Introduction: Beyond Babel, or, the Agency of Translators in Early Modern Literature and History

Every translation is an interpretation, both a rereading and a rewriting: translators deracinate and also resituate the works they re-language, and their actions are neither straightforward in practice nor simple to study. Even assuming a translator's full bilingual fluencies, this complex process requires not only his or her knowledgeable attention to the works originating cultural matrix, but also an informed intuition about the new intended readers. And literary translation further requires attention to tone and register, to connotation and intertextuality, to genre and form, and even to the different histories of genre and form in the respective languages in question. As if these factors were not sufficiently complicated, translation necessarily also involves remediation, or the re-creation of a work in a new material text. Translation, in other words, is never reducible to its common definition, "putting a work into another language"; after the cultural turn in translation studies in the 1990s and the current "textual turn," nearly all translation scholarship now acknowledges the many complications that proliferate around an act of translation. But the one consistently accessible site of transformative agency--what we can always hear working through these compounded complexities--is the translator's voice. That voice, with its own specific agency, proved an especially pervasive means of literary and cultural transformation when accelerated by the new technologies of printing during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. In our own time, translation challenges major critical categories such as authorship, genre, and periodization, and thus animates literary, historical, and theoretical inquiries alike. This special issue of Philological Quarterly samples such inquiries, gathering new research that was developed during the Year-Long Colloquium on Renaissance/Early Modern Translation held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2014-15. Thirteen selected participants assembled monthly during the year to explore the Folger Library collections, to study how recent scholarship in translation studies informs the study of early modern history and literature (and vice versa), and to develop, present, and discuss their research. The official Folger Colloquium description initiated the historicized, dialectical mode of inquiry and the broad view of early modern translation that characterized our year and ground these essays. It reads in part: Current database projects such as the Universal Short Title Catalogue and the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue have expanded our factual basis for studying translations; after the cultural turn in translation studies, new scholarship has theorized and historicized translation. In light of this new work, the colloquium will [study the theory and practice of early modern translation and will] rethink perennial Renaissance topics such as the appropriation of antiquity, emergent literary nationhoods, and vernacularity. Gender, empire, textuality, multilingualism, and the transculturation of ideologies, for example, may also inform our work. Other welcome topics include the so-called "untranslatables" ... Both early modern and contemporary translation theories will ground our reading of the translations treated in participants' projects. The Colloquium included specialists in history, comparative literature, English, Spanish, and French literatures, and translation studies. The participants' resulting essays reflect the interdisciplinary nature of our year's conversations; eight of them compose this special double issue. Our focus on western Europe was intentional, even as we acknowledged that early modern translation itself was a more global enterprise than we usually think (including work in, e.g., Arabic, Chinese, native "new world" languages, Slavic and Scandinavian languages, as well as the more familiar European vernaculars, Latin, and Greek). …