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Translating Nature: Cross-cultural Histories of Early Modern Science

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-8647109

1527-1900

Helge Wendt,

Latin American history and culture

In the introduction the editors claim that the volume explores the role of translation in the history of early modern natural sciences. The contributions (with one exception) are particularly concerned with transfers of knowledge stemming from Spanish America in a circum-Atlantic space. The editors discuss different understandings of translation, including both epistemic and political aspects. One aim of the anthology is to contribute to a comprehensive concept of science that goes beyond the northwestern European tradition of Francis Bacon to include transatlantic, especially Spanish American, knowledge production.Although the terms translating and nature are in the book's title, the reader will miss these two topics in some of the contributions. Juan Pimentel inquires into the recurring omission of actors who contributed to the “discovery” of the Pacific Ocean (p. 1). First, the Amerindian contribution to the Vasco Núñez de Balboa expedition was eclipsed. Later, Balboa erased their presence entirely in one portolan chart. This elucidating contribution does not treat the concepts of translation and nature. In his examination of Bernabé Cobo's work, Luis Millones Figueroa reduces the meaning of translation to the use of Aymara and Quechua terms. He assumes that Cobo had a profound understanding of Amerindian knowledge, although the Jesuit mentioned no sources or names of informants. The essay by Sarah Rivett does not address the topic of translating nature. She examines how dictionaries of Jesuit and Protestant missionaries depicted North American indigenous languages without clarifying the actual look and usage of these dictionaries or the differences between Jesuit and Protestant missionaries.Several contributors indeed focus on translation and a positive transfer of knowledge. Coeditor Marroquín Arredondo distinguishes two main functions of translation in Francisco Hernández's work, haphazard and systematic, which can both be found in this key oeuvre of early Spanish American knowledge production (p. 48). Daniela Bleichmar contributes a systematizing view of translation by viewing the Codex Mendoza as a “changeling object” (p. 118). She highlights the linguistic and physical translations of the manuscript, containing both script and images, in the Spanish Mexican context and through its physical transfer to England. Marcy Norton examines how Mesoamerican knowledge of the quetzal and the religious-ceremonial meaning of its feathers is treated eclectically in the writings of Bernardino de Sahagún and Francisco Hernández. She makes particularly clear how Nahuatl, Latin, and Spanish were closely related to their social contexts and consequently explains the different forms of selecting knowledge concerning the quetzal. Coeditor Bauer, in his contribution, makes a connection between alchemy and the beginning of English interest in the Americas. He could have stressed the connection between alchemy and mining instead of making too-long digressions into the outdated distinction between alchemy and science. After all, the author whom Bauer examines is Richard Eden (and his reception of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés), who closely fused alchemy and mining, to which he added a political dimension. Sara Miglietti convincingly shows how in the Spanish and subsequently in the English contexts climate became a topic of scientific consideration. Miglietti situates this development toward a chorologic explanation within a movement to translate between languages, forms of knowledge, and institutions.Christopher Parsons shows how confusing translation and negative transfer processes could be. He studies correspondence networks between North America and Paris of French researchers, who often confused plant names. Whether a plant was of European or American origin was lost in the multitude of terms used, the translations made, and the different collection methods. Ruth Hill understands Pedro Murillo Velarde's illustrated map of the Philippines as a process of negotiation between European and Philippine epistemes. The Jesuit cartographer intended to reduce complexity by omitting information and finding common explanations for hidden causes, such as the color of humans' and animals' skins.The editors and most of the contributors state how important Spanish knowledge production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was for the birth of modern science. John Slater takes a different approach, underlining the refusal of some Spanish authors to entrust their work to printers. It was their skepticism that set some Hispanic scholars apart from their English and Dutch colleagues and meant that their works thus reached a smaller readership.It is necessary to indicate that some terms are used in contradictory ways throughout the volume. For example, in various essays Western is used in its twentieth-century sense as encompassing western Europe and North America. In other contributions, Western is understood to refer only to knowledge of Latin Christianity. In another case, early modern authors are associated with modern practices—for example, when Cobo is described as carrying out an “etymological analysis” (p. 83). Furthermore, the quite important role of religion as an object of knowledge is not present. None of the studies deals with universities or other institutions, such as the Jesuit colleges in the colonies, which were places of scientific organization. Finally, it has to be considered whether it is helpful to present the actors studied as specialized scientists in a modern sense. For example, some of them were government officials or missionaries who collected knowledge on behalf of their institutions, not solely out of scientific interest. Certainly, these figures translated knowledge and were context-bound actors within a global transfer of scientific knowledge, which is the true subject of this volume.