The Authority of Translators: Vendors, Manufacturers, and Materiality in the Transfer of Barlaam and Josaphat along the Silk Road
Issue: Vol 8 No. 3 (2012) Special Issue: Reframing Authority—The Role of Media and Materiality
Journal: Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts, Cultural Histories, and Contemporary Contexts
Subject Areas: Religious Studies Islamic Studies Biblical Studies
DOI: 10.1558/post.33683
Abstract:
Texts–and the stories and teachings they contained–travelled far along the Silk Road in the hands of merchants, missionaries, monastic communities and many more. The intricate itineraries and the many languages and scripts used on the way have received much attention, and we can therefore follow some of the stages and versions that stories like the Barlaam and Josaphat (as it was known in the West) went through in its long journey from Sanskrit India to e.g. Norse-writing Norway. But in studies of such transfer of texts, translation has mainly been seen as a linguistic enterprise, requiring language skills and linguistic strategies of translators. The present paper aims at involving also material aspects of this process, focusing on the material conditions into which texts were inscribed on the way. The transformation from stringed palm leaves, to single parchment leaves or rolls, and then to bound codices also had an impact on the structure, presentation and symbolic value of these texts. Layout, the place and possibility of illuminations, as well as the portability and physical resilience of the written text all depended on the traditional manners of book production, and these varied immensely over the expanse of the Silk Road. Being authoritative to various degrees in themselves, texts entered, when translated and re-circulated, into a universe of multiple authority holders where translators (in a broad sense) would have to reinvent authoritative presentations of the new text, acting in many ways as vendors of it. This would in itself imply a–brief–authoritative position, comparable to the ‘authority of the seller’ auctoritas venditoris, as expressed in Roman law.
Author: Christian Høgel
References :
Agapitos, P. A. 1998. “Teachers, pupils and imperial power in eleventh-century Byzantium.” In Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of classical learning, edited by Y. L.
Too and N. Livingstone, 170–191. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511552731.009
Beckwith, Cristopher. 2011. Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 2012. Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400845170
Beecroft, Alexander. 2015. An Ecology of World Literature. From Antiquity to the Present Day. London: Verso.
Berger, Albrecht. 2006. Life And Works of Saint Gregentios, Archbishop of Taphar. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Bernard, Floris. 2014. Writing and Reading Byzantine Secular Poetry, 1025–1081. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bloom, Jonathan M. 2005. “Silk road or paper road?” The Silkroad Foundation Newsletter 3(2). http://www.silk-road.com/newsletter/vol3num2/5_bloom.php.
Brentjes, Sonja. 2006. “An exciting new Arabic version of Euclid’s Elements: MS Mumbai, Mullā Fīrūz R I.6.” Revue d’histoire des mathématiques 12: 169–197.
Burman, Thomas E. 1998. “Tafsir and translation: Traditional Arabic Quran exegesis and the Latin Qurans of Robert of Ketton and Mark of Toledo.” Speculum 73: 703–732. https://doi.org/10.2307/2887495
Cordoni, Constanza. 2014. Barlaam und Josaphat in der europäischen Literatur des Mittelalters. Darstellung der Stofftraditionen—Bibliographie—Studien. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
De Weerdt, H.G.D. 2007. Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinations in Imperial China (1127–1276). Harvard East Asian Monographs 289. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.
Der Nersessian, S. 1936. L’illustration du Roman de Barlaam et Joasaph. Paris: de Boccard.
Dodge, B. 1970. The Fihrist of al-Nadīm: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture. New York: Columbia Univeristy Press.
Dorival, Gilles, Marguerite Harl and Olivier Munnich. 1988. La Bible grecque des Septante : du judaïsme hellénistique au christianisme ancien. Paris: Cerf.
Ehrhard, A. 1936–1952. Überlieferung und Bestand der hagiographischen und homiletischen Literatur der griechischen Kirche. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geshichte der altchristlichen Literatur. Vol. 50-52.2, Leipzig: Hinrichs.
Foehr-Janssens, Yasmina, and Marion Uhlig, eds. 2014. D’Orient en Occident: Les recueils de fables enchassees avant les mille et une nuits de Galland (Barlaam et Josaphat, Calila et Dimna, Disciplina Clericalis, Roman de Sept Sages). Turnhout: Brepol.
Gaullier-Bougassas, Catherine, ed. 2011. L’Historiographie médiévale d’Alexandre le Grand. Turnhout: Brepols.
Griffith, Sidney. 2009. Hunayn Ibn Ishaq and the Kitab Adab Al-Falasifah: The Pursuit of Wisdom and a Humane Polity in Early Abbasid Baghdad. Piscataway: Gorgias.
Gutas, D. 1998. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203316276
Gutas, Dimitri. 2012. “Arabic into Byzantine Greek: Introducing a survey of the translations.” In Knotenpunkt Byzans, edited by A. Speer and P. Steinkrüger, 246-262. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110272314.246
Houben, Jan E. M. and Saraju Rath. 2011. “Introduction, Manuscript culture and its impact in ‘India’: Contours and parameters.” In Aspects of Manuscript Culture in India, edited by Saraju Rath, 1-53. Leiden: Brill.
Kazhdan, A. P., ed. 1991. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press.
Krausmuller, Dirk. 2007. “Patriarch Methodius, the first hagiographer of Theodore of Stoudios.” Symbolae Osloenses 81: 144–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/00397670701495161
Lang, David Marshall. 1966. The Balavariani: A Tale from the Christian East. Los Angeles: California University Press.
———. 1967. “Introduction.” In John Damascene. Barlaam and Ioasaph. Translated by
G. R. Woodward and Harold Mattingly. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674493346.intro
———. 1957. The Wisdom of Balahvar: A Christian Legend of the Buddha. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Lieu, Samuel N. C. 1992. Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and in China. 2nd ed. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr.
Lincoln, Bruce. 1994. Authority. Construction and Corrosion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Mortensen, Lars Boje. forthcoming. “Latin as vernacular: Critical mass and the ‘librarization’ of new book languages.” In Origin Stories: The Rise of Vernacular Literacy in a Comparative Perspective, edited by Norbert Kössinger et al.
Niehoff-Panagiotidis, Johannes. 2003. Übersetzung und Rezeption: Die byzantinisch-neugriechischen und spanischen Adaptionen von Kalila wa-Dimna. Serta Graeca. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
Pollock, Sheldon. 2009. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Powell, J.G.F. 1995. “Cicero’s translation from Greek.” In Cicero the Philosopher, ed. J.G.F. Powell, 273-300. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pym, A. 1999. Method in Translation History. London: Routledge.
———. 2010. Exploring Translation Theories, London: Routledge.
Rydén, Lennart. 1995. The Life of St Andrew the Fool. Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia, 2 vols. Uppsala: Uppsla University.
Schaik, Sam van and Imre Galambos. 2012. Manuscripts and Travellers: The Sino-Tibetan Documents of a Tenth-Century Pilgrim. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Scherrer-Schaub, Christina. 2009. “Copier, interpreter, transformer, représenter ou Des modes de la diffusion des Écritures et de lécrit dans le bouddhisme indien.” In Écrire et transmettre en Inde classique, edited by Gérard Colas and Gerdi Gerschheimer, 151–172. Paris: École francaişe d’Extrême-Orient.
Schopen, Gregory. 2009. “On the absence of Urtexts and otiose Ācāryas: Buildings, books, and lay Buddhist ritual at Gilgit.” In Écrire et transmettre en Inde classique, edited by Gérard Colas and Gerdi Gerschheimer, 189–219. Paris: École francaişe d’Extrême-Orient.
Sullivan, Denis F., Alice-Mary Talbot and Stamatina McGrath. 2014. The Life of Saint Basil the Younger: Critical Edition and Annotated Translation of the Moscow Version. Dumbarton Oaks Studies. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks,.
Tarchnisvili, Michael. 1955. Geschichte der kirchlichen georgischen Literatur: Auf Grund der ersten Bandes der georgischen Literaturgeschichte von K. Kekelije. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.
Taylor, Barry. 2014. “Frames Eastern and Western.” In D’Orient en Occident. Les recueils de fables enchâssées avant les Mille et une Nuits de Galland (Barlaam et Josaphat, Calila et Dimna, Disciplina clericalis, Roman des Sept Sages), edited by M. Uhlig and Y. Foehr-Janssens. Turnhout: Brepols. https://doi.org/10.1484/M.CELAMA-EB.1.101984
Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. 2008. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. New York: Continuum Publishing.
Titley, Norah M. 1983. Persian Miniature Painting. London: British Library.
Versteegh, Kees. 1997. The Arabic Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Volk, Robert. 2006. Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos. Historia animae utilis de Barlaam et Ioasaph, edited by H. C. Brenncke and E. Mühlenberg. Patristische Texte und Studien, vol. 6/2. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.