Translating English Republicanism in the European Enlightenment

I feel lucky that we have so many excellent early modern intellectual and cultural historians based at Newcastle with whom I can talk and collaborate. One of these is my friend and colleague Gaby Mahlberg who currently holds a Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship with us. In late June, Gaby organised a workshop as part of her fellowship which brought a number of excellent scholars who work on the translation of political texts to Newcastle. The workshop explored a number of themes, including: the purpose of translations; the roles of the individuals involved in producing them; the building of canons; and free speech.

As someone who has worked on translations since the very beginning of my research career, I have often reflected on their purposes. We tend to assume that the main aim of a translation is to disseminate the ideas contained within the text and that those involved in producing the translation identify the text as relevant to their own cultural and political context and audience. Yet, some of the examples discussed at the workshop suggested that this is not always the case.

Plaque commemorating Thomas Paine’s time in Lewes, East Sussex, which appears on the wall of the White Hart Inn. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Elias Buchetmann briefly discussed the partial translation of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, which appeared in Leipzig in 1791. Though it made available part of Paine's famous work to a German audience, the aim appears to have been less to disseminate Paine's ideas than to contain them, reinforcing instead the position of Paine's antagonist Edmund Burke. This is evident in the way in which the footnotes are used to contradict and correct Paine's views, so that the reader does not receive Paine's ideas in isolation but via a Burkean lens.

Ariel Hessayon's paper on the translation of Gerrard Winstanley's New Law of Righteousness raised a different question: whether a translation is always produced for circulation. We know about this German translation of Winstanley's text from the catalogue of the library of Petrus Serrarius, though no copy of the translation survives. The translator was probably Serrarius himself. We might assume that since he could read English he must have translated it to circulate among others who could not, but in the discussion we noted that this is not necessarily the case. Katie East reminded us that translation was a long-established pedagogical technique for those learning classical languages and that this could equally apply to the learning of European languages. It was also noted that translating a work could be used to develop a deeper understanding of it.

A title page from Cato’s Letters. Taken from the Internet Archive.

Several papers challenged the assumption that a translated political text is necessarily seen as relevant to the political context into which it is translated. The transmission of English republican ideas into France, which has been explored in detail by several of the workshop participants, certainly seems to fit this model. The Huguenots, who were particularly concerned with justifications for resistance, translated works by Algernon Sidney and Edmund Ludlow. Whereas Harrington's works, as Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq's paper reminded us, came into their own during the French constitutional debates of the 1790s. Several papers, however, made clear that the translation of English texts into German tells a rather different story. Both Felix Waldmann in his account of the German translations of John Locke's works and Gaby Mahlberg in her discussion of the German reception of Cato's Letters highlighted a sense among both translators and reviewers that those texts applied specifically to England, and that their insights and models could not easily be applied in a German context. Of course, this could be a rhetorical device to distance the translator, editor, or printer from potentially controversial ideas, but it is certainly true that the German states in the eighteenth century were very different from that of early modern England.

As well as thinking about the purpose of translations, several speakers touched on the role of the individuals involved in their production. Thomas Munck's paper drew attention to the fact that, despite being in France during the Revolution, Thomas Paine contributed very little to debates and events there. Though he was a member of the Convention, he hardly ever spoke, he did little while in France to promote his own works, and though he advocated certain proposals - such as a fairer tax system - he had little to say about the practical means of achieving them. In the discussion that followed we reflected on how we should classify Paine. Was he a political thinker, a politician, an activist, or more like a journalist or observer (at least during his time in France)? It was also noted that political thinkers and writers do not always make good politicians.

Similar questions were asked about Pierre Des Maizeaux who was the focus of Ann Thomson's paper. He was not an original thinker, nor was he much interested in political discussion - being more of an erudite scholar. Yet he was crucial to the dissemination of political ideas thanks to his role as an intermediary, editor and populariser.

These examples point towards a wider question of the connection between theory and practice. Today it often seems as though politicians engage very little with political thought, while academics engaged in political thinking have little influence on practical policy. Yet, it might be argued, both are necessary if improvements are to be made. Thinking about the channels that exist - or could be developed - between the two, and celebrating the intermediaries and popularisers who forge and sustain them, has potential value for us all.

Algernon Sidney by James Basire after Giovanni Battista Cipriani, 1763. National Portrait Gallery NPG D28941. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

The role or identity of key thinkers was approached from a different perspective in Tom Ashby's paper on the reception of Algernon Sidney's ideas in eighteenth-century Italy. Tom's account of the figures Sidney was associated with by different Italian thinkers at different times prompted much discussion. Initially he was linked, as one might expect, to natural law thinkers such as Samuel Pufendorf and Locke. But the Italian Jacobin Matteo Galdi associated Sidney, instead, with a more eclectic list of thinkers including Francis Bacon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the baron de Montesquieu, Gaetano Filangieri and Giambattista Vico. Galdi presented these figures as advocates of what he called 'new politics' (presumably building on Vico's 'new science'). Similarly, Christopher Hamel reminded us that the marquis de Condorcet associated Sidney with René Descartes and Rousseau in his Esquisse, and Sidney was also regularly linked in the eighteenth century with his contemporary John Hampden as examples of patriotic martyrs. While some of these links appear bizarre, and while it can be difficult to understand the thinking behind them, they do offer another potential avenue by which we can explore the tricky question of reception.

Finally, some of the papers touched on issues of free speech and toleration. Christopher Hamel drew attention to the idea of 'disinterested historians' in his paper on the French reception of Thomas Gordon's Discourses on Tacitus. Reviewers praised Gordon's tactic of simply describing, for example, 'the flattery which reigns at the court of tyrants' without feeling the need explicitly to pass judgement. It was noted that the Royal Society had emphasised the idea of disinterested scientists who would develop conclusions purely on the basis of reason, observation, and experimentation. The suggestion was presumably that historians could do something similar.

Ann Thomson reflected in a similar way on the approach of Huguenots such as Des Maizeaux and Jean Le Clerc. Des Maizeaux has sometimes been seen as advocating irreligion on account of his willingness to circulate free thinking works, but Ann suggested that his aim was really the promotion of toleration. This was reflected in the fact that he invested a great deal of time and energy into producing an edition of the works of William Chillingworth, who was a latitudinarian Anglican. Similarly, in a review of John Rushworth's collection of documents from the civil wars, Des Maizeaux noted a republican bias in the selected texts and suggested that royalist texts should be published as a complement. Jean Le Clerc also seems to have been concerned with offering a balanced account of the mid-seventeenth-century conflict. When reviewing the Earl of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England in Bibliothèque choisie he noted that it was 'very zealous' for the King's party and suggested that Edmund Ludlow's Memoirs be read to provide a contrast or comparison.

These examples reminded me of Thomas Hollis. As I have discussed previously in this blog, Hollis published not just works that he favoured but also those expressing opposing views - on the grounds that readers needed to read both and judge for themselves. Moreover, Hollis also picked up specifically on Clarendon's History, though his suggestion was that it should be read alongside the works not of Ludlow, but of John Milton.

In short, the workshop provided much stimulation for thought about the role and importance of translations and translators in adding to our understanding of early modern political cultures, and the relationship between ideas and practical action. At the same time, it prompted thought about that relationship today. What means can be used to bring the rich political thinking of academics to bear on contemporary political issues? And what specific role might 'disinterested historians' play in this task?

Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government: The Journey of a Text from Manuscript to Translation

Covid-19 has disrupted everything, including academic conferences, workshops and seminars. In the light of the necessary postponement of this year’s Translating Cultures workshop in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, I have chosen to suspend my series on Myths Concerning Republican Government for one month more in order to offer a brief account of the paper I would have given at that workshop, which reflects the new project that I am currently in the process of developing.

Scholarship on translation inevitably focuses on words. How are specific terms translated? How accurately does a translation convey the meaning and sentiment of a work? But what about the form in which those words are presented: what role does the genre that is used or the physical appearance of a text play in conveying meaning, indicating audience, and determining purpose; and what happens when a translation appears in a different form from the original? These are questions I had begun to ponder during previous Wolfenbüttel workshops.

Algernon Sidney, after Justus van Egmont, based on a work of 1663. National Portrait Gallery NPG 568. Reproduced thanks to a Creative Commons license.

For my contribution to our postponed third workshop I plan to explore these issues using Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government as a case study. Though an important seventeenth-century work with a long afterlife in England and abroad, the original 'text' was simply a collection of manuscript sheets found on Sidney's desk when he was arrested, in May 1683, for his alleged involvement in the Rye House Plot. In its journey from Sidney's desk to the French Revolution, where it generated particular interest, Discourses Concerning Government was transformed multiple times through the interventions of various collaborators.

The first stage of this was its publication as a physical book in 1698 by the editor John Toland and printer John Darby. In 1762, Thomas Hollis published a new edition in his 'Library of Liberty' and, a further thirty years on, Daniel Eaton followed suit with his own edition. Over the same period The Discourses established a French presence. Toland's edition was reviewed in the Huguenot periodical Nouvelles de la République des Lettres in 1699. Soon after, a French translation was produced by a Huguenot refugee Pierre-August Samson. It too was reviewed in Huguenot periodicals as well as being reprinted in 1755 and 1794. In 1789 Sidney's ideas were drawn to the attention of a wider French audience via Lettre de félicitation de milord Sidney aux Parisiens et à la nation françoise. Exploring the different stages of this text's journey, and changes in its form that occurred in the process, reveals interesting evidence about the relationship between the form and content of texts and translations.

The frontispiece to Toland and Darby’s 1698 edition of Sidney’s text. I am grateful to Gaby Mahlberg for providing me with this image.

First, the physical form of a text - its size, the quality of the paper, the sophistication of the frontispiece - offers indications as to its audience, purpose, and significance. Here there is a marked contrast between the different versions of The Discourses. The Toland and Hollis editions are large lavish volumes intended for the private libraries of the rich (Toland) or major university and public libraries (Hollis). Hollis went so far as to bind the works in his Library of Liberty in red leather and to emboss them with symbols of liberty such as the bonnet rouge. By contrast Daniel Eaton's edition was more modest, being part of a scheme by the London Corresponding Society to make available cheap versions of key political texts. In fact, Eaton not only published Sidney's text in full, but also included excerpts in his weekly periodical Politics for the People. The French translations too were generally smaller than Toland's original, perhaps reflecting the humble and transient lifestyle of Huguenots at the time.

Secondly, it is interesting to observe the connections these editors and translators saw between texts. Toland was largely responsible for the creation of a canon of English republican works and he deliberately associated Sidney's Discourses (written in the 1680s) with works produced during the English Revolution, emphasising their common themes. His 1704 reprint of the Discourses explicitly alerted readers to the fact that John Milton's, Edmund Ludlow's and James Harrington's works could also be found in Derby's shop. Similarly, Hollis's Library of Liberty set Sidney's text alongside works by Milton, Ludlow, Andrew Marvell and Marchamont Nedham; and the common binding used physical resemblance to reinforce the ideological connection. In sending collections of works to particular institutions Hollis was also able, as Mark Somos demonstrated to us last year, to use marginalia to create a trail of republican writings and to influence how they were read.

Pierre-August Samson’s 1702 French translation of Sidney’s Discourses. With thanks to Gaby Mahlberg for providing the image.

Thirdly there is the question of genre. Knowledge of Sidney in France came initially via the reviews in periodicals. Here, then, The Discourses was associated with Huguenot concerns - in particular Protestantism and resistance to absolute monarchy. How did this affect French readings of Sidney's text? And what about Lettre de félicitation de milord Sidney. This was not a translation, but a short work pretending that Sidney had returned from the dead to counsel the French. Presenting Sidney's ideas in the form of a letter addressed to the revolutionaries allowed those ideas to be targeted at their concerns. Content and form, then, are inextricably bound together. To fully understand the one - we must also pay close attention to the other.

Transcultural Conversations

Having just returned from a fascinating conference at the European University Institute (EUI) near Florence I feel I must interrupt my series of posts on Republicanism to offer some reflections on that event.

Villa Salviati. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

The conference was expertly organised by four PhD students based at the EUI: Thomas Ashby, Ela Bozok, Muireann McCann and Elisavet Papalexopoulou. It was held in the beautiful Villa Salviati. Medici imagery appears throughout the villa in reference to the family link via Lucrezia, the wife of Jacoo di Giovanni Salviati who owned the villa in the sixteenth century and whose renovations determined the current layout. Contributors to the conference were lucky enough to be shown the private chapel that Jacopo constructed, probably for his daughter's wedding, with its beautifully decorated ceiling bearing heraldic devices alluding to the alliance between the Medici and Salviati families.

The ceiling of the private chapel at Villa Salviati. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

The conference theme, 'transcultural conversations', is not only academically popular at present (as evidenced by the excellent papers), but also has potential contemporary relevance. My own work in this area has tended to focus on the crossing of linguistic boundaries particularly through translations. In my paper I reflected on this work arguing that to fully understand the impact of translations we need to go beyond the conventional texts to look not only at  explicit and acknowledged translations, but also at works that perform similar functions; to consider the form and materiality as well as the content of the text; and to look at the uses to which translations and associated texts were put. The conference organisers and participants very deliberately chose the term 'transcultural' rather than 'transnational' and took a broad approach.

Some papers did consider conversations that took place across national and linguistic boundaries - for example Arnab Dutta's paper on discussions between Bengali and German scholars and intellectuals in the 1920s and 30s over the meaning of the term 'kultur' and Simone Muraca's paper on cultural diplomacy between Italy and Portugal in the same period. Others considered conversations that occurred across confessional divides. Thomas Pritchard's paper on pan-European Anti-Spanish polemic highlighted the distinction between Anti-Catholic and specifically Anti-Spanish arguments. Concerns about the establishment of a Spanish universal monarchy were articulated not just by Protestant authors but also by Catholics such as Trajano Boccalini and Paolo Sarpi, whose works were then translated into English and used to further English campaigns. Such conversations could even cross the religious/secular divide as Agathe de Margerie's paper on the Austrian Paulus Gesellschaft made clear. She showed how in the late 1960s attempts were made by the group to open up a dialogue between Catholic and Marxist thinkers and the ideologies they embraced. Other papers explored conversations across philosophical boundaries, as in Nicholas Devlin's paper on 'The continental Marxist origins of American totalitarian theory' and Luke Illott's paper exploring Michel Foucault's crossing of the boundary between the English and Continental philosophical traditions. Moreover, Benjamin Thomas, in his paper 'Intra-Party Contestation: Ideological Transformations and Neoliberalism', emphasised the importance of considering conversations within, as well as between, ideological groups. In a number of these cases, conversations took place across multiple cultural boundaries simultaneously.

The means by or through which these conversations occurred were equally complex. While some participants focused on the reading, translation, and writing of published texts, others engaged with conversations that took place in private correspondence or even face-to-face. Thus, the kind of 'conversation' that Hugo Bonin explored in his paper on  Henry Reeve's English translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and the British reception of the work that resulted from it, was very different from the face-to-face encounters discussed by Dutta's Indian and German intellectuals or de Margerie's Marxists and Catholics. In both types of conversation, however, it was noted that the engagement could be either monolingual or multilingual (the conversations Dutta described took place in English, French, and German as well as in various Indian languages).

Alex Collins's paper looked more theoretically at methods of communication. He argued that the pioneering seventeenth-century scientist Henry Oldenburg expressed an explicit preference for knowledge gained via acquaintance (for example news that came directly from his contacts) as compared with knowledge by description (such as the information he might gain from newspapers). For Oldenburg the advantage lay primarily in the importance of trust in knowledge formation. In our discussion, however, we also considered the fact that direct engagement between people tends to encourage cultural conversations that are multi-directional rather than ones in which ideas flow in only one direction.

Portrait of Henry Oldenburg, attributed to Jan van Cleve. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

All of this complexity inevitably generates obstacles to communication. These might include problems of vocabulary and language. Dutta noted that initially there was no Bengali word for kultur, it simply had to be transliterated from the German. But there was another word from the west of India, 'Sanskrita', the etymology of which derived from the notion of krishe/krishti or cultivated ground, which brought fresh connotations to the Indian version of the kultur/civilisation debate. Similarly, Bonin noted that 'democracy' had different connotations in English from how the word was used in French. For British readers it still tended to be understood to refer to a type of regime, whereas in Tocqueville's French account it had a broader meaning, referring to a relatively egalitarian form of society.

One way around obstacles to communication is to use different formats for the transmission of ideas.  This was a particular focus of Panel 2 'Transfer through print, visual arts and music'. As Lia Brazil demonstrated, English pamphlets engaging with the South African War took very different forms, with the strong graphics and poetry of the Stop the War Committee publications contrasting starkly with the much more plain, cautious approach of those produced by the South African Conciliation Committee. Here, form was probably designed to mirror content, with the Conciliation Committee publications engaging in much deeper legal and philosophical debate, which Brazil expertly analysed. Arthur Duhé focused to an even greater degree on form in his paper 'Affective transfer in revolutionary times'. He noted how engravings and songs were used to convey the emotional aspect of the 1848 revolutions - and particularly the impact of the deaths of revolutionary martyrs - to foreign audiences. Duhé argued persuasively that historians of revolutions need to pay more attention to visual and musical sources, their production and material transfers. In a later panel Jessica Sequeira picked up this theme. Her protagonists - Pedro Prado and Antonio Castro Leal - did not merely translate poetry, but actually went so far as to invent an Afghan poet Karez-i-Roshan. As Sequeira argued, this playfulness was not simply a prank or joke, but had a deeper meaning and resonance as a deliberate method of enacting a transcultural conversation.

Il Duomo. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Other contributors explored other means by which different communities could dialogue with each other when holding conflicting views and opinions. Luke Illot made a strong case for the fact that it was Foucault's reading of the Oxford Analytic philosophers - and the conception of language that he derived from that reading - that provided a basis on which he could open a dialogue between the English and Continental philosophical traditions, one which had seemed impossible at the time of the Royaumont Conference in 1958. Highlighting the contingency that often facilitates or frustrates these conversations, Illot noted that it was in Tunisia, and via the library of Daniel Defert, that Foucault gained access to these ideas. Similarly, Anna Adorjána referred in her paper 'Conceptualising and experiencing (inter) nationalism. The Case of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary in 1903' to Martin Fuchs's concept of the 'third idiom'. This is an overarching or higher level discourse that provides space for communication in a conflicted situation. In the case of the Hungarian Social Democrats, international class struggle performed this role, but in cases discussed by other participants human rights or religion enacted a similar function.

Yesterday's 'Brexit Day' reflects the huge political and ideological divisions that not only affect Britain's relations with the rest of Europe but also run right through the UK itself. Now, more than ever, it would seem we need to find ways to engage in positive and constructive transcultural conversations. The diverse and myriad ways in which such conversations have taken place across more than five centuries is perhaps grounds for some small hope and optimism.

Translating Cultures

The main square in Wolfenbüttel. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley.

Last year I attended a 'Translating Cultures' workshop organised by Gaby Mahlberg and Thomas Munck. I found it so collegial and thought-provoking that I was delighted to be invited to attend the follow-up this October. The occasion did not disappoint. The location is one where early-modern historians instantly feel at home: the beautiful Lower Saxony town of Wolfenbüttel has a remarkably well preserved collection of 17th century houses, complete with mottos carved into the lintels. And the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB), which hosted our workshop, is a wonderful research library based around the collection put together by Duke August the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley.

The HAB and its director, Peter Burschel, and head of scientific programmes, Volker Bauer, were very hospitable hosts, but the positive and stimulating atmosphere also owed much to the excellent conference organisers, Gaby Mahlberg and Thomas Munck, and to the other participants, who without exception delivered thoughtful and engaging papers. Gaby has offered a summary of the workshop here, but I would like to take this opportunity to offer my own reflections on some of the themes that surfaced during the two days. In particular, the papers provided food for thought on three issues that I have been pondering myself recently: language, genre, and materiality.

Given our focus on translation, it is not surprising that several papers touched on the limitations of language and the difficulty sometimes of conveying a particular idea or concept in a foreign language. Lázló Kontler in his paper on the translation of Montesquieu into Hungarian, pointed out that 'parliament' is a difficult word to translate into Hungarian. It ended up being translated as 'word house' which while alluding to the etymology of the word, seemed rather quaint and provoked smiles around the room. Several papers developed this point to suggest that certain ideas or concepts might be easier to express in one language than in another. In his paper on the Book of Job, Asaph Ben-Tov noted that, while this was not (as some in the early-modern period had believed) a Hebrew translation from an Ancient Arabic source, there was nevertheless a sense in which the ideas it contained could be more easily understood in Arabic than in Hebrew. Nor is this just a question of the written word. Jaya Remond in discussing colonial botanical texts, raised the idea that images might themselves be viewed as a language made up of lines and dots, and that a picture might evoke an object much more effectively than could ever be achieved in words. Rachel Foxley went even further in exploring language, translated words, and the power they wield. She looked at the translation of terms from Latin and Greek as a way into thinking about how the language of innovation and revolution developed in seventeenth-century England. She showed that, while the Roman term 'novae res' evoked a sense of innovation that was linked to the restless crowd and to demagoguery, this was set against an Aristotelian understanding of the means by which more gradual change by the authorities might bring about revolution. In this way, ancient languages of innovation were deployed by both sides in the build up to the English Civil War.

Portrait of Aphra Behn by Robert White, after John Riley line engraving, published 1716. National Portrait Gallery, NPG D30183. Reproduced under a creative commons license.

Not only were specific terms or languages felt to be most appropriate for conveying particular concepts or ideas, but the choice of genre may also be important. In her paper on Aphra Behn's translations of French works, Amelia Mills made the fascinating observation that Behn's version of Paul Tallemant's Le Voyage de L'Isle d'Amour not only translated the language from French to English, but also transformed an original prose work interspersed with small sections of verse into a work that was entirely in poetic form. As a group we speculated about Behn's motivations in doing so. Perhaps she viewed poetry as higher form and was using the transformation to show off her skills, or perhaps she felt poetry to be a more appropriate mode of writing for a woman at that time.

Several papers noted the fact that in the early-modern period historical writing was often seen as a good vehicle for the transmission of political ideas. Helmer Helmers described the deliberate efforts of the Dutch government to produce histories of the Dutch Revolt for European dissemination. The state invested more than 40,000 guilders in histories of this key event that were translated into German, French, and Latin. Emanuel van Meteren's history of the Dutch Revolt proved particularly popular going through 111 editions and translations between 1596 and 1647 including no fewer than 74 German versions. Almost as popular were the Italian translations of the historical works of William Robertson, examined by Alessia Castagnino, with more than 50 translations appearing in the early-modern period. In her paper on the 1627 French translation of Francis Bacon's History of the Reign of Henry VII, Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq delved into the question of why that work should have been of interest to the French at that time, concluding that the reign of Henry VII offered a useful antidote to French absolutism. It held a revealing mirror to Louis XIII in presenting a King who sought to reconcile warring parties and to promote religious concord.

French translation of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government by P. A. Samson. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Several participants touched on another genre of writings which while not translations in themselves, are closely connected to them - reviews. For Thomas Munck these offer one valuable way of gaining an insight into the 'imagined community of readers' that can prove so elusive to those of us working on the early-modern period. Reviews were presented as particularly useful in this regard as they need not be purely national in focus, and therefore when dealing with translated works may provide insight into transnational communities of readers. Thomas - and Gaby Mahlberg in her paper on German reviews of Algernon Sidney's Discourses - noted that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reviews start making comments about the nature and quality of the translations themselves, suggesting an emerging understanding of what was considered a good translation. In my own paper on the reception of James Harrington's ideas in revolutionary France I pointed out that while reviews are not translations, a review in a different language from the original work can perform some of the same functions, not least in providing an account of the argument and key points of the work for a foreign audience and many early-modern reviews included lengthy quotations translated directly from the text, thereby constituting at least a partial translation. Both French and German reviews of Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government that appeared in the early eighteenth century are a good example in this regard. The idea that the basic content of a text could be disseminated without an actual translation appearing was also picked up by Lázló Kontler who noted that Montesquieu's ideas had already been much debated in Hungary long before the first full translation of The Spirit of the Laws appeared in 1833.

Finally, various papers touched on the materiality of texts, including translations, and what texts as physical objects and associated artefacts might reveal about the aims, audience, and reception of texts. William Robertson, Alessia Castagnino explained, deliberately laid out the original text of his history of Scotland so that it could appeal to two distinct groups of readers - on the one hand scholars and on the other a more general, casual public - placing the notes and other scholarly apparatus in such a way that they could be accessed, but did not interfere with the flow of the narrative. The Italian translators, however, eschewed this method, instead producing separate translations for different audiences. Crocchi's 1765 translation was deliberately aimed at government and administrative officials, men of letters and science, whereas Rossi's 1779-80 translation was directed at a wider audience. The absence of illustrations and other supplementary elements ensured that the volume was cheap, costing the same as just 24 eggs, prompting Alessia to joke that  Italians could choose between Robertson's history and a very large omelette.

The interior of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley

A number of the translations discussed at the workshop were also linked to or associated with other objects. For example, the Collection Magliabechi, put together by Raimondi on behalf of the Medici and discussed by Luisa Simonutti, involved the gathering and production not just of books but also of seeds for the Medici garden. Moreover, the collection includes not just the books themselves, but also some of the original plates that were used to produce the lavish images that adorned them. As far as I am aware, Thomas Hollis did not send seeds from England to Europe or America, but he sent more or less everything else. Moreover, as Mark Somos demonstrated in his paper, Hollis sought to link texts with other texts, and with objects and networks. This is evident from the extensive marginalia that he added to the copies of books he sent to libraries around the globe. As Mark argued, Hollis's aim was to guide his readers through the works, pointing them to related works (sometimes even giving page numbers) and creating a trail for them through republican writings. I was particularly fascinated by the observation that his technical comments on the works of John Milton (an author almost always featured in the donations he sent) often refer to Harrington, suggesting that Hollis wanted his audience to read Milton through the lens of The Commonwealth of Oceana.

It is a sign of a good workshop that it prompts one to ponder new projects and future work. It is testimony to just how good this one was that I left eager to pick up Hollis's trail for myself and to follow his texts across Europe and North America. For now, though, I think I will have to remain content with looking forward to next year's workshop.

Translating Cultures

Exterior of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley.

In June 2018 I attended two excellent conferences at which I was able to present some of the findings of the research I have completed during my British Academy fellowship. It seems appropriate, then, to reflect on those conferences and my thoughts about them. I cannot, in two blogposts, do justice to the rich nature of all the papers. Rather I will draw out certain themes that struck me as pertinent to my work and demanding further reflection. This blogpost will deal with the first conference of the week, which took place in Wolfenbüttel, Germany on 26-27 June. In September's blogpost I will deal with the Graduate Conference on the History of Political Thought, which was held in London on 28-29 June.

'Translating Cultures: Translation, Transmission and Dissemination of Printed Texts in Europe, 1640-1795' was held at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel and organised by Thomas Munck from the University of Glasgow and Gaby Mahlberg, an independent historian who now also works as a journalist in Berlin. Fittingly, the idea for a workshop on translation arose when these two academics met at the Herzog August Bibliothek when they were both carrying out research there, thanks to the institution's generous research fellowship programme. This setting was the perfect place in which to hold such a workshop since it is Germany's national library for the seventeenth century. It owes this distinction to the fact that it houses one of the few intact seventeenth-century libraries still in existence, much of which was collected by Duke August (1579-1666) after whom the library is named.

Interior of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley

During the course of the workshop, we took time out to be given a tour of the library. We were shown the books, many still bound in their original white coverings, which are organised according to eight themes and placed on the shelves by theme and in height order. We were also shown the catalogue that Duke August produced himself and the wonderful seventeenth-century book wheel which was made to hold it. We learnt that, in its original location, the library was housed immediately above the stables. It struck me that Harrington would have appreciated this arrangement, given his notion that the foundation of power is grounded in land (and in the military force - including horses - needed to protect it), but that at the level of the superstructure, power also comprises authority and that this requires reason - including the knowledge found in books.

Duke August's catalogue. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley.

In his opening paper, Thomas Munck introduced several important themes. One of these was the idea of tracing when key works in the history of political thought were translated into particular European languages, in order to uncover the motivations behind those translations. I was already aware that a number of English republican works were translated into French during the French Revolution. I included a list of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century French translations of English republican writings in an appendix to my last monograph, which shows that at least ten such works were published  between 1789 and 1801. Munck's research identifies at least another five English political works that also appeared during that period. More precise research is also revealing. As noted in the papers that Miriam-Isabelle Ducroq and I gave at the workshop, the two French translations of Harrington's works that were published during 1795 were directly relevant to the very particular circumstances of that year - and especially the debates over the introduction of a bicameral legislature and the form it ought to take.

As well as translations being inspired by particular circumstances, works also sometimes had to be adapted to fit new contexts. In the case of scientific translations this could involve having to make careful choices regarding vocabulary, or even updating the original text to reflect advances in scientific knowledge since the original work had appeared. Sietske Fransen described examples of the former in German translations of the works of Jan Baptist van Helmont, where the lack of an established German vocabulary for the new science forced translators to give new meanings to words. Similarly, Lázló Kontler found that German translations of Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes were adapted in order to reflect subsequent advances in the discipline.

Books from Duke August's library. Photograph by Rachel Hammersley

In a parallel way, translations of political works sometimes distorted the meaning of the original text in order to better fit new circumstances or the concerns of the author.  Munck addressed this in relation to André Morellet's translation of Cesare Beccaria's work on crime and punishment, raising the question of at what point translations become completely distinct works. Gaby Mahlberg demonstrated that the German translations of Algernon Sidney's Discourses produced in 1793 and 1795 were quite different from the seventeenth-century original. Those texts were edited, cut and moderated, so as to turn Sidney from a defender of rebellion into a proponent of good citizenship. The text became a defence of moderate constitutional monarchy against the radical forces of the French Revolution (ironically at exactly the time when the French were using him and his associates to endorse their revolution). In a similar way, Wyger Velema showed how Dutch translations of the classics were employed on both sides of the patriot debate in The Netherlands in the late eighteenth century. 

Distortions could also arise and be perpetuated through the common practice of one translation being used, in place of the original, as the base text for later translations. Asaph Ben-Tov explored an extreme example of this in his discussion of early modern translations of the Koran into European languages - many of which were produced by scholars who knew little or no Arabic.

Distortion is also linked to another theme that loomed large in our discussions: audience. Both Alessia Castagnino, in her consideration of the theory and practice of translation in eighteenth-century Italy, and Luc Borot, in his comparison of two translations of Thomas Hobbes's De Cive, commented on this issue. Castagnino emphasised the fact that one common justification for producing a translation is to make a book that is deemed useful available to a wider public - including those whose linguistic skills may be limited. Borot noted that different translators may aim at different audiences such as those with greater technical knowledge and experience as compared with the general public; and that these decisions impact directly on the translation itself. 

Yet the relationship between translator and audience can be complex. Both Helmer Helmers and Rachel Foxley cited examples in their papers of works which might be read differently depending on the linguistic skills of the reader. In the case of the diplomatic translations examined by Helmers, some of the jokes presented in those works would only be fully understood by multilingual readers. Similarly, Foxley noted that readers of Marchamont Nedham's The Case of the Commonwealth would have a different experience of the text depending on whether or not they understood Latin. Nedham's translation of Juvenal's famous tag 'Panem & Circenses' as 'Bread and Quietnesse', rather than the more commonly used 'bread and circuses', will have produced a rather different understanding without knowledge of the original Latin.

Finally, several papers reminded us of the importance of paying attention not just to the words, but also to translation as a business and books as material objects. Ann Thomson's study of Pierre Desmaizeaux offered insight into some of the causes of translators distorting original texts, by reminding us that the extent of their freedom could be seriously limited by agents and publishers. Mark Somos's fascinating paper on census bibliographies, which trace and describe all extant copies of a particular work, revealed the insights that can be drawn from such research. This led me back to thinking about Harrington and to wonder what a census bibliography of his works might reveal.