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The Translations of Nebrija: Language, Culture, and Circulation in the Early Modern World

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00141801-4260802

1527-5477

Miguel Martínez,

Historical and Linguistic Studies

In The Translations of Nebrija: Language, Culture, and Circulation in the Early Modern World, Byron Ellsworth Hamann studies the global impact of Antonio de Nebrija’s lexicographical work, particularly the Dictionarium ex hispaniensi in latinum sermonem (1495?), a Spanish-Latin vocabulary that was destined to exert a powerful influence on the intellectual history of Europe and the world. Conceived as a tool for scholars and learners of Latin, Nebrija’s was indeed one of the most frequently reprinted dictionaries of its kind in the early modern period. Moreover, as Hamann amply shows, the Dictionarium was also the main material and intellectual tool to produce important dictionaries of New World, and occasionally Asian, languages. The study of the variants of this changing product of medieval printing and Renaissance humanism, usually linked to matters of distribution and reception, allow Hamann to build a global genealogical tree for Nebrija’s swarming progeny.The first chapter, “Nebrija and the Ancients,” explores and collates the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish (and some Netherlandish) editions of the Dictionarium. Chapter 2, “Arabic, Nahuatl, Tuscan, Tagalog . . . ” turns to the uses of Nebrija’s work by colonial lexicographers, normally missionaries, who produced a host of dictionaries of Nahuatl, Otomi, Matlatzinca, P’urhépecha, Quechua, Zapotec, Maya (Cakchiquel, Tzotzil, Yucatec, and Tzeltal), Mixtec, Aymara, and Tagalog; the chapter also covers a few Old World adaptations of the Dictionarium in Arabic, English, French, and Tuscan. The third chapter, “From the Shores of Tripoli to the Halls of Montezuma,” calls attention to the complex linguistic mediations of these translations and the misinterpretations they have generated in ethnohistorical scholarship, which has occasionally fashioned Amerindian societies in the image of Ancient Rome. Finally, chapter 4 (“Margins of Vocabularies”) pays cursory attention to the marginal annotations—normally manuscript additions of lexical items—of a few printed dictionaries analyzed in the previous chapter.The amount of research with primary sources in different languages that is behind this project is impressive. The book is heavily illustrated with many of the items the author discusses, from a number of libraries in Spain and North America, and enriched with some useful charts, such as figure 0.3 attempting to filiate the many dictionaries modeled after Nebrija to the specific editions of the humanist’s Dictionarium in a kind of global stemma. The appendixes, however, which include a long list of lexical items added and removed from subsequent editions of Nebrija’s vocabulary and a regular, unremarkable legal document granting printing rights to the humanist’s sons, are arguably dispensable.The author could have perhaps profited from a deeper engagement with scholarly discussions of Nebrija, a vast field of scholarship in and of itself, book history, and translation theory. Some philological-minded readers may find the collation and filiation of testimonies somewhat unsystematic. In following the reverberations of a single book in world history, however, The Translations of Nebrija works very well as an annotated bibliography of Nebrija’s legacy on a global, cross-cultural scale. In this regard, the book will be useful for scholars of humanism, linguistic anthropology, comparative lexicography, historical linguistics, and ethnohistory.