this book. As Borges would write, I do not know which of us has written these pages.

Chapter 1

Publishing

The Seven Lives of the Brevísima relación de la destruyción de las Indias

One text that crossed frontiers, circulating in multiple languages and taking on new meanings in different times and places, is of remarkable importance: the Brevísima relación de la destruyción de las Indias, written by the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas and printed in Seville in 1552. The Brevísima relación became central to the construction of the Black Legend, the trans-European polemic condemning the cruelty of the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas. This chapter focuses on this text’s editions and translations. It is based in large part upon the collection of Las Casas editions assembled by Robert Dechert and housed at the University of Pennsylvania Library. Thanks to this collection, we can follow the uncommon destiny of this text and trace its seven lives from 1552 to the early nineteenth century.

Seville, 1552

The first and most famous life of the Brevísima relación begins at its first printing in 1552, together with seven other Spanish treatises that had been prepared by Las Casas over the ten preceding years.¹ Its title page presents us with a stark contrast. We see the royal coat of arms of Emperor Charles V and the device P V, Plus Ultra, the chivalric motto used, after 1516, to designate the emperor’s sovereignty over the newly discovered territories lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Figure 1). At the same time, we note the absence of any privilege, or permission to publish, granted to the text by the sovereign. This text, in fact, lacks all of the censorial approbations normally obligatory in Spanish Golden Age books.

Figure 1. The title page of Las Casas’s Brevísima relación (Seville: Sebastián Trujillo, 1552), here bound with the seven other treatises by Las Casas. Robert Dechert Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.

How can we explain the absence of these preliminary texts? Their absence may suggest Las Casas’s wish to avoid the censorial regime of Seville, which had since 1502 been under the archbishop’s control.² On the title page, Las Casas’s title of bishop appears ahead of his position in the Dominican order: por el Obispo dõ fray Bartolome de las Casas / o Casaus de la orden de Sãcto Domingo. The phrase announces Las Casas’s place within the ecclesiastical hierarchy, despite the fact that, although named bishop of Chiapas in 1543, he had renounced his bishopric in 1550. Another possibility is that Las Casas received a tacit, or unwritten, permission to publish from Prince Philip, who as regent of the Spanish kingdoms was at that time responsible for Spanish territories in the Indies. Philip had received Las Casas favorably upon his return to Spain in 1547, and the Brevísima relación is addressed directly to him.

Each word of Las Casas’s title—Brevísima relación de la destruyción de las Indias: colegida por el Obispo dõ fray Bartolome de Las Casas—is carefully placed in order to assure readers of the text’s authenticity. A relación’s authority derives from the facts it relates, which are directly reported by eyewitnesses. The "relación here is brevísima, very brief, according to one of the classical rhetorical figures of speech, the brevitas." It is a summary of an infinite history of cruelties, each one of which was, in itself, arguably a mortal sin. This relación is also colegida, a collection of several accounts or documents. This claim might appear paradoxical if the text’s veracity rests upon the personal, eyewitness observations of its author, Las Casas. Yet the verb colegir, as defined in Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), meant to assemble numerous, different things heard, seen, or read. Direct observations and written texts —what is seen and what is read—have equivalent authority in Las Casas’s account, as they had in anthologies of commonplaces. Also serving as guarantors of the credibility of the text are the claims of social rank Las Casas makes for himself: as a bishop but also as a member of the noble Casaus family. His noble lineage may well have been open to dispute, but it would have carried particular value in a time when aristocratic testimony was held likely to be true because it was not biased by any economic interest.³

The printer’s name does not appear on the title page, which includes only the date of printing, 1552. However, the text’s colophon tells us that it was printed in Seville, En casa de Sebastian Trujillo, in the printing shop of Sebastian Trujillo. Las Casas had written the text ten years prior to its 1552 publication date, after his return to Spain in 1540 and on the occasion of his attempt to convince the emperor to reform the Laws of Burgos. These laws, first promulgated in 1512, organized the American colonies into a series of encomiendas. Each encomendero was allotted a land parcel and a group of Indians, whom he was expected to evangelize and who, in turn, owed him tribute and forced labor. In this system, according to Las Casas, lay the seeds of the destruyción of the Indies—understood in the Latin meaning of the verb destruere as signifying ruination, desolation, and depopulation. Encomiendas were not founded upon legitimate property rights. They led to no significant increase in efforts to instruct Indians in Christianity, and they shattered Indian communities and families, whose members were distributed among different Spanish masters according to various repartimientos. All in all, the system destroyed Indian populations, who had already been enslaved and were further weakened by forced labor and martyrized by Conquistador cruelty. Las Casas puts the number of victims of this tyranny at fifteen million: We are able to yeeld a good and certaine accompt, that there is within the space of the said 40. yeeres, by those said tyrãnies & divlish doings of the Spaniards doen to death unjustly and tyrannously more than twelve Millions of soules, men, women, and children. And I verilie do beleeve, and think not to mistake therein, that there are dead more than fifteene Millions of souls.⁴

Alain Milhou has situated Las Casas’s 1542 account at the center of a two-pronged intellectual crisis of Spanish colonization: a crisis of conscience over the eternal damnation of victims of conquistador atrocities and a legal crisis surrounding the legitimacy of Spanish sovereignty in the New World.⁵ Legal title had been based upon the doctrine of the pope’s potestas, universal sovereignty, received from Christ and transmitted to the kings of Portugal and Spain. In opposition to this doctrine, theologians at the University of Salamanca cited the Thomist philosophy of natural right, which recognized the legitimate sovereignty of indigenous rulers and required, consequently, that possession by the conquering Spaniards be based upon just titles.

In Las Casas’s text, these themes took on prophetic, even apocalyptic, overtones. By destroying Indians, through forced labor, excessive taxes and tributes, and violent massacres—by imposing upon them, that is, the most extreme hardships—the Spaniards had gravely offended God. Divine anger would lead to divine retribution. Those who drowned their victims or burned them alive would suffer these same fates themselves. But God’s vengeance would be far more sweeping than that: the destruction of the Indies, Las Casas implies, foretold the forthcoming destruction of Spain itself. This prophetic theme, forecasting the punishment of a cruel and tyrannical kingdom, was frequent in millenarian and Morisco circles. Here it is linked closely to the horrors of the conquest. It was a critique that opponents of the Catholic king of Spain could and would return to. A particularly strident prophetic moment concludes the final chapter of the Brevísima relación, on the kingdom of New Granada, and serves as a summary of Las Casas’s motives for writing. I quote here from the 1583 English translation of this passage:

I brother Bartholomewe de las Casas or Casaus, religious of the order of S. Dominicke, which by the mercie of God am come into this courte of Spayne, to sewe that the hell might bee withdrawen from the Indes, and that these innumerable soules, redeemed by the blood of Iesus Christ, shoulde not perishe for euermore without remedie, but that they might knowe their creator and bee saued: also for the care and compassion that I haue of my countrey, which is Castile, to the ende that God destroy it not for the great sinnes thereof, committed against the fayth and his honour, and against our neighbours: for certaine mens sakes notablie zealous of the glory of God, touched with compassion of the afflictions and calamities of others, followers of this court: . . . I atchieued this treatise and summarie at Valencia, the 8. of December, 1542. the force beeing mounted to the highest type of extremitie, and all the violences, tyrannies, desolations, anguishes, and calamities abovesayde, spread ouer all the Indies, where ther are any Spaniardes, although they bee more cruell in one part then they bee in an other, and more sauage, and more abhominable.⁶

The 1552 edition of the Brevísima relación opens with an Argument that evokes the text’s origins, a decade earlier, for its readers. Las Casas asserts that the acts of carnage and destruction perpetrated by the Spanish in the Indies and that he has detailed in his narrative provoked a sensation of éxtasi and a suspensión de ánimos among witnesses to them. This phrase merits close attention. It was later translated in the 1583 English translation as a kind of extasie and maze. The meaning of éxtasi in the early modern period was close to the modern stupor, a condition that left an individual temporarily disturbed or deranged. This condition could lead—as European texts suggests did happen to some at the moment of the discovery of the new American lands—from wonder to fright. Suspensión de ánimos could be rendered as a freezing or capture of one’s spirit or senses.

Las Casas continues by noting that he had been asked to set down these events in writing in order to warn the