‘Reasons of State for any Author’ Common Sense, Translation, and the International Republic of Letters

Este ensayo es la versión del autor, previa a la revisión por los editores, y a la versión final, que será publicada en el libro titulado provisionalmente 'A Maturing Market. The Iberian World in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century', editado por Alexander S. Wilkinson y Alejandra Ulla Lorenzo (en prensa para Brill, 2017). El autor desea expresar su agradecimiento a los editores y a la editorial por conceder permiso para publicar esta versión previa.This is the pre-peer-review, author’s version of a book chapter that will be published in "A Maturing Market. The Iberian World in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century", edited by Alexander S. Wilkinson and Alejandra Ulla Lorenzo (forthcoming in Brill, 2017). The author is grateful to the editors and the publisher for permission to issue this version.This chapter will focus on several case studies that illustrate the nature of the material and intellectual networks of authors, editors, publishers and translators who laid the foundations of the international republic of letters as a virtual third space between the inveterate system of aristocratic patronage and the growing mass of urban consumers. It shall first trace the evolution of the new conditions within the book market and the concerns they raised among authors through a comparison of some texts produced in England by Gabriel Harvey (ca. 1552-1631) and his circles with the pragmatic political vocabulary displayed a generation later by Antonio López de Vega (ca. 1586-1655) in Spain. Whereas Harvey and López de Vega shared the influence of international Ciceronianism, one of the most remarkable differences between them lies in the shift from the moral concerns of sixteenth-century humanism to the more pragmatic and disenchanted views expressed in the languages of neostoicism and Tacitism. The second part of this chapter will then examine the consequences deriving from the development of a new international market for the mass consumption of cultural products, chiefly printed matter, but also the public commercial stage. Situated between its status as a new form of mass entertainment in thriving urban milieus and its canonization as printed goods through the publication of the most successful among these plays, the public stage constitutes a uniquely dynamic phenomenon that illustrates these literary, intellectual and material developments. The international republic of letters stood as a heterogeneous and adiaphoric public space that grew out of these manifold tensions. The interdisciplinary discourse that created and regulated it was woven with the languages of moral philosophy, politics and theology, as well as the vocabulary of traditional literary doctrine. Its agents were–to use an expression coined by Antonio López de Vega—men of understanding engaged in a transnational conversation sustained by common language and common sense. This pragmatic and consensual view of language and knowledge resulted from the intersection between the new trends of cultural and literary mercantilism, on the one hand, and more traditional aesthetic theories founded upon the discourse of what David Summers has called Renaissance Naturalism, on the other

The picaresque, translation, and the history of the novel

A lecture for a seminar on "Intercultural Communication", at the Centro Mediterráneo, University of Granada, June 28th 2013.The picaresque novel as a generic category originated in the Spanish sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It then spread all over Europe, exerting a particularly important influence towards the end of the seventeenth, and above all the eighteenth century in Germany, France and England. Given its status as one of the founding narrative discourses of modernity, it appears inextricably tied to the emergence of the novel: hence its importance when it comes to an assessment of the origins and evolution of certain varieties of European late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century prose fiction. The fate of the picaresque after the eighteenth century is subject to controversy, but there is no doubt that its influence and presence diminished. Like the concept of the picaresque itself, the role of the international picaresque in the development of prose fiction must be studied in parallel with different national traditions that addressed similar concerns and responded to the same early modern stimuli. The picaresque crystallizes in its plots and in its language concerns and paradoxes that are inherently modern and transnational. These include the moral, political, and economic foundations for the values that regulate the relations between the early modern self and society. The main concerns of the picaresque include poverty, vagrancy, crime, prostitution and in general the struggle of individuals for material survival and social legitimacy in a social environment which upholds lofty ethical standards as it also requires the reckless pursuit of self-interest for mere survival. Its autobiographical, first-person narrator also brings to the foreground the paradoxes of narrative representation, and the intricate strategies that the picaresque devices to verbalize all these concerns constitute founding moments in the history of the novel. Students and researchers will find that, after a general survey of the existing scholarship, the best model for an approach to the picaresque is one that contemplates it as part of a larger network. This heterogeneity requires an interdisciplinary approach that must include literary theory and semiotics, the history of translation, cultural and gender studies, as well as social, political and economic history

TRANSLATION AND ENGLISH LITERARY HISTORY

Schurink, Fred (ed.) (2011). Tudor Translation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 248 pp. Gillespie, Stuart (2011). English Translation and Classical Reception. Towards a New Literary History. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 208 pp. Reynolds, Matthew (2011). The Poetry of Translation. From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 384 pp

Translation and English literary history. A bibliographical essay.

This is a preliminary version of an article which will be published in Sendebar. I am grateful to the editors of the journal for the permission granted to publish this preview in our institutional repository.Artículo publicado en: Sendebar, 21: 373-378 (2012). Issn: 1130-5509

Los problemas de Villalobos: Medical Humanism, Translation and Early Modern Prose Fiction

A previous version of a paper presented at the "Translation and the Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern Science" Colloquium, at the Warburg Institute, London, Friday 28 June, 2013.The Spanish doctor Francisco López de Villalobos (1473-1549) shared an interest in translation with fellow humanist physicians like Andrés Laguna or François Rabelais. His Spanish rendering of Plautus’s Amphitryon, first published in Alcalá de Henares by Brocar in 1517, was printed again as part of Los problemas de Villalobos: que tracta de cuerpos naturales y morales, y dos dialogos de medicina: y el tratado de las tres grandes y una cancion y la comedia de Amphitrion (Zamora, 1543). As its unwieldy title reveals, this new volume included a large variety of texts. Next to Plautus’s comedy the reader could find moral and political treatises, essays on natural philosophy, dialogues peppered with comic stories, and passages that verged on the picaresque. Villalobos’s abundant comments to his translation of Amphitryon moralized the plot, provided contextual information, and glossed the medical import implicit in some of its passages. This colourful array of texts is interspersed with autobiographical episodes which displayed his disenchantment with life at the Castilian court where he served, and also hinted at the harassment that Villalobos arguably suffered because of his Jewish converso background. Its tragicomic satura of serious and humorous matter, its combination of poetry, dialogue, narrative episodes and essayistic prose turns Los problemas into a fascinating text that defies categorization. This paper aims to explore how this peculiar admixture responded to a growing demand from an increasing readership that sought to be both enlightened and amused, and how it also coincided with a crucial moment in the early modern canon that pointed to the development of prose fiction as an essentially protean and heterogeneous genre

Communication and Mobility across the Mediterranean

This is a previous version of an article that will be included in a forthcoming volume published under the auspices of the Inter-University Network for Global History (GlobHis) at the University of Florence (José María Pérez Fernández, Giorgio Riello & Giovanni Tarantino, Encounters at Sea: Paper, Objects and Sentiments in Motion Across the Mediterranean. An intellectual journey through the collections of the Riccardiana Library in Florence). This volume grew out of an exhibition held at the Riccardiana Library in Florence, 13 February–13 March 2020, which was in turn one of the activities organized as part of COST Action 18140 People in Motion: Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean (1492-1923) – or ‘PIMo’ for short. The exhibition complemented the symposium Encounters at Sea: Material and Symbolic Mobility across the Mediterranean, also organized by PIMo. The research that led to the elaboration of this essay and also to the different introductions for each of the respective sections in the forthcoming book was made possible by a STSM scholarship from the PIMo COST Action. I am grateful to its chair, Giovanni Tarantino (who first proposed the idea of organizing an exhibition alongside the conference), for giving me the opportunity to work in a place like the Biblioteca Riccardiana. I must also express my gratitude to its director, Francesca Gallori, and librarians Teresa Sansone and Rossella Giovannetti, for their kind and generous support during my stay at the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi.People in Motion COST Action 18140 (http://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/

How to Do Things with Paper in King Lear

EDMUND: If the matter of this paper be certain, you have mighty business in hand CORNWALL: True or false, it hath made thee Earl of Gloucester. (King Lear, 3.5.15-18) This exchange in the third act of Shakespeare’s King Lear reveals the role of paper as a trope that denotes the messages recorded in this medium alongside their performative power. Edmund, the arch-villain in the play, plots to betray his father, Gloucester, and his half-brother, Edgar, for the sake of self-promotion at court. He does so by weaving an intricate web of letters that manipulate the opinions and views of powerful political agents at court. It is no less significant that in his exchange with Cornwall, the latter claims that the consequences of the “matter of this paper” will take effect irrespective of their veracity. That paper will, indeed, will bring about Gloucester’s downfall and elevate Edmund to his title instead (1.2.1-182, in particular 1.2.23-61). Paper matters of this sort do not just constitute the semiotic infrastructure for Edmund’s strategy: they also drive the overall plot of a play which rests upon the recurrent exchange of messages. Some of the key issues in King Lear involve besides that eminently Shakespearean obsession: the troubled relation between words and deeds, language and truth.Cost Action 18140 People in Motion (http://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/

Turcimanarie e carte d’ogni sorte: Translation, Trade, and Paper in Sixteenth Century Venice

The heading of Riccardiana MS 2523 proclaims its nature as a record of prices and tariffs for merchants and goods trading with Damasco and the rest of Siria. Dated on November 25th 1534, the "Tariffe mercantili del Levante" was put together under the supervision of patricians who belonged to some of the most prominent Venetian families. This tariffa was negotiated, drafted and enforced by the Venetian establishment for its deals with the Levant, and it is proof of the sophisticated administrative structures that Venice had developed to regulate and run the exchange of goods, the movement of people, and the circulation of value. This control required an equally complex and sophisticated system for the recording of information and its systematic processing so that the same standards could be applied over different products, locations, and practices. By registering and quantifying expenses incurred by translations and translators, it also incorporates the cost involved in the practice of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic exchange of information—a sine qua non for international trade. It incorporates, in other words, data regarding the material foundations of trade (goods, their prices, their weights and measures) alongside its inescapable immaterial dimension, by quantifying and listing expenses in translation (turcimanarie) and translators

Translation, diplomacy and espionage: new insights into James Mabbe’s career

Artículo pendiente de publicar en la revista "Translation and Literature" (Edinburg University Press).James Mabbe is arguably the most eminent among early modern English Hispanists. His translations included Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina, Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, and an influential rendering of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache. This article aims to focus on less known translations, and to demonstrate that a proper understanding of Mabbe’s career and production requires a careful analysis of his context and his contacts. A survey of Mabbe’s intriguing political, religious and diplomatic connections will provide new insights into his career. Thus, the political activities of his patrons—e.g. Sir John Digby, 1st Earl of Bristol, or Sir John Strangways—will show his work under a new light. A comparative chronology of his publications and activities with political and religious controversies in Madrid and in London, hand in hand with an examination of unpublished manuscript material, will contribute to provide plausible hypotheses about the agenda that lurked behind his choice of texts and patrons, as well as about the controversial topic of Mabbe’s religious allegiance. This survey will display Mabbe’s activities as part of larger networks of publishers, translators, diplomats, intelligencers and politicians. Mabbe’s position within these international circles constitutes a most interesting case study to illustrate the of intricate networks that lay at the foundations of cultural, political and religious exchanges and controversies, not just between England and Spain, but also all over Europe, in the early decades of the seventeenth century

Spanish Bawds and Quixotic Libraries Adventures and Misadventures in Early English Hispanism and World Literature

This is the author’s version of an article which has been accepted for publication in the journal Comparative Literature (ISSN 0010-4124) (ca. March 2017). I wish to express my gratitude to the editor of the journal, and to its publisher Duke University Press, for their permission to publish this previous version at the University of Granada institutional repository.This essay focuses on two early English Hispanists, James Mabbe (1571/2–1642?) and Thomas Percy (1729–1811), who illustrate different stages in the pre-history of Comparative and World Literature. It will look into their appropriation of La Celestina and Don Quijote as case studies for the use of certain tropes to legitimize the traffic of political and cultural capital involved in the creation of domestic and transnational literary canons. These tropes include conquest and war, finance and trade, community and language as currency. The networks throughout which their texts circulated, their different formats and means of production, all exemplify the mechanisms for the establishment of an International Republic of Letters. This led in turn to the gradual emergence of a World Canon created under the auspices Enlightened Universalism, but also driven to a considerable extent by the self-interested policies of cultural imperialism