Michael Brumbaugh (Tulane University)
In 1793, a Catalan Jesuit, José Manuel Peramás, living out his exile in the Papal States of Italy published a detailed treatise in Latin about life in the Guaraní Republic of Paraguay, where he had lived decades before. His audience was made up, primarily, of well-educated Europeans in a variety of nations for whom Paraguay was a distant and fantastical land – belonging perhaps more to the realm of the imaginary than anywhere else. Much discussed in European intellectual culture, Paraguay fascinated Europeans of the 17th and 16th century and featured prominently in the works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot though none of them had ever set foot in the Americas. Their ignorance of this space apparently presented no obstacle to them or their readers. Among a variety of personal and political agendas, Peramás very much wanted to set the record straight and provide a more accurate portrayal of the indigenous peoples of Paraguay for his eighteenth-century contemporaries. He described the landscapes they inhabited (pre- and post-contact with Europeans) as well as the spaces where they lived and worked, in many instances describing them with an abundance of qualitative and even quantitative detail.
In the first part of this talk, I explore a variety of the challenges Peramás faces in using Latin as an elite lingua franca to communicate Guaraní realities to a linguistically diverse European audience. I then go on to a second order set of challenges, namely, how to represent these dynamics today in a modern translation meant to serve both as a historical document and as a readable and intelligible translation of the source text for a specialist and non-specialist audiences. I will use a variety of examples from Peramás’s text to explore different types of translation challenges, including: quantitative terms (e.g., Latin ulna “forearm” used as a measurement for describing the layout of buildings and towns), proxy terminology (e.g., Latin forest vocabulary applied to tropical rainforests), and descriptive vocabulary dependent on cultural values (e.g., Latin rudis “raw,” “unworked,” “uncivilized”).
Using words to describe the places you see in an effort to recreate those places in the mind of a reader is itself a powerful act of translation that engages the senses and the intellect of the one who sees and the one who imagines. The more unfamiliar the spaces are to the reader, the greater the challenge. Adding further distancing variables such as translation across languages, across cultures, across value sets, and across centuries creates a labyrinthine nexus of obstructions for the reader trying to use an author’s words to see through his eyes