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Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities by Carla Nappi

2022; University of California; Volume: 53; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cjm.2022.0022

1557-0290

Elisa Frei,

Chinese history and philosophy

Reviewed by: Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities by Carla Nappi Elisa Frei Carla Nappi, Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), x + 256 pp. This is one of the most peculiar history books one could imagine. Is it because it is not a history book at all? Starting from the preface, Carla Nappi writes a fascinating manifesto of a monograph; explicitly based on the Italian author Italo Calvino's (1923–85) work, it refuses to be classified into one or another category. Consistent with Calvino's poetics, Nappi declares everything and its contrary. She started writing Translating Early Modern China as a history book, and sort of got lost in the process while never regretting it, because she has no interest "in using names to hold concepts stable, nor in arguing over the correct conceptual territory that a name should delimit, nor in preventing the inevitable, beautiful metamorphoses of anything I say into something else when it reaches your ears or eyes or mouth or mind" (vii). What is sure is that the homage to Calvino starts from the subtitle of the book: Illegible Cities alludes to Calvino's Invisible Cities (1972). Influenced by his interest in semiotics and structuralism, Calvino's novel reports the imaginary conversations between Italian explorer Marco Polo (1254–1324) and Mongol Kublai Khan (1215–94), founder of the Yuan dynasty of China. Nappi organizes the structure of her book based on this novel and another one by Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969). Translating Early Modern China imagines a "gathering" of six men (11–12), sitting together for dinner and pleasantly talking about their activities as translators and their different policies and visions for this discipline and, in a way, art form. Every chapter has a main character and a year in which that person was active: the Siamese interpreter Women La (1578); the student of Mongolian language Wang Zilong (1608) and the author of a Mongolian-Chinese textbook Quoninci (1389); the Jesuit interpreter Ferdinand Verbiest (1678); the Manchu teacher Uge and his colleague Chang Mingyuan (1730); and finally the Manchu-Chinese translator Bujilgen Jakdan (1848). Given both these chapters' impressionistic view and Nappi's own declaration, Translating Early Modern China, despite its title, does not aspire to give a complete overview of the history of translations in the Chinese empire during the [End Page 263] early modern period. What the author wants is to create, inspire, and also encourage scholars to think and rethink about their linguistic certainties. She offers suggestions to the readers—addressing them directly, especially in the endnotes—as she found them in the documents she carefully studied and closely read. Nappi's interdisciplinary curriculum, her linguistic skills, and the divertissement spirit that permeates the whole book allow this experiment to succeed. The reader's attention and curiosity are caught when Nappi explains archival and bibliographical sources such as glossaries, grammars, textbooks, conversation manuals, and poems. There are six chapters, accompanied by a preface and an introduction before, and a dispersal at the end. Let us analyze here just the third chapter, whose protagonist is the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–88). Many things have been written on him as a renowned figure of the history of Catholic missions, but to see him depicted by Nappi as a magician, a sculptor, a dancer, an architect, and a musician is something that has never before happened. The fulcrum of this chapter is Verbiest's Elementa linguae tartaricae, the first grammar of Manchu in a European language—in this case, Latin, the lingua franca of the Society of Jesus and generally of educated people in early modern Europe. Nappi presents Verbiest in all these shapes to show how translating is an act of creatively transforming and manipulating (more or less concrete) materials: in their substance, in space and time, and according to their readers and listeners. Verbiest tries to give to an already existing language, Manchu, a fixed and established structure by putting its rules into a written and definite form. However, how can something so volatile as language find an unchangeable form? Nappi refers to another literary passion of hers: the Latin poet Ovid and his...