Historically, translation in the visual arts was predicated on a deficit-based model, whereby canonical, Eurocentric texts produced in the art-historical centers of the West are transported into the supposed margins of art history: Wölfflin into Chinese, for example. Art in Translation has always challenged this model, arguing that its function is to enable cross-cultural dialogue rather than promote a one-way flow. As the editorial to the very first issue of the journal explained:
“The mission of AIT is to open, via the act of translation into English, new vistas into current scholarship and production in the visual arts worldwide. It is rooted in the concept of transculturation, which admits resistance and accommodation between the hegemonic center and cultures that have been colonized, marginalized, and oppressed.”1
In recent years, however, translation has been vigorously redefined as an activity that mediates rather than simply transfers data between cultures.
Beyond the obvious gain in knowledge and understanding, translation understood interculturally, allows the messages originating in what were historically considered the margins to promote structural transformation at the mainstream center. The researcher and translator is no longer an interventionist but one who listens to alternative realities. The result is reflexivity, prompting the mainstream participants—historians of art, architecture, and visual culture—to question the way in which they pursue their own production of knowledge.
Expanding its remit in step with these developments, Art in Translation now functions not only as a source of translations of significant historical and recent texts, but also of key texts written in English, which offer new insights into the nature and processes of cultural translation within the realm of the visual arts. In recent issues it has published works of original scholarship on translation and architecture, on the Moorish Revival in nineteenth-century Europe, and on the geopolitics of art in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. This exploration of the theory and practice of intercultural translation will be further developed in future issues of the journal.
Cultural exchange occurs across both space and time, and the distance between contemporary cultures in diverse regions of the globe may be seen as analogous to the distance between different historical periods at the same location. Both modes appear in this issue of Art in Translation. Frankfurt am Main in the 1530s was an entirely different city to its modern counterpart, and yet there are resonances across the centuries between the instructions on early-modern science, chemistry, printing, and publishing, and the activities that still thrive in Frankfurt today. The publication in English of the Egenolff volume works, therefore, as both interlingual and intercultural translation.
Later in the same century, Jerome Nadal—a Spanish Jesuit priest and companion of Ignatius of Loyola—created the Evangelicae Historiae Imagines (Images of the History of the Gospel), which was published posthumously in 1593. This made its way to China with the Jesuit order, which saw the translation, printing, and circulation of Western books and catechisms as key vehicles for spreading the Christian faith. This intense intercultural communication was both textual and visual, and Rui Oliveira Lopes investigates in his essay the adaption of the Nadal images by Chinese artists to conform with local pictorial traditions.
The third text in this issue is a translation from Bengali of a young woman’s autobiographical account of her studies at the ashram at Santiniketan, which had been established in the late 1880s by Debendranath Tagore, and developed in the new century as Visva-Bharati University by his son, the poet, polymath, and Nobel Prize laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. The student, previously known as Nibhanani, was given the name Chitranibha (Chitra—painting, and Nibha—beauty), by Rabindranath Tagore himself, and she was taught painting by the pioneer Indian modernist Nandalal Bose. Her text is a moving paean to her master, which transports the reader back across time and space to Santiniketan in the late 1920s. On completing her studies, and at the instigation of Rabindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose, she was appointed in 1935 as the first female professor at Kala Bhavana, the fine arts faculty of Visva-Bharati University.
Note
Notes
1 “Editorial”, Art in Translation, 1, no. 1 (Spring 2009), p. 2.