Translating geographies: The Navigatio Sancti Brendani and its Venetian translation

Abstract

Spatial and geographical issues are experiencing a period of prosperity within translation studies, so much so that we could speak of a “spatial turn” within the “translational turn”. This article locates itself within that space-oriented field of research, but proposes something new: rather than examining the “geography of translation”, it focuses on the translation of spaces, on the “translation of geographies”. The paper first introduces this concept, explaining how translation is a cultural activity that produces “new” spaces – or, more precisely, how translation, as a rewriting of geopoetic features, creates new “imaginative geographies”. Maintaining that such translational processes are not just contemporary phenomena but have always been part of human orientation practices, I then examine the Navigatio Sancti Brendani (tenth century) as a cultural translation itself and its Venetian version, La navigazione di San Brandano (early fourteenth century), as a counter-translation of geographies, namely as the rewriting of a West-oriented, Atlantic geopoetics into an East-oriented, Mediterranean one.

Keywords:

• translation of geographies
• cultural translation
• geopoetics
• medieval translation
• Navigatio Sancti Brendani
• Venetian vernacular

Notes

1. To support Buden and Nowotny's “culturalist” recovery of Saussure and Jakobson, see the very readable book by linguist Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass (2010), in particular 150–6.

2. Too often we forget the intentional difficulty of poetry since, and that is probably also a part of the discourse, we always think of novels when we speak of literature.

3. With regard to the dating of the Venetian translation (beginning of the fourteenth century), I refer to Grignani (1975, 269–72) and Davie (2005, 155–7).

4. With regard to the dating of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, I refer to Mackley (2008, 14–16).

5. The Venetian version presents important interpolations throughout, but they increase progressively towards the end, in particular in the Paul the Hermit chapter and the Paradise chapters.

6. I have given variations in square brackets.

7. Davie (2005, 220) translates “ganbari” as lobsters.

8. I have given variations in square brackets.

9. On the mercantile aspects of Venetian vernacular, see Folena (1990, 227–67) and Ferguson (2007).

10. On the staging of Eastern motifs in medieval Venice, see also Howard (2000).