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The Routledge handbook of translation studies and linguistics First Published. Edition Malmkjær
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SPANISH TRANSLATION STUDIES
Written by leading experts in the area, The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Translation Studies brings together original contributions representing a culmination of the extensive research to date within the field of Spanish Translation Studies.
The Handbook covers a variety of translation related issues, both theoretical and practical, providing an overview of the field and establishing directions for future research. It starts by looking at the history of translation in Spain, the Americas during the colonial period and Latin America, and then moves on to discuss well-established areas of research such as literary translation and audiovisual translation, at which Spanish researchers have excelled. It also provides state-of-the-art information on new topics such as the interface between translation and humour on the one hand, and the translation of comics on the other.
This Handbook is an indispensable resource for postgraduate students and researchers of translation studies.
Roberto A. Valdeón is Professor in English Studies at the University of Oviedo, Spain.
África Vidal is Professor of Translation at the University of Salamanca, Spain.
ROUTLEDGE SPANISH LANGUAGE HANDBOOKS
Series Editors: Manel Lacorte, The University of Maryland, USA, and Javier Muñoz-Basols, The University of Oxford, UK
Routledge Spanish Language Handbooks provide comprehensive and state-of-the-art overviews of topics in Hispanic Linguistics, Hispanic Applied Linguistics and Spanish Language Teaching. Editors are well-known experts in the field. Each volume contains speciallycommissioned chapters written by leading international scholars. Each Handbook includes substantial pieces of research that analyse recent developments in the discipline, both from a theoretical and an applied perspective. Their user-friendly format allows the reader to acquire a panoramic perspective of selected topics in the fields of Spanish language and linguistics.
Published in English or in Spanish, the Handbooks are an indispensable reference tool for undergraduate and postgraduate students, teachers, university lecturers, professional researchers, and university libraries worldwide. They are also valuable teaching resources to accompany textbooks, research publications, or as self-study material. Proposals for the series will be welcomed by the Series Editors.
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SPANISH AS A HERITAGE LANGUAGE
Edited by Kim Potowski
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SPANISH LANGUAGE TEACHING
Metodologías, contextos y recursos para la enseñanza del español L2
Edited by Javier Muñoz-Basols, Elisa Gironzetti and Manel Lacorte
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SPANISH TRANSLATION STUDIES
Edited by Roberto A. Valdeón and África Vidal
For more information about this series please visit: www.routledge.com/RoutledgeSpanish-Language-Handbooks/book-series/RSLH
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SPANISH
TRANSLATION STUDIES
Edited by Roberto A. Valdeón and África Vidal
SPANISH LIST ADVISOR: JAVIER MUÑOZ-BASOLS
First published 2019 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
The right of Roberto A. Valdeón and África Vidal to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-1-138-69801-7 (hbk)
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23 Translation policies from/into the official languages in Spain 429
Montserrat Bacardí
24 A bibliometric overview of translation studies research in Spanishspeaking countries 454
Javier Franco Aixelá and Sara Rovira-Esteva
Index 500
CONTRIBUTORS
Montserrat Bacardí is a professor at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). She has published articles on the history of literature and translation and various books, including Cent anys de traducció al català (1891–1990) (1998), Anna Murià. El vici d’escriure (2004), El Quixot en català (2006), Catalans a Buenos Aires (2009), La traducció catalana sota el franquisme (2012), Gràcia Bassa, poeta, periodista i traductora (2016) and, with Pilar Godayol, Diccionari de la traducció catalana (dir.) (2011) and Les traductores i la tradició (2013).
Georges L. Bastin is a full professor of Translation Studies at the Université de Montréal. He is a leading researcher in the field of the translation history of Latin America. He has authored several books and papers in various refereed journals. He is the President of the Canadian Association of Translation Schools. He is the editor of Meta since 2014 and he heads the Research Group on Translation History in Latin America at his university since 2004.
Robert Neal Baxter holds a PhD in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Vigo, where he has taught consecutive and simultaneous interpreting (English-Galician) since 1995. He has also worked extensively as a professional freelance translator and interpreter. His research interests include interpreter training and the sociolinguistic impact of interpreting and translating on subordinated (‘minority’) languages, with special emphasis on Galician and Breton, as well as the interplay between translation and gender.
Ovidi Carbonell Cortés is a full professor of Translation Studies, University of Salamanca, Spain. He has also taught at the universities of Salford (UK), James Madison (US), Benito Juárez (Oaxaca, Mexico) and Hamad bin Khalifa (Doha, Qatar). He is author of Übersetzen ins Andere (2002), Traducción y cultura: de la ideología al texto (1999) and Traducir al Otro: traducción, exotismo, poscolonialismo (1997). Some of his edited works include, The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture (2018, with Sue-Ann Harding), Presencias japonesas (2014), Intercultural Translation in a Global World (2015, with Izaskun Elorza) and Ideology and Cross-Cultural Encounters (2009, with Myriam Salama-Carr).
Frederic Chaume is a professor of Audiovisual Translation at Universitat Jaume I (Spain), where he teaches audiovisual translation theory and dubbing; and Honorary Professor at University College London (UK), Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (Peru) and Universidad Ricardo Palma (Peru). He is author of the books Doblatge i subtitulació per a la TV (Eumo, 2003), Cine y Traducción (Cátedra, 2004), Audiovisual Translation: Dubbing (Routledge, 2014) and co-author of Teories Contemporànies de la Traducció (Bromera, 2010), and La Traducción para el Doblaje: Mapa de Convenciones (UJI, 2016). He has been awarded the Berlanga Award and the Xènia Martínez Award for his support to audiovisual translation and his constant university training in this field.
Gloria Corpas Pastor is a professor in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Malaga, visiting Professor in Translation Technologies at the University of Wolverhampton and Spanish delegate for AEN/CTN 174, CEN/BTTF 138 and ISO TC37. She is a regular evaluator for University Quality Assurance Agencies and various research funding bodies and has published extensively in corpus-based translation, tools and resources for translators and interpreters, phraseology and language technology.
Álvaro Echeverri is an associate professor of Translation Studies at the Université de Montréal. He teaches graduate courses on translation theory and translation pedagogy as well as undergraduate courses on documentary research and other practical translation courses. He has published several book chapters and articles in refereed journals on topics related to the history of translation in Latin American. He is particularly interested in the translation of political texts at the time of independence.
Pamela Faber is a full professor in the Department of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Granada, where she lectures on Terminology and Specialized Translation. She is the director of the LexiCon research group, with whom she has carried out various national and international research projects on Frame-based Terminology. She is the author of over one hundred publications on translation, terminology and lexical semantics.
Goretti Faya-Ornia graduated in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Valladolid. She specializes in medical and technical translation in English (University Jaume I) and German (University of Córdoba), and has professional experience as a translator, reviewer, proofreader and coordinator of translation projects. She was a lecturer and researcher at the University of Oviedo (where she earned her international doctorate), and currently works at the University of Valladolid. Her research pivots on specialized translation (mainly on medical translation), text genres, text typologies, contrastive linguistics and linguistic corpora.
Javier Franco Aixelá is a senior lecturer at the Department of Translation and Interpreting of the Universidad de Alicante (Spain), where he teaches literary translation, ethics, documentation, and theory of translation. For twelve years, he was a professional translator and as such has published over thirty books in Spain. His research topics include the bibliometrics of translation, medical translation, and the manipulation of culture in translation, with some fifty academic publications in these areas. He is the creator of BITRA (Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation), available online, and comprising over 72,000 records as of June, 2018.
Alberto Fuertes Puerta has a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of León, Spain. He has been a lecturer at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, where he taught courses on general
and specialized English to Spanish translation. As a researcher, he is interested in translation property law and the reception of translational plagiarism. He currently works as a freelance translator for Vicens Vives and acts as an expert witness in cases of plagiarism.
Pilar Godayol is a professor in Translation Studies at the University of Vic-Central University of Catalonia. Her field of expertise includes history and theory of translation, gender studies and censorship. She currently coordinates the Gender Studies Research Group: Translation, Literature, History and Communication (GETLIHC) and she has also led different R&D projects. She has published extensively on translation, gender and feminism. Her latest publications are Tres escritoras censuradas. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan y Mary McCarthy (2017), and, with Annarita Taronna, Foreign Women Authors under Fascism and Francoism. Gender, Translation and Censorship (2018). She coordinates the series “Biblioteca de Traducció i Interpretació” (BTI) in Eumo Editorial.
María José Hernández Guerrero is tenured lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Málaga and a member of the Grupo de Investigación Traductología e Interculturalidad. Her lines of research include news translation and journalistic translation. She was the editor of TRANS. Revista de Traductología and the director of the master’s degree program in “Traducción para el Mundo Editorial”. She teaches journalistic translation.
Amparo Hurtado Albir is a full professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is the team leader of a number of research projects on translation pedagogy and the acquisition of translation competence and head of the PACTE group. She is the author of over one hundred publications on the theory and pedagogy of translation, including La notion de fidélité en traduction, 1990; Enseñar a traducir, 1999 (3rd ed. 2007); Traducción y Traductología, 2001 (5th rev. ed. 2011; 9th ed. 2017); Aprender a traducir del francés al español, 2015; and Researching Translation Competence by PACTE Group, 2017. She is also general editor of the Aprender a traducir series.
Miguel Ángel Jiménez-Crespo holds a PhD in Translation and Interpreting Studies from the University of Granada, Spain. He is an associate professor at Rutgers University where he directs the Master’s programme and the undergraduate certificate in Spanish <> English Translation and Interpreting. He is the author of Crowdsourcing and Online Collaborative Translations: Expanding the Limits of Translation Studies published by John Benjamins in 2017 and Translation and Web Localization published by Routledge in 2013. He is the coeditor of the John Benjamins journal JIAL: the Journal of Internationalization and Localization. His research focuses on the intersection of translation theory, translation technologies, the world wide web, translation training, and corpus-based translation studies.
María Araceli Losey-León is a lecturer in English Philology at the University of Cádiz. Member of the Terminology scientific committee of the Spanish Association of Languages for Specific Purposes (AELFE) since 2017. Her research lines cover descriptive and applied linguistics, terminology, corpus linguistics, specialized translation and communication, English for specific purposes and educational technologies.
M. Rosario Martín Ruano is an associate professor at the University of Salamanca, Spain, where she is a member of the Research Group on Translation, Ideology and Culture and where she currently leads the research project entitled VIOSIMTRAD (‘Symbolic Violence
and Translation: Challenges in the Representation of Fragmented Identities within the Global Society’, FFI2015–66516-P; MINECO/FEDER, UE). She has published widely on translation and ideology, gender and postcolonial approaches to translation, and on legal and institutional translation.
Marta Mateo is a professor of English Studies at the University of Oviedo, where she teaches Translation and English Phonetics. Her research interests and publications mostly cover the translation of humour, drama and musical texts (focussing on opera, musicals, surtitling and multilingualism), as well as translation theory (particularly Pragmatics and Translation). She has also done professional translation, both of fiction and academic works. Her most recent literary translation, the Spanish rendering of Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, won her the 2013 National Translation Award given by the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies.
Silvia Montero-Martínez holds an undergraduate degree in English Philology and a Master’s in Specialized Translation from the University of Valladolid. She has a PhD in Spanish Linguistics. She lectures on Translation, Terminology and Translation Technologies at the University of Granada. Her main research interests are terminology, specialized translation and knowledge engineering. Her work has been published in leading journals and prestigious publishers. She is responsible for the institutional terminological standardization at the University of Granada, the UGRTerm project.
Javier Muñoz-Basols is a senior instructor in Spanish at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. He has published on Hispanic literature, translation studies and applied linguistics. His current research focuses on the interaction between language and culture in various settings, including contemporary graphic literature and humour. He is President of the Asociación para la Enseñanza del Español como Lengua Extranjera (ASELE).
Luis Pegenaute is an associate professor of Translation at Pompeu Fabra University. His research areas include Comparative Literature, literary translation, translation history and translation theory. He has co-edited fifteen volumes on these subjects, including Historia de la traducción en España (2004), Diccionario histórico de la traducción en España (2009) and Diccionario histórico de la traducción en Hispanoamérica (2013). He is the coordinator of the book series Relaciones literarias en el ámbito hispánico: traducción, literatura y cultura (Peter Lang).
Carmen Quijada Diez graduated and gained her PhD in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Salamanca. She is specialized in medical translation in German-Spanish and has professional experience as a translator, reviewer and proofreader. She worked as a junior lecturer at the Translation and Interpreting Department in Salamanca and works since 2013 at the University of Oviedo, where she teaches German language and Translation. Her research focuses on specialized translation, mainly in the medical field, science reception in nineteenthcentury Spain and the use of translation as a didactic tool in second-language learning.
Enrique del Rey Cabero is a lector in Spanish at the University of Oxford. He has published in journals such as Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada and Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research. He is the Spanish news correspondent for the website Comics Forum
and editorial assistant for the journal The Comics Grid, as well as co-convenor of the Oxford Comics and Graphic Novels research network at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).
Sara Rovira-Esteva is a senior lecturer at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and East Asian Studies of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), where she teaches Chinese language and linguistics and translation from Chinese. Her research topics include media accessibility, audiovisual translation, bibliometrics, Chinese-Spanish/Catalan translation, and teaching Chinese as a foreign language, with numerous books and articles in these areas. She is one of the creators of the online database RETI (devoted to the indexing of Translation and Interpreting journals). For more details, visit: http://pagines.uab.cat/sara_rovira/en.
Roberto A. Valdeón is a professor of English Studies at the University of Oviedo, Spain; honorary professor at Jinan University, China; a research associate at the University of the Free State in South Africa; and a member of the Academia Europaea. He is the author of over one hundred publications, including Translation and the Spanish Empire in the Americas (Benjamins, 2014) and contributions to all the major Translation Studies journals. He is currently editing a special issue of Target devoted to “Language, Translation and Empire in the Americas”. He is the editor-in-chief of Perspectives Studies in Translation Theory and Practice and the general editor of the Benjamins Translation Library.
Carmen Valero-Garcés is a full professor of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Alcalá, Madrid (Spain) and the Director of the Postgraduate Programme on Public Service Interpreting and Translation. She has taught and lectured in translation and interpreting programmes from several countries. Moreover, she is the coordinator of the Research Group FITISPos® and of the teaching innovation group FITISPos E-Learning as well as the managing editor of FITISPos International Journal and president of the association AFIPTISP. She has edited and authored several books and articles. Some of her most recent publications include Ideology, Ethics and Policy Development in Public Service Interpreting and Translation (Valero-Garcés & Tipton, eds., 2017) and Beyond Public Service Interpreting and Translation (Valero-Garcés et al., eds., 2017). (http://www3.uah.es/traduccion)
M. Carmen África Vidal Claramonte is a professor of translation at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her research interests include translation theory, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, contemporary art and gender studies. She has published 14 books, 10 anthologies, and over a hundred essays (Meta, Perspectives, The Translator, European Journal of English Studies, Translating and Interpreting Studies, Forum, etc.) on these issues. She has lectured in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Chile, Italy, England and France. She is a practising translator specialized in the fields of philosophy, literature, history and contemporary art.
Kelly Washbourne is a professor of Spanish Translation at Kent State University, Ohio, US. His works include Autoepitaph: Selected Poems of Reinaldo Arenas, which was longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2015, and Handbook of Literary Translation (Routledge, 2018, co-edited with Ben Van Wyke). He won a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities stipend (2010) for his translation of Nobel Laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias’ Leyendas de Guatemala (Legends of Guatemala), and is co-editor of the series Translation Practices Explained (St. Jerome, UK). He has worked as a medical interpreter for several years with migrant populations at the
Hartville Migrant Center, and leads a bilingual academic enhancement programme for migrant children.
Elizabeth Woodward-Smith is a senior lecturer in English at the University of A Coruña, Spain, received her English Philology degree and PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela, and her BA in Spanish and French from the University of Bradford. Her main areas of research interest include: translation of cultural concepts; cultural and linguistic analysis of advertising discourse, history and culture of the British Isles; cultural references in English literature; and translation of humour. She has published widely in both Spanish and international journals, editing and co-editing collections of essays on cultural diversity, and identity through language and literature.
Patrick Zabalbeascoa is a professor in translation studies at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Within translation studies, his research and publications deal mostly with humour, dubbing and subtitling, metaphor, and new theoretical proposals and concepts. Examples can be found in his model of priorities and restrictions, L3 theory, types of humour for translation, and a system for mapping translation solutions as an alternative approach to traditional lists of “technqiues”.
Juan Jesus Zaro is a professor of translation at the University de Málaga since 2008. His research interests include translation theory, history of translation and literary translation. He has been a guest lecturer in universities in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Spain, United Kingdom, United States, and Uruguay. He has published a number of books, anthologies and articles, including Shakespeare y sus traductores (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008) and Diez estudios sobre la traducción en la España del siglo XIX (Granada: Atrio, 2009). He is also a practising translator and has translated, among other books, Charles Dickens’ Historia de dos ciudades (Cátedra, 2000) and Jane Austen’s Persuasión (Cátedra, 2004). He is now supervising a research project on the translation of classics.
INTRODUCTION
Translation and Translation Studies in Spain and in Spanish-speaking areas
Roberto A. Valdeón and África Vidal Claramonte
Spain has always been a country of translators. Its long history is one full of encounters and clashes with other nations and cultures. It is a land which was initially a settlement for Iberians, Celts, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks and, later, it formed part of the Roman Empire until its fall when it became a Visigoth Kingdom from 500 to 700 ad. The first Muslim conquest occurred in 711, and Islam ruled in parts of the country for almost eight centuries in an area known as Al-Andalus. The so-called Reconquest (comprising the period from Don Pelayo’s first rebellion in Asturias in 722 until the conquest of Granada in 1492) allowed the Christian kingdoms to recover all the territory under Muslim domination. This was completed in 1492 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs who not only financed Columbus’ voyages to America but also unified Spain and expelled the Jews. This brief description of Spain’s early history allows us to conclude that contact with the Other is not something new. The Iberian Peninsula has always been a space for encounters and clashes and has long required the help of the so-called alfaqueques, or interpreters, who acted as multilingual mediators during the long period when Jews, Muslims and Christians shared the same geographical areas. Thus, this Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive panorama of the crucial role of translators and translation in the history of Spain, as well as of the emergence and evolution of Translation Studies.
And although Translation Studies is indeed healthy we must bear in mind that Spain was not present when translation emerged as a discipline: there were no Spanish representatives at the meeting held at the University of Leuven in April 1976 (for some the founding symposium of the discipline), which gathered James Holmes, José Lambert, Raymond van den Broeck and André Lefevere, nor at the conference of the British Comparative Literature Association at the University of East Anglia, which included plenary lectures by René Wellek, Jan Knott and Itamar Even-Zohar. Nor were there Spanish representatives at the conferences in Tel-Aviv in 1978 and Antwerp in 1980. Spain entered the field gradually, as CETRA was created in 1989 and the European Society for Translation Studies was founded in Vienna in 1992. Both were crucial to develop an international network of translation scholars. During the 1980s and 1990s, as numerous and very well-attended conferences and seminars were organized in Europe and Canada, Spanish researchers began to leave their mark in the discipline. In addition, Spanish authors have been instrumental in the consolidation of international Translation Studies journals such as Babel (the Netherlands,
Roberto A. Valdeón and África Vidal
founded in 1955), META (Canada, 1955), Traduction. Terminologie, Rédaction (Canada, 1988), Target (The Netherlands, 1989), Perspectives Studies on Translatology (Denmark, 1993), The Translator (UK, 1995) and Across Languages and Cultures (Hungary, 2001); and they have contributed to terminologies, bibliographies, anthologies, readers and other documents key to the development and institutionalization of Translation and Interpreting Studies (Gambier and van Doorslaer 2010; Munday 2010). In addition, most international translation journals include Spanish researchers in their boards, and some are edited or co-edited by Spanish scholars.
This Handbook opens with a chapter by Luis Pegenaute, who provides substantial references to all the work that translation historians have done and continue to do, with particular reference to literary translation. Pegenaute, who contends that these scholars need to surmount many difficulties pertaining to the methodologies used and the access to the documents, offers a wide panorama of the importance of translation in Spain, and points to the many areas of research that are likely to produce significant publications in the future. Not unrelated to Pegenaute’s chapter, Juan Jesús Zaro reviews literary translation, which has been traditionally associated with translation practice and the early theoretical approaches. Zaro points out that the publishing industry in Spain is now among the most active in Europe. Drawing on Even-Zohar, Zaro highlights the primary function of translation in Spain and other Spanishspeaking areas, and reminds us that literary translation can be traced back to the thirteenth century when the future king Alfonso X of Castile became a patron of translation on a large scale. As in many other European nations, translation also played a key role in the standardization of the language. Zaro highlights the close connection between writing and translation in the following centuries, as writers such as Ramón de la Cruz and Fernández de Moratín rendered foreign classics into Spanish, while he points out that the outbreak of the civil war and the dictatorship meant a setback for the publishing industry in general and for translation in particular. Meanwhile, a significant number of classics were translated for the first time in Argentina, Chile and Mexico.
André Lefevere (1992, 2) posited that translation is a “window opened on another world a channel opened, often not without a certain reluctance, through which foreign influences can penetrate the native culture, challenge it and even contribute to subverting it”. That is why in this volume the editors start from the premise that translation in Spain has been for centuries a tool to construct and represent the cultural Other, and that today, from the new visions proposed by such fields as ethnography, sociology, anthropology and others, translation should be a productive space for critical self-reflection on such burning questions of our globalized society as its role in asymmetry between languages or in the creation of stereotyped clichés of the foreign. Thus, translation was not only essential in Spain, but also in the Americas. As Spain initiated the process of colonization, the need for cultural and linguistic mediation was reflected in
the presence of what were called lenguas or nahuatlatos, who acted as interpreters in the many meetings that took place all over the continent between the indigenous peoples and the Spanish, Portuguese, French and English colonisers was fundamental. Interpreters-translators-mediators, trujamanes, alfaqueques, nahuatlatos, lenguas, capitanes de amigo . they carried out the work required in the frontiers, acting as interlinguistic and intercultural mediators in contact zones, and were an example of the human need to find communication bridges.
(Sales 2012, p. 181, our translation)
Introduction
In his chapter, Roberto A. Valdeón reviews the publications that have delved into the role of language and translators during the Spanish colonial period and highlights the work of scholars such as Georges L. Bastin, Galen Brokaw and Gertrudis Payàs, who have made significant contributions to the study of this controversial period, when translation was necessary for the purpose of administration and for the evangelization of the native populations.
Undeniably the Spanish Empire, as any empire, required mediators. That is probably the reason why, in his novel El Naranjo, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes (2008) points out that in the case of the Spanish Empire, the asymmetries between the two sides of the colonial enterprise began with language, or rather languages; in other words, with the power of translators. Thus, right from the start, we find the roots of the conflicts generated by imperialist visions of the world and the feelings of superiority which were and may remain ingrained in the language and culture of colonial powers. In the conquest of the Americas, translation was undoubtedly a fundamental tool for domination, communication and representation of the Other, a symbol of the expansion of ideologies and ways of looking at the world. Translators and interpreters have been regarded as metaphors of the violation of the Americas, of treason (for instance, in the case of La Malinche), but translations also played a fundamental role in imperial rivalries, such as those of Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias into English (Valdeón 2014). After Valdeón’s chapter, Álvaro Echeverri and Georges L. Bastin explore the translational activity in Hispanic America after the colonial era, paying particular attention to two phases: the pre-Independence and Emancipation years (going from the end of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century), and the period comprising the creation and consolidation of the different republics (from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day). Bastin and Echeverri emphasized the hybrid nature of translation in the area, and the role of appropriation in translation. In this sense, research being done in universities in Colombia, Chile, and Argentina looks very promising.
On the other hand, it is important to notice that, in this volume, Hispanic America will be used to refer to the Spanish-speaking areas of the continent, including large portions of South, Central, and North America, as opposed to the most restricted use of Hispanic in the United States, where it often used to refer to the US population of Spanish-speaking ancestry. The term is far from stable, though, and the introduction of Latino (and Latina) in the final years of the twentieth century has not served to clarify its meaning and use. In fact, both Hispanic and Latino are currently used in the United States, albeit with some regional variations. Kelly Washbourne uses Hispanic (and Latino) in this restricted sense in the chapter devoted to Spanish in the United States and Canada, where he explores how translation facilitates “private and government commerce, education, health and human services, the legal system, the arts, multimedia localisation, and the work of many other institutions, cultural producers, and businesses in North America”, despite the difficulties derived from Donald Trump’s rise to power in 2017. Washbourne reminds us that the United States has always been a multilingual nation despite the calls for monolingualism, normally associated with patriotism. And yet the interest in the Spanish language and cultures is early in the US, as shown by the fact that the first training programmes in the country were created in the mid-twentieth century. Washbourne also highlights the significance of Latin American writers in translation and the role of translators such as Harriet de Onís and Gregory Rabassa in the popularization of the literature written in Spanish, although many key Spanish texts translated into English are published in the US and Canada as a result of the agreements with foreign publishing houses in order to save translation costs. Translation into Spanish is problematic, not only for political reasons, but also as regards the variety of the language chosen for the target texts. In commercial terms, companies have attempted to use a neutral variety that could reach most receptors, although
Roberto A. Valdeón and África Vidal
this has posed problems of understandability. In other cases, the influence of English on the target text has had a disastrous effect. Whatever the odds, Spanish will continue to expand in the region as the need for communication in areas such as commerce, healthcare and education will remain.
Nowadays, long gone the pomp and splendour that at some time in the past might may have led Spaniards to believe they were superior to other nations, the situation has changed: English is currently the language of reference, even if Spanish remains the second most spoken language in the world. After the end of Franco’s rule in Spain and the return to democracy in 1978, Spanish institutions and organizations soon realized that translation was necessary. On the other hand, it is important to remember that the years prior to this period, i.e. the 1960s, brought about new ideas and radical changes as well as innumerable challenges in the field of the humanities, e.g. the transformations of the literary canon as a result of feminist and postcolonial scholarship that questioned the construction of the traditional canon included in the syllabi of so many American and European universities, together with the rise of cultural studies that highlighted the significance of class, ethnicity and identities for this discipline. All those concepts were ingrained in movements such as postmodernism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, postcolonial studies, feminism and queer studies, all of which would reach Spain later than other areas, as a result of the forty years of isolation, censorship and exiled intellectuals.
And yet, research into the intersection between these fields and translation has produced a considerable bulk of relevant publications. The chapters by Pilar Godayol on translation and gender and Ovidi Carbonell on translation and ideology summarize the introduction and consolidation of these studies in Spain and Spanish-speaking areas. Following the Cultural Turn of the late 1980s, translation studies recognized its interdisciplinary and/or cross-disciplinary nature by incorporating some of the theoretical tenets of feminism, postcolonial studies, critical linguistics, sociology and so on. Carbonell’s chapter presents a survey starting with discourse approaches to translation, many of which have relied on Critical Discourse Analysis as described and practised by authors such as Roger Fowler and Norman Fairclough, and moves on to discuss sociolinguistic perspectives delving into the relationship between translation, language and power. On the other hand, theorists such as Niranjana, Spivak and Said have been at the base of the work produced by both Spanish and Latin American researchers. Carbonell also provides the readers with a review of the publications and doctoral theses that have begun to explore the complex relationship between Spanish, Arabic and their respective cultures in a world that has seen the rise of Islamic terrorism and the Western response to the threat it poses. As Carbonell reminds us, translation has been part and parcel of the conflict both in war zones and during the trials that ensue following terrorist attacks on Western soil. On the other hand, Godayol discusses the interface between feminism and translation studies in Spain and Spanish-speaking areas, paying particular attention to women translators, the texts they produced and their accompanying paratexts. Godayol claims that this connection has also helped to raise criticism and self-criticism of the theories and practices of feminist translation at home and abroad; to reflect on the ethics and the responsibility of feminist translators and of the relationship between them and the publishers who publish their work; and to explore the linguistic representation of gender in translation and carry out linguistic analyses of feminist and sexist translations.
The interaction between translation and other disciplines is also explored in the chapter by Marta Mateo and Patrick Zabalbeascoa, who have published extensively on the topic of humour, albeit focusing on different genres and from different perspectives. In this chapter, they highlight the interaction between humour, translation and various text genres calling for
Introduction
humour translation studies as a subarea of research with its own complex features and challenges. They provide ample evidence of the text types that can be studied from this perspective, ranging from literary texts, including novels and plays, to audiovisual material, such as situation comedies. Mateo herself has focused on plays while Zabalbeascoa was among the first to study the translation of screen humour. Mateo and Zabalbeascoa relate the study of humour in translation to disciplines such as Pragmatics, Frame Semantics, Reception Studies and Cultural Studies, and call for a greater integration of humour translation studies within Spanish Translation Studies.
In professional terms, the recognition of the profession of the translator and of the interpreter took place after the international trials that followed World War I and World War II, as well as the South African Waarheidstribunaal. In the aftermath of World War II a number of countries created training institutes (based in Geneva, Ottawa, Mons, Trieste and, later, in Moscow and Prague) to give professional support to the multilingual services required in these international courts. The international progress in the institutionalization of translation also illustrates a societal attitude: translation was finally considered a service. Around the beginning of the 1970s, translation theories began to look attractive to academia as well (Lambert 2013, 7). The first Translation Schools to be set up in Spain (Barcelona in 1972, Granada in 1979 and Las Palmas in 1988) were groundbreaking and, as some of the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate, scholars gradually drew on the most innovative concepts and theories being developed at that time, which would be the base of the discipline as we know it today. At the beginning of the 1990s the first Faculties of Translation opened in Spain. The discipline was becoming institutionalized and translator training was crucial for the new professionals, as Dorothy Kelly points out in her chapter on the pedagogy of translation. Kelly provides the reader with an overview of the evolution of translation programmes in Spain, from the previous five-year licenciaturas to the current four-year degrees resulting from the so-called Bologna educational reform, a pan-European move that was introduced in the first years of the twenty-first century. Kelly discusses highly relevant issues such as the fact that, unlike other European centres, Spanish universities do not offer programmes where the A (native) language is not one of the official languages of the country or that the success story of Spain’s translation and interpreting degrees is partly the result of the decline in demand for the more traditional language and literature programmes known as filologías. Kelly also introduces the most significant debates on pedagogical approaches to training, ranging from the application of the concept of textual genre to the analysis of intercultural communication to the study of functionalism, as well as issues of quality assessment and cognitive approaches to the translation process.
For her part, Amparo Hurtado Albir focuses specifically on the latter, tracing cognitive approaches to translation back to the late 1990s. Hurtado Albir, who is the main researcher of the PACTE group based at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, examines the main concepts associated with this strand of enquiry that has burgeoned over the past decade, both nationally and internationally. Hurtado Albir and her group have indeed contributed to the advancement of research on translation competence acquisition through a series of important projects and doctoral dissertations. Likewise, she reviews the work of the PETRA group, headed by Ricardo Muñoz at the University of Las Palmas, which has made equally significant contributions to the field since its inception at the University of Granada in 2000, and has also produced a number of doctoral dissertations, whose authors have later moved to academic institutions worldwide. Hurtado Albir also reviews the work of researchers in various Spanishspeaking universities and research centres around the globe: Adolfo García in Argentina; Isabel
Roberto A. Valdeón and África Vidal
Lacruz, based at Kent State University in the United States; Stephanie Díaz-Galaz in Chile; and, back in Europe, the work carried out at the University of Vigo and at Jaume I University. Training is also central to Robert Neal Baxter’s chapter on interpreting and Carmen Valero-Garcés’s on community interpreting. The former presents its various modes and discusses the introduction of interpreting courses in Spain, mostly taught by state universities, and in Latin America, mostly by private ones. Baxter traces the origins of interpreting in the Spanish context back to the Toledo School of Translators first and to the conquest of the Americas later, and also reviews the work of interpreters and interpreting scholars such as Baigorri Jalón. Finally, he reviews the main topics studied by translation scholars working on any of the official languages of Spain and stresses the increasing number of publications and doctoral theses produced on the subject. On the other hand, Carmen Valero-Garcés’s chapter offers an insight into a new type of translation where the foreign and the national live together and have to learn how to live together. As a result of the economic, political and historic situation of the country, Spain began to receive waves of immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe, which gave way to a new form of intercultural communication involving interpreters between the languages of Spain and languages as varied as Romanian, Chinese and Arabic. The University of Alcalá, where Valero is based, has been very active in this area. Valero and her colleagues have organized numerous conferences, published manuals, articles and monographs and, above all, have trained mediators to work in the public services. In her chapter, Valero studies the evolution of the intercultural communication in Spain by providing relevant information on the latest advancements and the connection with the work being done in other parts of the world.
It is important to point out that when Translation Studies was beginning to become institutionalized it was often associated with comparative literature or with linguistics studies before becoming a discipline in its own right. This meant that translating was often regarded as an art or a science. In those early years, John Catford and others were more concerned with language than with other issues such as ideology, power, identity, ethnicity or gender. The seminal work of Eugene Nida, Vinay and Darbelnet, and Catford had a great impact worldwide, and contrastive approaches to languages and translation also produced and continue to produce important work in Spain. For instance, Gloria Corpas and Maria-Araceli Losey highlight the work carried out by Vázquez-Ayora and García Yebra in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the publications by Amparo Hurtado and Pamela Faber in the 1990s. Among the many areas of interest, Corpas and Losey mention contrastive linguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics and so on. In their chapter, they also look at the research groups based at the Universities of León, Jaume I, the Basque Country, Granada and Málaga, and stress that the strong links between linguistics and translation has not been overshadowed by the arrival of other more ideological and sociological approaches, because, Corpas and Losey argue, the various foundations of Translation Studies are inextricably intertwined.
Language is also at the base of the next chapters of the Handbook. In fact, this volume provides ample evidence of the vitality and diversity of Spain’s researchers in areas such as terminology, legal translation, intercultural mediation, and medical and technical translation. Thus, Pamela Faber and Silvia Montero-Martínez’s chapter offers a comprehensive view of terminology, i.e. the study of specialized concepts necessary for communication among experts of specific domains. Starting with a definition and classification of terminology, Faber and Montero-Martínez provide a historical review of the two main theories that have influenced translated-oriented terminology research in Spain, namely Communicative Theory of Terminology, proposed by María Teresa Cabré at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and Frame-based Terminology proposed by Pamela Faber at the University of Granada. Faber
Introduction
and Montero-Martínez also present the factors that intervene in terminology research such as needs assessment and resource collection, term identification and extraction, concept and term description, the elaboration of term entries, and quality assurance. Finally, they discuss the many challenges facing this dynamic and much-needed area of research.
The next three chapters deal with specialized fields. Rosario Martín Ruano explores the features and complexity of legal and institutional translation, or, as she puts it “the intricate and multidimensional nature of the practices in a field which resists concrete definitions”. This complexity is often the result of the very divergent legal systems translators work with. Therefore, research into these vast fields is difficult on account of the fact that although the practice itself has a long tradition, research is a much more recent phenomenon. As is the case with other areas, Martín Ruano claims, the evolution of this field has evolved from the more prescriptive and didactic approaches towards more functional-descriptive paradigms that take into account issues related to status and power. This evolution is also reflected in the methodologies used by the various research groups, e.g. contrastive and textual, corpus-based, sociology-based, and so on. Martín Ruano concludes that, although legal and institutional translation is a respected academic subarea within Translation Studies, there is still a long way to go in terms of research.
On the other hand, Goretti Faya and Carmen Quijada review the publications on technical and scientific translation, an area of limited appeal to researchers, although it represents an important percentage of the translation practice carried out in the world. Faya and Quijada contend that this lack of interest may be partly due to the fact that, in aesthetic terms, this type of mediation tends to be considered less of a challenge and may require less attention. Besides, the content of the documents may be less attractive than that of other text types widely researched. However, the interest in technical and scientific translation keeps growing, as shown by the numerous collections and articles published in recent years. Particularly noteworthy is the existence of several manuals, dictionaries, and terminological databases aimed at helping professionals who have to combine translation skills and a sound knowledge of the field they have to translate.
From here we move to the translation of multimodal texts. In his chapter, Frederic Chaume presents a comprehensive view of audiovisual translation, an activity and a research area in which Spanish translators and scholars have excelled. Considered a type of “constrained” or “subordinate” translation, the film industry has always viewed audiovisual translation as a must in order to expand and reach other markets. Initially, Hollywood used to make movies in various languages, and later the studios commissioned non-English versions of their Englishlanguage films. Not surprisingly, Spanish-speaking audiences were a natural market for the Hollywood industry. On the other hand, Spanish scholars have been at the forefront of the research carried out into this area, as shown by the length of a chapter that aims to highlight the extraordinary contribution of Spanish authors and translators to this important area of research. Chaume’s chapter guides the reader of the Handbook through the linguistic, technical and historical issues that have fascinated scholars and will continued to do so in the coming years. Although Chaume focuses on dubbing and subtitling, he also reviews the work done into other modes, including surtitling, audio description, and localization. It is precisely on localization that Miguel A. Jiménez-Crespo focuses in the following chapter. The digital revolution of the twentieth century had a great impact on the way cultural artefacts were produced, translated and accessed. Jiménez-Crespo considers localization as a by-product of the digitalization that has affected all spheres of life that can be traced in products such as websites, software and videogames, although the term has also been used in other fields such as news translation (Orengo 2005). Two areas have been of particular interest for Spanish researchers, i.e.
web localization and videogame localization. As digitalization continues to expand, JiménezCrespo sees several emerging areas that will attract professionals and researchers alike.
Multimodality is also central to the chapter authored by Javier Muñoz-Basols and Enrique del Rey Cabero, who look at the role of translation in the dissemination of Spanish graphic novels and comics. Thus, their chapter aims to show the contribution of translation to the popularity of this type of literature, as foreign works are translated for the Spanish market and Spanish texts are rendered into foreign languages. It also provides a different approach to translation, discussed here not only from the perspective of the Spanish target texts, but also from that of the authors wanting to publish their work in other languages. They also consider the Latin American market, where they find fine examples of cultural and linguistic hybridity. Muñoz-Basols and del Rey Cabero propose the use of multimodality, a paradigm developed by communication scholars Kress and van Leeuwen, and use a case study to support the validity of this approach to the study of graphic novels and comics as well as their translations.
In fact, in a world where multilingualism has almost become the norm, translation reflects what it means to live in a state of in-betweenness. This Handbook wants to highlight through very different types of texts what it means to be endlessly negotiating between the familiar and the unfamiliar. What it means to ‘belong’ to a culture, a society, a place. In this sense, the next two chapters exemplify how the global has become the norm. María José Hernández Guerrero, a specialist on news translation based at the University of Málaga, examines the emergence and consolidation of journalistic translation as a line of research initiated in Europe and that has gradually attracted researchers from other parts of the world, including North America, China, and South Africa. As Hernández Guerrero reminds us, translation has always been crucial in news production, albeit the way in which translation is viewed in the journalistic profession does not necessarily correspond with the more open approaches to translation in translation studies. She also contends that the first significant publications on news translation came from two Spanish-speaking countries, i.e. Spain and Argentina. Hernández Guerrero, who is indeed one of the pioneers in this field (she has published a number of books in Spanish, including Traducción y periodismo in 2009, as well as numerous articles in English in all the major translation journals) provides the readers with a veritable state-of-the-art chapter on the field, pointing to the need for collaboration with related disciplines such as communication studies.
For her part, Elizabeth Woodward-Smith tackles the role of translation in tourism, which, since the 1960s, has been one of Spain’s main industries. Tourist texts come in many shapes and genres, including guidebooks, leaflets, TV advertisements, magazine articles and websites, all of which need to be translated both for advertising and for information purposes. WoodwardSmith, who traces the interaction of tourism and translation back to the well-known slogan “Spain is different”, discusses the need of adequate communication skills in order to persuade prospective tourists to travel to the country, and to provide adequate information once they have arrived. She also points to the lack of quality controls when it comes to the translation of tourist texts. In this respect, she stresses the potential of research into this area for the production of adequate texts by carrying out both textual analysis and reception studies. The results of these studies should have an impact on the current position of languages and translation in degrees in tourism, as in Spanish universities law and economy subjects occupy a more prominent position than languages and culture. On the other hand, and given the interdisciplinary and complex nature of tourist texts, Woodward-Smith also stresses the need of treating them as specialized texts with very specific goals, including the persuasive function characteristic of advertising, which she discusses in the final section.
Introduction
Translation Studies in Spain has reached a point of meta-reflection, which is also exemplified in the various chapters of this volume. After decades of continuous progress (which has finally made the translator visible), after successive paradigms, turns and new methodologies, almost two decades into the twenty-first century, and once Translation Studies has become institutionalized, the need to rethink the discipline has arisen as a result of the social, cultural and political changes in which translation activity is currently being carried out. The reader of this Handbook will see that there are many Spanish publications dealing with these subjects, which take into account all the new approaches and contexts translators are involved with. They will make us reflect on the future of our discipline and ask ourselves to what extent the contributions of researchers whose mother tongue is not English, but one of the many ‘Spanishes’ or of the other languages of Spain might be important. In his chapter, Alberto Fuertes discusses ethical issues focusing on deontology, literary ethics and social ethics or activism. After providing a short historical overview, Fuertes delves into the initial connections between ethics and fidelity, which in the second half of the twentieth century gave prominence to source-oriented views of translation and of the translation process. From here, and partly as a result of the move towards a more descriptive approach to translation and of an interest in the translator as an agent of social change, Fuertes surveys the work carried out by interpreting scholars such as Valero Garcés, and literary translators and academics such as Vidal Claramonte and her research group at the University of Salamanca. He concludes with a reference to the Granada Declaration of 2010, which called for action on the part of translators and scholars against colonization and other forms of domination. Thus, now seems to be the time to look back in order to move forward. From the Cultural Turn, which was crucial to help us understand another way of translating, to the Technilogical Turn, which is a reflection of how the contemporary world has changed, we need to reexamine “conventional understandings of what constitutes translation and the position of the translator” (Cronin 2010, 1). Now is the time to analyse the evolution of translation between Spain and the Americas, where, according to Gentzler (2008, 2013, 2017), translation is a discursive practice that reveals identities, that is constitutive of cultures, and a way to construct and maintain identities often obscured by monolinguist imperialism (van Doorslaer and Flynn 2013, 2–3) and not a mere marker of linguistic differences. Today, many mestizo and hybrid writers of the Americas avoid assimilation into the dominant languages, which are in their case both English and Spanish, using translation as a tool to enrich their Spanishes. But it is also the time to draw a new map of power relations, of multicultural dialogues from an ever-growing range of domains. In order to do so, the Handbook surveys the work into the discourse of the co-official languages of Spain (Basque, Catalan, and Galician) and what role translation has played with regard to Spanish as the language of the state. In fact, as Montserrat Bacardí shows in her chapter, these languages have been standardized partly by translations, which have had a very literary flavour. Bacardí mentions the importance of the translations of the works of Goethe, Shakespeare, Molière and Dante, amongst many others. Translation research has also been relevant in Basque, Catalan and Galician, as revealed by an sizeable number of published collections. Bacardí also stresses that translations from these languages have also grown after the end of Franco’s dictatorial regime.
The last chapter of this Handbook is devoted to bibliometrics, a burgeoning area of research. In their chapter, Javier Franco and Sara Rovira offer a bibliometric analysis of the publications produced by scholars in the Hispanic world. Although the emphasis is on publications in Spanish, they also provide figures for publications in Catalan, Basque and Galician. And, most importantly, they present a preliminary approach to English publications authored by Spanish and Spanish-speaking scholars.
Roberto A. Valdeón and África Vidal
Before we conclude this introduction, two points need to be made. The first one refers to the term Hispanic. Given the instability of the concept, it is important to indicate that Hispanic will be used throughout the book to refer in a very general way to the scholars who work in areas where Spanish is used for communication, notably Spain and the Americas. The second one pertains to the structure of the chapters. Although most chapters in the Handbook follow a similar structure, it was necessary to make adjustments to the peculiarity of the topic at hand. For instance, Spanish researchers have been particularly productive in audiovisual translation research. This is reflected in a longer chapter that provides an overview of the many modes associated with it. On the other hand, the chapter on comics aims to offer a proposal for the study of this genre, which does not have a consolidated tradition.
Translation completes the original, wrote Jorge Luis Borges. Translating increases the meanings of the texts, opens up new interpretations and asks questions; and those questions lead to other questions: how to read the original text in order to discover a journey over rough terrain with views covered in mist which, nonetheless, deserve to be explored. In this Handbook the reader will set off on a journey which is not without incident; a journey which is a cartography where fortresses will be replaced by thresholds where we can translate from a vernacular cosmopolitism (Bhabha 2000) which will try to create routes without limits or frontiers, capable of looking in order to explore the other. Translating is understood here as a way of looking at foreign geographies spread out before us to enrich us, by leaving behind any false sense of legitimacy. We hope that after plunging into this volume the reader will have a clear idea that, in Spain, translating nowadays does not mean walking safely over a solid bridge, but over a provisional walkway, in continuous movement backwards and forwards with every step the translator takes, and, every movement as a result creates questionable realities that can be revised, which only makes them all the more fascinating. And from this way of looking at things, translation ceases to be a secondary process to become one of the most important processes that can shape or question culture.
References
Bhabha, Homi K. 2000. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Cronin, Michael. 2010. “The Translation Crowd.” Revista Tradumàtica 8. www.fti.uab.es/tradumatica/ revista/num8/articles/04art.htm.
Doorslaer, Luc van, and Peter Flynn, eds. 2013. Eurocentrism in Translation Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Flynn, Peter, and Luc van Doorslaer. 2013. “On Constructing Continental Views on Translation Studies: An Introduction.” In Eurocentrism in Translation Studies, edited by Luc van Doorslaer and Peter Flynn, 1–8. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fuentes, Carlos. 2008 [1993]. El naranjo. Madrid: Santillana. Gambier, Yves, and Luc van Doorsaer, eds. 2010. Handbook of Translation Studies. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Gentzler, Edwin. 2008. Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory London: Routledge.
———. 2013. “Macro- and Micro-Turns in Translation Studies.” In Eurocentrism in Translation Studies, edited by Luc van Doorslaer and Peter Flynn, 9–28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
———. 2017. Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies. London: Routledge. Hernández Guerrero, María José. 2009. Traducción y periodismo. Bern: Peter Lang. Lambert, José. 2013. “Prelude: The Institutionalization of the Discipline.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Carmen Millán and Francesca Bartrina, 7–27. New York/London: Routledge.
Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London: Routledge.
Introduction
Munday, Jeremy. 2010. “Translation Studies.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, 419–28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Orengo, Alberto. 2005. “Localising News: Translation and the ‘Global-National’ Dichotomy.” Language and Intercultural Communication 5 (2): 168–87.
Sales, Dora. 2012. “ ‘Calibán ha salido de la isla . . .’ Viaje y traducción.” In Traducción, política(s), conflictos, edited by África Vidal and Rosario Martín. Granada: Comares. Valdeón, Roberto A. 2014. Translation and the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
1 SPANISH TRANSLATION HISTORY
Luis Pegenaute
Spanish translation history and historiography
In a much-cited phrase, Antoine Berman (1984, 12) stated that the constitution of a history of translation is the first task of a modern theory of translation. Verdicts of a similar nature have been presented by Bassnett (1980, 38), D’Hulst (1991, 61; 1995, 14), Lambert (1993, 22), and Delisle (1997–1998, 22). If we accept Berman’s words, we should acknowledge that researchers, both inside and outside Spain, seem to have applied themselves diligently to laying the foundations of a modern theory of Spanish translation, as works of a historical nature – be they the study of a past translation, a past translator or a past translation theorist – constitute a bibliographical corpus whose dimensions are certainly of note. A query on keywords “History” and “Spain” provides 2750 hits in BITRA (a Spanish free and online bibliography on translation and interpreting which includes more than 75,000 references, far exceeding those of other bibliographies such as, for example, John Benjamins’ Translation Studies Bibliography). Although those 2750 hits constitute quite an impressive amount of references, the specialized bibliography compiled by Francisco Lafarga on the history of translation in Spain – continuously in progress and available at http://hte.upf.edu/ in Lafarga and Pegenaute’s website on this topic) – triples that figure, providing the amazing figure of 8000 references, which bears testimony to the tremendous activity undertaken in this particular field of research. It is legitimate to consider, therefore, that the study of translation throughout the history of Spain (or, if you prefer, the study of the history of Spanish translation, or the study of the Spanish history of translation) has experienced a boom worthy of attention, even if research is still too often scattered or fragmented, as a consequence of a certain lack of cooperation among research teams, and even if enough attention has still not been paid to certain issues (see the following).
Although an interest in studying the history of Spanish translation is highly appreciable, there still is, however, a shortage of historiographical contributions taking a systematic and integrated analytical approach to the difficulties and problems implicit in the specific study of Spanish translation history, with a clear definition of the field of study and sharp methodological precision. By translation historiography, Woodsworth understands “the discourse upon [translational] historical data, organized and analysed along certain principles” (2001, 101), which must clearly be differenced from translation history, which is the actual narration of the
events of the past. A similar position is adopted by Apak (2003), Fernández (2016) or Lambert, who states that “we have to distinguish between the object of study and the discourse on the object of study, although such a discourse can also be itself part of the investigation” (1993, 4), as opposed to, for example, Pym (1998, 5) and Gürçaglar (2013, 132), who make no distinction between both concepts. D’Hulst (2010), for his part, introduces a tripartite classification between history, historiography, and metahistoriography, the latter category coinciding with Woodsworth’s and Lambert’s notion of historiography. According to D’Hulst, history is the “proper sequence of facts, events, ideas, discourses, etc.”, while metahistoriography is “the explicit reflection on the concepts and methods to write history and also on epistemological and methodological problems that are related to the use of these concepts and methods” (D’Hulst 2010, 397). Within this terminological scheme the concept of historiography acquires for D’Hulst a new meaning, namely, “the history of histories, i.e., the history of the practices of history-writing” (2010, 398). However, in this chapter, I shall understand history and historiography in Woodsworth and Lambert’s terms, and conceptualize metahistoriography as both (1) the history of histories and (2) the discussion upon the historiographical sources, as it involves a “discourse which is concerned or alludes to other discourses” (definition of ‘metadiscourse’ in the Oxford English Dictionary).
The historiography of Spanish translation history is still a field very much in need of academic development. Bibliographical references of interest come from different sources: general historiographical studies on translation, with occasional attention to Spain, such as those by Lepinette (1997), Pym (1998), López Alcalá (2001), Sabio (2006), Vega (2006), and Lafarga and Pegenaute (2015b); specific historiographical studies on Spanish translation (sometimes biased towards metahistoriography), such as Pym (2000b), Santoyo (2004, 2012, 2014), Lafarga (2005), Pegenaute (2010, 2012, 2017), Navarro-Domínguez (2012), Sabio and Ordóñez (2012), Ordóñez and Sabio’s edited volume (2015), Pérez Blázquez (2013) and Ordóñez (2016); and introductory studies to the history of Spanish translation, such as Lafarga and Pegenaute (2004, 1–18) and Ruiz Casanova (2018, 31–61). The majority of the aforementioned studies have revealed – albeit not always explicitly – how historical studies of translation display several shortcomings: firstly, an indeterminacy in the conceptualization of the object of study, such as the – not always obvious – concepts of translation and translator; secondly, certain problems of a methodological nature (most prominently, the segmentation of time and space), which are largely a consequence of not paying enough attention to Lambert’s admonition to avoid two extremes when studying the history of translation, namely: (1) simply borrowing historical and historiographical frameworks derived from other disciplines (as, for example, literary studies, history, linguistics, etc.); (2) considering that translation (whether viewed as process or product) constitutes something intrinsically unique which has nothing to do with the general characteristics of a culture or society (Lambert 1993, 4).
Translations
The scholar carrying out research in translation history depends, of course, on catalogues documenting bibliographical information on existing translations. There are different resources which are particularly useful, the most evident of which is the Index Translationum, UNESCO’s database of book translations, which contains indexes of authors, publishers, and translators. This database contains cumulative bibliographical information on books translated and published in about 100 of the UNESCO Member States since 1979 and totals more than 1,800,000 entries in all disciplines. The references before 1979 can be found in the printed
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Philo for these twenty years has been collecting and reading all the spiritual books he can hear of. He reads them, as the critics read commentators and lexicons; to be nice and exact in telling you the stile, spirit, and intent of this or that spiritual writer; how one is more accurate in this, and the other in that. Philo will ride you forty miles in winter to have a conversation about spiritual books, or to see a collection larger than his own. Philo is amazed at the deadness and insensibility of the Christian world, that they are such strangers to the spiritual nature of the Christian salvation; he wonders how they can be so zealous for the outward letter and form of ordinances, and so averse to that spiritual life, that they all point at, as the one thing needful. But Philo never thinks how wonderful it is, that a man who knows regeneration to be the whole, should yet content himself with the love of books upon the new birth, instead of being born again himself. For all that is changed in Philo, is his taste for books. He is no more dead to the world, no more delivered from himself, is as fearful of adversity, as fond of prosperity, as easily provoked and pleased with trifles, as much governed by his own will, tempers and passions, as unwilling to deny his appetites, or enter into war with himself, as he was twenty years ago. Yet all is well with Philo; he has no suspicion of himself; he dates the newness of his life from the time that he discovered the pearl of eternity in spiritual authors.
All this, Academicus, is said on your account, that you may not lose the benefit of this spark of the divine life that is kindled in your soul.
It demands at present an eagerness of another kind, than that of much reading, even upon the most spiritual matters.
Academicus. I thank you, Theophilus; but did not imagine my eagerness after such books to be so dangerous a mistake.
Theophilus. I have said nothing, my friend, with a design of hindering your acquaintance with all the truly spiritual writers. I would rather in a right way help you to a true intimacy with them: for he that converses rightly with them has an happiness, that can hardly be overvalued.
My intention is only to abate, for a time, a spirit of eagerness after much reading, which in your state rather gratifies curiosity, than reforms the heart.
Suppose you had seen an angel from heaven, who had discovered to you a glimpse of that glorious union in which it lived with God. Suppose it had told you that your own soul was capable of all this, but that your flesh and blood would not suffer it to be imparted to you. Suppose it had told you, that all your life had been spent in helping this flesh and blood to more and more power over you, to hinder you from knowing and feeling the divine life within you. Suppose it had told you, that to this day, you had lived in the grossest self-idolatry, loving, serving, honouring, and adoring yourself instead of loving, serving, and adoring God: that all your intentions, projects, cares, pleasures, and indulgences, had been only so much labour to bring you to the grave in a total ignorance of that great work, for which alone you was born into the world.
Suppose it had told you, that all this insensibility of your state, was wilfully brought upon yourself, because you had boldly resisted all the inward and outward calls of God, all the teachings, doings, and sufferings of the Son of God. *Suppose it left you with this farewell, O man, awake; thy work is great, thy time is short, I am thy last trumpet; the grave calls for thy flesh and blood, thy soul must enter into a new lodging. To be born again, is to be an angel: not to be born again, is to become a devil.
Tell me now, Academicus, what would you expect from a man who had been thus awakened, and pierced by the voice of an angel? Could you think he had any sense left, if he was not cast into the deepest depth of self-dejection, and self-abhorrence? Casting himself with a broken heart, at the feet of the divine mercy, desiring nothing but that, from that time, every moment of his life might be given unto God, in the most perfect denial of every temper and inclination that nourished the corruption of his nature: wishing and praying from the bottom of his heart, that God would lead him into and thro’ every thing inwardly and outwardly, that might destroy the evil workings of his nature, and awaken all that was holy and heavenly within him.
Or would you think he was enough affected with this angelic visit, if all that it had awakened in him, was only a longing desire to hear the same, or another angel talk again?
Academicus. Oh Theophilus, you have said enough: for all that is within me consents to the truth of what you have said. I now feel in the strongest manner, that I have been rather amused, than edified, by what I have read.
Theophilus. A spiritual book, Academicus, is a call to as real and total a death to the life of corrupt nature, as that which Adam died in paradise, was to the loss of heaven. All our redemption consists in our regaining that first life of heaven, to which Adam died in paradise: and the one work of redemption, is the one work of raising up a life and spirit, contrary to that we derive from our fallen parents. To think therefore of any thing, but the continual, total denial of our earthly nature, is to overlook the one thing on which all depends. And to hope for any thing, to trust or pray for any thing, but the life of God, in our souls, is as useless to us, as placing our hope and trust in a graven image.
Now is your time, Academicus, to enter deeply into this great truth. You are just come out of the slumber of life, and begin to see the nature of your salvation. You are charmed with the discovery of a kingdom of heaven within you, and long to be entertained more and more with the nature, progress, and perfection of this kingdom in your soul.
But, my friend, stop a little. It is indeed great joy that the pearl of great price is found; but take notice, it is not your’s till, as the merchant did, you sell all that you have, and buy it. Think of a lower price, or be unwilling to give thus much for it; plead in your excuse, that you keep the commandments, and then you are that very rich young man in the gospel, who went away sorrowful from our Lord, when he had said, If thou wilt be perfect, that is, if thou wilt obtain the pearl, sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor; that is, die to thyself and then thou hast given all that thou hast to the poor, all is devoted and used for the love of God and thy neighbour. The apostate nature corrupts every thing it touches; it defiles every thing it receives; it turns all the gifts and blessings of God into coveteousness, partiality, pride, hatred and envy
*Hence it is that sin rides in triumph over church and state, and from the court to the cottage all is over-run with sensuality, guile, falseness, pride, wrath, selfishness, and every form of corruption. Every one swims away in this torrent, but he who hears and attends to the voice of the Son of God, calling him to die to this life, to take up his cross and follow him. Much learned pains has been often taken to prove Rome, or Constantinople, to be the seat of the beast, the antichrist, the scarlet whore. But, alas! they are not at such a distance from us, they are the properties of fallen human nature, and are all of them alive in our ownselves, till we are dead to all the spirit and tempers of this world. They are every where, in every soul, where the heavenly nature, and the Spirit of the holy Jesus is not. But when the human soul turns from itself, and turns to God, dies to itself, and lives to God in the Spirit, tempers, and inclinations of the holy Jesus, loving, pitying, suffering, and praying for all its enemies, and overcoming all evil with good, as Christ did; then, but not till then, are these monsters separate from it.
This, Academicus, is the fallen human nature, which is alive in every one, though in various manners, till he is born again. To think therefore of any religion, or to pretend to real holiness without dying to this old man, is building castles in the air; and can bring forth nothing, but Satan in the form of an angel of light. Would you know, Academicus, whence it is, that so many false spirits have appeared in the world, who have deceived themselves and others with false fire, and false light? It is this; they endeavoured to have turned to God, without turning from themselves; would be alive in God, before they were dead to their own nature; a thing as impossible in itself, as for a grain of wheat to be alive before it dies.
Now religion in the hands of corrupt nature, serves only to discover vices of a worse kind, than in nature left to itself. Hence are all the disorderly passions of religious men, which burn in a worse flame, than passions only employed about worldly matters; pride, hatred, and persecution, under a cloak of religious zeal, will sanctify actions, which nature, left to itself, would start at.
Observe, Sir, the difference which cloaths make in those, who have it in their power to dress as they please: some are all for shew, colours, and glitters; others are quite fantastical and affected in their dress: some have a grave and solemn habit; others are quite simple and plain in the whole manner. But all this difference of dress is only an outward difference, that covers the same poor carcase, and leaves it full of all its own infirmities. Now all the truths of the gospel, when possessed by the old man, make just such a difference as is made by cloaths. Some put on a solemn, formal, prudent, outside carriage; others appear in all the glitter and shew of religious colouring, and spiritual attainments; but under all this outside difference, there lies the poor soul, unhelped, in its own fallen state. And, it is not possible to be otherwise, till the spiritual life begins at the true root, grows out of death, and is born in a broken heart. Selfcontempt, and self-denial, are as suitable to this new-born spirit, as self-esteem, and self-seeking to the unregenerate man. Let me, therefore, my friend, conjure you, not to look forward, or cast about for spiritual advancement, till you have rightly taken this first step in the spiritual life. All your future progress depends upon it: for sin has its root in the bottom of your soul, it comes to life with your flesh and blood, and breathes in the breath of your natural life; and therefore, till you die to nature, you live to sin; and whilst this root of sin, is alive in you, all the virtues you put on, are only like fine painted fruit hung on a dead tree.
Academicus. But how am I to take this first step, which you so much insist upon?
Theophilus. You are to turn wholly from yourself, and to give up yourself wholly unto God,¹ in this or the like manner.
¹ Amazing! First step! It is the very highest attainment of the greatest saint under heaven
*“Oh my God, with all the strength of my soul, assisted by thy grace, I desire and resolve to resist and deny all my own will, earthly tempers, selfish views, and inclinations; every thing that the spirit of this world, and the vanity of fallen nature, prompt me to. I give myself up wholly unto thee, to be all thine, to have, and do, and be, inwardly and outwardly, according to thy good pleasure. I desire to live for no other ends, with no other designs, but to accomplish the work which thou requirest of me, an humble, obedient, faithful, thankful instrument in thy hands, ♦to be used as thou pleasest.”
♦ duplicate word “to” removed
*You are not to content yourself with now and then making this oblation of yourself to God. It must be the daily, the hourly exercise of your mind; till it is wrought into your very nature, and becomes an essential state of your mind, till you feel yourself as habitually turned from all your own will, selfish ends, and earthly desires, as you are from stealing and murder; till the whole turn and bent of your spirit points as constantly to God, as the needle touched with the loadstone does to the north. This, Sir, is your first¹ step in the spiritual life; this is the key to all the treasures of heaven; this unlocks the sealed book of your soul, and makes room for the light and Spirit of God to arise up in it. Without this, the spiritual life is but spiritual talk, and only assists nature to be pleased with a fancied holiness.
¹ Not so: it is not the threshold, but the whole building.
You may perhaps think this an hard saying. But do not go away sorrowful, like the young man in the gospel. I shall now leave you to consider, whether you will give up all the wealth of the old man for this heavenly pearl. I do not expect your answer now, but will stay for it till to-morrow.
But pray, gentlemen, who is this Humanus? I do not remember to have seen him before: he seems not willing to speak, yet is often biting his lips at what is said.
Rusticus. This Humanus, Sir, is my neighbour; but so ignorant of the nature of the gospel, that he is often trying to persuade me into a disbelief of it. I say ignorant (though he is a learned man) because I am well assured, that no man ever did or can oppose the gospel, but through a total ignorance of what it is in itself: for the gospel, when rightly understood, is irresistible: it brings more good news to the human nature, than sight to the blind, limbs to the lame, health to the sick, or liberty to the condemned slave. But this neighbour of mine has never yet been in sight of the real gospel; he knows nothing of it, but what he has picked up out of the books that have been written against it, and for it.
But this is enough concerning the man. He comes with me at his own desire, and upon promise, not to interrupt our conversation; but to be a silent hearer, till it is all over. And therefore, if you please, Sir, I beg our conversation may for a while turn upon the chief points of religion, that he may hear the whole nature, the necessity and blessedness of the Christian redemption.
*Theophilus. Your neighbour is welcome, and I pray God to give him an heart attentive to those truths, which have made so good an impression upon you. Your friend Humanus lays claim to a religion of nature and reason: I join with him, with all my heart. No other religion can be right but that which has its foundation in nature. For the God of nature can require nothing of his creatures, but what the state of their nature calls them to. Nature is his great law, that speaks his whole will both in heaven and on earth; and to obey nature, is to obey the God of nature; to please him, and to live to him, in the highest perfection. God indeed has many after-laws; but it is after his creatures have fallen from nature, and lost its perfection. But all these after-laws have no other end or intention, but to repair nature, and bring men back to their first natural state of perfection. What say you now, Academicus, to all these matters?
*Academicus. You know, how these matters have affected me, ever since I read some books lately published. From that time, I have seen things in such a newness of light, as makes me take my former knowledge for a dream. A dream I may justly say, since all my labour was taken up in teaching into a seventeen hundred years history of doctrines, disputes, decrees, heresies, schisms, and sects, wherever to be found, in Europe, Asia, and Africa. From this goodly heap of stuff crouded into my mind, I have been settling matters betwixt all the present Christian divisions both at home and abroad, according to the best rules of criticism; having little or no other idea of a religious man, than that of a stiff maintainer of certain points against all those that oppose them. And in this respect, I believe I may say, that I only swam away in the common torrent.
*And in this laborious dream I had in all likelihood ended my days; had not those books shewn me, that religion lay nearer home. But however, though I seem to be entered into a region of light, yet I must not forget to tell you, what some of my friends say: that in those books, there are many things asserted, which have not scripture to support them.
Theophilus. Is there not some reason Academicus, to take this objection of your learned friends to be a mere pretence? For what is more fully grounded upon scripture, than the doctrine of a real regeneration? And yet the plain letter of scripture, upon the most important of all points, the very life and essence of our redemption, is not only overlooked, but openly opposed, by the generality of men of sober learning. But this point has not only the plain letter of scripture for it; but what the letter asserts, is absolutely required by the whole spirit and tenor of the New Testament. All the epistles of the apostles proceed upon the supposed certainty of this one great point.
A Son of God, united with, and born in, our nature, that his nature may be produced in us; an holy Spirit, breathing in our souls, ♦quickening the dead in sin, is the letter and spirit of the apostles writings: grounded upon the plain letter of our Lord’s own words, that unless we are born again of water, and the Spirit we cannot see the kingdom of heaven.
♦ “quickning” replaced with “quickening”
Again: Is not the plain letter of scripture, that Adam died the day that he did eat of the earthly tree? Have we not the most solemn asseveration of God for the truth of this? Was not the change which Adam found in himself, a demonstration of the truth of this fact? Instead of the image and likeness of God which he was created, he was stript of all his glory, afraid of being seen, and unable to see himself uncovered; delivered up a slave to the rage of all the elements of this world, not knowing which way to look, or what to do in a world, where he was dead to all that he formerly felt, and alive only to a new and dreadful feeling of heat and cold, shame and fear, and horrible remorse of mind, at his said entrance in a world, whence God and his own glory, was departed. Death enough surely!
Death in its highest reality, a much greater change, than when an animal of flesh and blood is only changed into a cold lifeless carcase.
A death, that in all nature has none equal to it, none of the same nature with it, but that which the angels died, when, from angels of God, they became living devils, and slaves to darkness. Say that the angels lost no life, that they did not die a real death, because they are yet alive in the horrors of darkness; and then you may say, with the same truth, that Adam did not die when he lost God, and the first glory of his creation, because he ♦afterwards breathed in a world which was outwardly, in all its parts, full of the same curse that was within himself. But farther, not only the plain text, and the change of state which Adam found in himself, demonstrated a real death to his former state; but the whole tenor of scripture requires it; all the system of our redemption proceeds upon it. For what need of redemption, if Adam had not lost his first state? What need of the Deity to enter again into the human nature, not only as acting, but being born in it? What need of all this mysterious method to bring the life from above again into man, if the life from above had not been lost? It is true indeed that Adam, in his death to the divine life, was left in the possession of an earthly life. But ’tis wonderful that any man should imagine Adam did not die on the day of his sin, because he had as good a life left in him as the beasts of the field have.
♦ “aftewards” replaced with “afterwards”
For is this the life, or is the death that such animals die, the life and death with which our redemption is concerned? Are not all the scriptures full of a life and death of a much higher kind? What ground or reason then can there be to think of the death of an animal of this world, when we read of the death that Adam was to die the day of his sin? For does not all that befel him on the day of his sin shew that he lost a much greater life, suffered a more dreadful change, than that of giving up the breath of this world? For in the day of his sin, this angel of paradise; this Lord of the new creation, fell from the throne of his glory (like Lucifer from heaven) into the state of a poor, naked, distressed animal of flesh and blood; inwardly and outwardly feeling the curse in himself, and all the creation; and reduced to have only the faith of the devils, to believe and tremble. Proof enough, surely, that Adam was dead to the life of God; and that, with his death, all that was divine and heavenly in his soul, was quite at an end. Now this life to which Adam then died, is that life which all his posterity are in want of. And is there any reason to say, that mankind, in their natural state, are not dead to that first life in which Adam was created, because they are alive to this world? Yet this is as well as to say, that Adam did not die a real death, because he had afterwards an earthly life in him. How comes our Lord to say, that unless ye eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, ye have no life in you? Did he mean, ye have no earthly life in you? How comes the apostle to say, he that hath the Son of God has life, but he that hath not the Son of God hath not life? Does he mean the life of this world? No. But both Christ and his apostles assert this great truth, that all mankind are in the state of Adam’s death, till they are made alive again by the Son and Holy Spirit. So plain is it, both from the letter and spirit of scripture, that Adam died a real death to the kingdom of God in the day of his sin. Take away this death, and all the scheme of our redemption has no ground left to stand upon.
For without the reality of a new birth, founded on a real death in the fall of Adam, the Christian scheme is but a skeleton of empty words, a detail of strange mysteries between God and man, that do nothing, and have nothing to do.
Oh Academicus, what a blindness there is in the world! What a stir is there among mankind about religion, and yet almost all seem to be afraid of that, in which alone is salvation!
Poor mortals! What is the one desire of your hearts? What is it that you call happiness, and matter of rejoicing? Is it not when every thing about you helps you to stand upon higher ground, and gratifies every pride of life? And yet life itself is the loss of every thing, unless pride be overcome. Oh stop awhile in contemplation of this great truth. It is a truth as unchangeable as God; it is written and spoken thro’ all nature; heaven and earth, fallen angels, and redeemed men, all bear witness to it. The truth is this: Pride must die in you, or nothing of heaven can live in you. Under the banner of this truth, give up yourselves to the meek and humble Spirit of the holy Jesus. This is the one way, the one truth, and the one life. There is no other door into the sheepfold of God. Every thing else is the working of the devil in the fallen nature of man. Humility must sow the seed, or there can be no reaping in heaven. Look not at pride only as an unbecoming temper; or humility only as a decent virtue; for the one is death, and the other is life; the one is all hell, and the other is all heaven.
So much as you have of pride, so much you have of the fallen angel in you: so much as you have of true humility, so much you have of the Lamb of God. Could you see with your eyes what every stirring of pride does to your soul, you would beg of every thing you meet to tear the viper from you; tho’ with the loss of an hand or an eye. Could you see what a sweet, divine, transforming power there is in humility, how it expels the poison of your fallen nature, and makes room for the Spirit of God to live in you; you would rather wish to be the footstool of all the world, than to want the smallest degree of it. My friends, for this time, adieu!
The Second Dialogue.
Theophilus.
F
ROM this view of things, we see ♦a spirit of longing after the life of this world, made Adam and us to be the poor pilgrims on earth that we are; so the spirit of prayer, or the longing desire of the heart after Christ, and God, and heaven, raises us out of the miseries of time into the riches of eternity. Thus seeing and knowing our first and our present state, every thing calls us to prayer; and the desire of our heart becomes the spirit of prayer. And when the spirit of prayer is in us, then prayer is no longer considered as only the business of this or that hour, but is the continual panting or breathing of the heart after God. Its petitions are not picked out of manuals of devotion; it loves its own language; it speaks most when it says least. If you ask what its words are, they are spirit, they are life, they are love, that unite with God.
♦ duplicate word “a” removed
Academicus. I apprehend, Sir, that what you here say of the spirit of prayer, will be taken by some for a censure upon hours and forms of prayer; tho’ I know you have no such meaning.
Rusticus. Pray let me speak again to Academicus: His learning seems to be always upon the watch, to find out some excuse for not receiving the whole truth. Does not Theophilus here speak of the spirit of prayer, as a state of the heart, which is become the governing principle of the soul? And if it is a living state of the heart, must it not have its life in itself, independent of every outward time and occasion? And yet must it not, at the same time, be that alone which disposes the heart to delight in hours, and times, and occasions of prayer? Suppose he had said, that honesty is an inward living principle of the heart, a rectitude of the mind, that has all its life and strength within itself. Could this be thought to censure all times and occasions of performing outward acts of honesty? Now the spirit of prayer differs from all outward acts and forms of prayer, just as the honesty of the heart, or a living rectitude of mind, differs from outward and occasional acts of honesty. And yet should a man disregard times and occasions of outward acts of honesty, on pretence that true honesty was an inward living principle; who would not see that such a one had as little of the inward spirit, as of the outward acts of honesty? St. John saith, If any man hath this world’s goods, and seeth his brother hath need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion to him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? Just so, it may be said, if a man neglects times and hours of prayer, how dwelleth the spirit of prayer in him? And yet, its own life and spirit is vastly superior to, and stays for no particular hours, or forms of words. And in this sense it is truly said, that it has its own language; that it wants not to pick words out of manuals of devotion, but is always speaking forth spirit and life, and love towards God. But pray, Theophilus, do you go on as you intended.
*Theophilus. I shall only add, before we pass on to another point, that, from what has been said, it plainly follows, that the sin of all sins, or the heresy of all heresies, is a worldly spirit. We are apt to consider this temper only as an infirmity, or pardonable failure; but it is indeed the great apostasy from God, and the divine life. It is not a single sin, but the whole nature of sin, that leaves no possibility of coming out of our fallen state, till it be renounced with all the strength of our hearts. Every sin, be it of what kind it will, is only a branch of the worldly spirit that lives in us. There is but one that is good, saith our Lord, and that is God In the same strictness of expression it must be said, there is but one life that is good, and that is the life of God and heaven. Depart in the least degree from the goodness of God, and you depart into evil; because nothing is good but his goodness.
Chuse any life, but the life of God and heaven, and you chuse death; for death is nothing else but the loss of the life of God. The creatures of this world have but one life, and that is the life of this world: this is their one life, and one good. Eternal beings have but one life, and one good; and that is the life of God. God could not create man to have a will of his own, and a life of his own, different from the life and will that is in himself; this is more impossible than for a good tree to bring forth corrupt fruit. God can only delight in his own life, his own goodness, and his own perfections; and therefore cannot love, or delight, or dwell in any creatures, but where his own goodness and perfections are to be found. Like can only unite with like, heaven with heaven, and hell with hell; and therefore the life of God must be the life of the soul, if the soul is to unite with God. Hence it is, that all the methods of our redemption have only this one end, to take from us that earthly life we have gotten by the fall, and to kindle again the life of God and heaven in our souls. Not to deliver us from that gross and sordid vice called coveteousness, which Heathens can condemn, but to take the whole spirit of this world entirely from us; because all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father; that is, is not that life, which we had from God by our creation; but is of this world; is brought into us by our fall from God into the life of this world. And therefore a worldly spirit is not to be considered as a single sin; but as a state of real death to the kingdom and life of God in our souls. Management, prudence, or an artful trimming betwixt God and mammon, are here all in vain; it is not only the grossness of an outward, worldly behaviour, but the spirit, the prudence, the wisdom of this world, that is our separation from the life of God.
Hold this therefore, Academicus, as a certain truth, that the heresy of all heresies is a worldly spirit. It is the whole nature and misery of our fall; it keeps up the death of our souls; and, so long as it lasts, makes it impossible for us to be born again. It is the greatest blindness and darkness of our nature, and keeps us in the grossest ignorance both of heaven and hell. For we feel neither the one nor the other, so long as the spirit of this world reigns in us. Light, and truth, and the gospel, so far as they concern eternity, are all empty sounds to the worldly spirit. His own good, and his own evil, govern all his hopes and fears; and therefore he can have no religion, farther than as it can be made serviceable to the life of this world. Publicans and Harlots are all of the spirit of this world; but its highest birth are Scribes, the Pharisees, and Hypocrites, who turn godliness into gain, and serve God for the sake of mammon; these live, and move, and have their being in and from the spirit of this world.――Of all things therefore my friends, detest the spirit of this world, or you must live and die an utter stranger to all that is divine and heavenly. You will go out of the world in the same poverty and death in which you entered into it. For a worldly spirit can know nothing, feel nothing, taste nothing, delight in nothing but with earthly senses, and after an earthly manner. The natural man, saith the apostle, receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, they are foolishness unto him. He cannot know them, because they are spiritually discerned; that is, they can only be discerned by that Spirit, which he hath not. Now the true reason of the absolute impossibility of the natural man, how polite, and learned, and acute soever he be, is this; so far as our life reaches, so far we understand, and feel, and know, and no farther. All after this is, only the play of our imagination, amusing itself with the dead pictures of its own ideas. Now this is all that the natural man can possibly do with the things of God. He can only contemplate them as so many dead ideas, that he receives from books, or hearsay; and so can learnedly dispute and quarrel about them, and laugh at those as Enthusiasts, who have a living sensibility of them. He is only the worse for his dead ideas of divine truths; they become bad nourishment to all his natural tempers: he is proud of his ability to discourse about them, and loses all humility, thro’ a vain and haughty contention for them. His zeal for religion is
envy and wrath, his orthodoxy is pride and obstinacy, his love of the truth is hatred and ill-will to those who dare to dissent from him. This is the constant effect of the religion of the natural man, who is under the dominion of the spirit of this world. He cannot make a better use of his knowledge than this; and all for this plain reason, because he stands at the same distance from a living sensibility of the truth, as the man that is born blind, does from a living sensibility of light.
Academicus. You know, Sir, that in the morning you told me of a first step, that must be the beginning of a spiritual life; you gave me till to-morrow to speak my mind and resolution about it. But you have now extorted my answer from me: with all the strength that I have, I turn from every thing that is not God, and his holy will; with all the desire of my heart, I give up myself wholly to the light and Holy Spirit of God; pleased with nothing in this world, but as it gives time and place, and occasions of doing and being that, which my heavenly Father would have me to do and be; seeking for no happiness from this earthly fallen life, but that of overcoming all its spirit and tempers. But I believe, Theophilus, you had something farther to say.
Theophilus. Indeed, Academicus, there is hardly any knowing when one has said enough of the evil effects of a worldly spirit. It is the canker that eateth up all the fruits of our other good tempers; it leaves no degree of goodness in them, but transforms all that we are to do, into its own earthly nature. The philosophers of old, began all their virtue in a total renunciation of the spirit of this world. They saw with the eyes of heaven, that darkness was not more contrary to light, than the wisdom of this world to the spirit of virtue; therefore they allowed of no progress in virtue, but so far as a man had overcome himself, and the spirit of this world.
But the doctrine of the cross of Christ, the last, the highest, the most finishing stroke given to the spirit of this world, that speaks more in one word than all the philosophy of voluminous writers, is yet professed by those, who are in more friendship with the world than was allowed to the disciples of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, or Epictetus.
Nay, if those antient sages were to start up among us with their divine wisdom, they would bid fair to be treated by the sons of the gospel, if not by some fathers of the church, as dreaming enthusiasts.
But, Academicus, this is a standing truth, the world can only love its own, and wisdom can only be justified of her children. The heaven-born Epictetus told one of his scholars, that then he might first look upon himself, as having made some true proficiency in virtue, when the world took him for a fool; an oracle like that, which said, The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God
If you was to ask me, whence is all the degeneracy of the present Christian church, I should place it all in a worldly spirit. If here you see open wickedness, there only forms of godliness; if here superficial holiness, political piety, crafty prudence; there haughty sanctity, partial zeal, envious orthodoxy; if almost every where you see a Jewish blindness, and hardness of heart, and the church trading with the gospel, as visibly, as the old Jews bought and sold beasts in their temple; all this is only so many forms and proper fruits of the worldly spirit. This is the great net, with which the devil becomes a fisher of men; and be assured of this, that every son of man is in this net, till, thro’ the Spirit of Christ, he breaks out of it.
