Translating Cultures – Workshop at the Duke August Library, 26/27 June
An eighteenth-century German edition of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government (1683)
If you are an early modernist interested in translation, print and the book trade in Europe and you can make it to Wolfenbüttel this summer, drop in on our workshop on 26 and 27 June. We are gathering at the excellent Duke August Library (HAB) once in the charge of the Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) to discuss all things related to ‘Translating Cultures: Translations, Transmission and Dissemination of Printed Texts in Europe 1640-1795’.
Key works of early modern social and political thought, such as Samuel von Pufendorf’s De jure naturae et gentium (1672), John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762) were read, used and passed around by scholars and interested lay people across Europe, contributing to the spread of ideas and knowledge across countries and borders.
Yet, little is known about the translation processes and translators that enabled these texts to travel and reach their readers in their own vernacular languages. This two-day workshop therefore addresses the key role of translation in the dissemination and reception of ideas in print across Europe during the period from the mid-seventeenth century to the French Revolution.
A German edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762).
In this period, Latin lost its position as the preferred international language amongst scholars, the Republic of Letters, and educated readers. At the same time, the growth of printing in the major vernacular languages of Europe facilitated the dissemination of shared ideas and cultural identities across a more socially diverse range of readers using their native languages. The workshop will address the various processes involved in the translation, transmission and distribution of texts, while also looking at their wider cultural understanding, which involved the many ways in which the texts were acquired, read, used, passed around and received.
In order to provide a better understanding of translators as cultural agents, a particular focus will be on the selective reception and adaptation of texts to suit their new readers, employing the concept of ‘cultural translation’, as distinct from ‘straight’ or literal translation (Peter Burke, 2009).
The workshop will necessarily centre on those parts of Europe with the most lively book trades, including the British Isles, the Netherlands, France, Germany and northern Italy, but the approach will be widely comparative. Broader conceptual papers will give an insight in both theories of translations and general translation practices, and how such cultural communication may have helped to create new ideas and identities.
The eighteenth-century building of the Bibliotheca Augusta.
Some of the works discussed are available at the library itself, and you might get a chance to look at some of them while you are there. The event is convened by Prof Thomas Munck and myself with administrative support from the excellent HAB staff and funding by the DFG, and we have invited a range of excellent scholars from all over Europe in an attempt to defy Brexit and strengthen scholarly networks across borders.
Click here for the programme.
If you are interested in coming along, please contact forschung@hab.de.
Selling French books in Enlightenment Germany*
Jeffrey Freedman’s engaging Books without borders in Enlightenment Europe (2012) looks at the French book trade in the German-speaking territories during a pivotal period in the European history of ideas. This French book trade did not just cater for a small elite of princes and courtiers, it was absorbed by a variety of well-educated German speakers from scholars to doctors and lawyers and a variety of other professionals and thus played an important role in spreading and popularising the Enlightenment. By the 1770s, the French segment accounted for some ten per cent of all books sold on the German market.
Among the works sold by the German agents of French-language printers and booksellers were also many unlicensed and prohibited books. But thanks to the political fragmentation and the many administrative quirks of the German lands, censorship laws were virtually unenforceable, so that heterodox and libertine works could reach their readers relatively easily. The ban of a work often only served to make it more popular and more desirable to ‘procure the forbidden pleasure’ (118) as no one less than the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe remarked recalling the burning of a French book in his native Frankfurt.
Following in Darnton’s footsteps
Books without borders feels in many ways like a sequel to Robert Darnton’s seminal Business of Enlightenment (1979), not just because Freedman draws on the same depository of sources of the Swiss Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), which here represents ‘a slice of the French book trade in Germany’ (11) but also because he, like Darnton (who was his PhD supervisor at Princeton), offers the reader a carefully researched and well-informed book history intermixed with numerous little personal stories of the STN’s correspondents in the German lands, zooming in and out of the bigger picture.
Some of these personal stories are quite detailed, and readers might be inclined to skim read them. But this would mean to miss the colourful picture Freedman paints of the lives, successes and struggles of eighteenth-century printers and their agents. Occasionally, we even get a rare glimpse of their political inclinations and the convictions that might have driven the latter to get involved in the business of books.
Censorship and self-censorship
There is, for instance, the ‘native Parisian and Freemason’ François Mettra, who had his shop in Münz, near Cologne, and moonlighted as a ‘radical journalist’ (63); or Charles Fontaine in Mannheim, the semi-educated ‘son of a fisherman’ who is unlikely to ‘have read many of the books in his own bookshop’ (75); and finally Johann Conrad Deinet in Frankfurt, who ended up as the Empire’s book commissioner (or chief censor) despite having had various run-ins with the authorities himself for dealing in prohibited books. But as Freedman points out, ‘it would be a mistake to assume that in the eighteenth century, censors and booksellers were always on opposite sides of the ideological barricades and that if booksellers obeyed the law, it was only because they feared the consequences of transgressing it.’ (110) Many exercised a certain amount of self-censorship too, selling prohibited material, but drawing the line, say, at ‘atheism and pornography’. (110) (more…)
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