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Translating the Cabinet of Curiosities in Early Modern England

2019; Canadian Comparative Literature Association; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/crc.2019.0025

1913-9659

Brent Nelson,

Information Architecture and Usability

Translating the Cabinet of Curiosities in Early Modern England Brent Nelson Reading the book of creatures, or book of nature, in the age of early modern empiricism involved new methods that brought a new and enriched understanding of translation. Even as it was enjoying a golden age of literary translation, seventeenth-century England experienced a perceptible shift in attention from texts to things, introducing a new domain of translation at the centre of which was the cabinet of curiosities, a site of translation in every major sense of the word. To translate might mean to bear or convey a thing from one place to another, to change the form or appearance of a thing, or to turn from one language to another (OED II.7, III.15a, I.1). All three senses of the term were at play in the acquisition and exchange of rare and curious objects, both natural and artificial, in these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century precursors of the modern museum. As in the textual domain, representing or translating the world of objects resulted in what Randall McLeod, writing as Random Clod/Cloud, calls “transformission” (246). McLeod’s portmanteau represents the idea that texts and, in this case, objects are transformed when they are transmitted. Collectors acquired objects from points around the globe and transmitted them via a pan-European network of exchange. Many of these objects were of interest precisely because they bore the marks of some sort of material transformation, such as, for example, a nautilus shell turned into an ornate vessel. The cabinet of curiosities itself was an attempt to render into a complex visual language a representation of a rapidly expanding and changing world of experience, deeply entwined with efforts to reform or devise new linguistic systems to mediate adequately this new world of objects. The most obvious application of translation to the cabinet of curiosities in the first sense is provided by the OED, the transitive verb meaning “[t]o convey or move (a person or thing) from one place to another; to transfer or transport” (OED II.7a). By its very definition, a collection is a site for objects that have been removed from [End Page 336] one location to another, particularly and conspicuously so in the case of these collections. John Tradescant the Elder called his collection “The Ark,” evoking the idea of bringing into one container a representative and ideally, though not realistically, complete set of objects from all over the world. Objects in these cabinets came from the Americas to the west, the “indies” to the east, and Africa to the south, and from the more immediate environs of continental Europe and England itself. They were transported by travellers, merchants, sea captains, and other agents, and also by citizens of the collector’s own community. They were transferred not only in the initial act of collecting, but also (sometimes) afterward, between collectors and from donors to collectors. In all such cases, the removal was not just from one place to another, but from one state or condition to another. As the following discussion demonstrates, there are two senses in which these objects, in being transported, were also transformed. The second definition of translate is “To turn from one language into another; ‘to change into another language retaining the sense’ (Johnson); to render; also, to express in other words, to paraphrase” (OED II.2). This usage is the most common today, and the baseline for any article published in a collection dedicated to translation studies. Language was an implicit factor in the collecting of curiosities insofar as these collections served a representative function with respect to the world of natural and anthropological objects. In the earliest days of these collections, their metaphoric association with language was fundamental to how the collections were understood. In calling his collection “The Ark,” Tradescant was signalling that it was to be understood as an epitome, a collection of signs pointing to the wide world of objects beyond its walls. English traveller and diarist Peter Mundy clearly recognized this function when he said of Tradescant’s collection, “I am almost perswaded a Man might in one daye behold […] collected into one place more Curiosities then...