When Galileo stepped away from his telescope and said, “The moon looks like a victim of small-pox,” he hammered into place his stake in the mapping of the stars. He wasn’t to know that one of the many translations of this observation reached people as “The moon has small-pox.” And this, precisely, is the problem.
Though translation is ‘the great pollinator of Science’ (Fishbach, in an issue of the journal Babel ), a stony fact is that it has always been difficult to achieve this pollination without pollution. Given the competing, multiple and approximate vocabularies, it has been a challenge to establish the norms and standards that a field such as Science demands.
The ancients, who didn’t enjoy the democratisation that printing brought much later, were primarily interested in five things: religion, moral philosophy, agriculture, armies on the move, and the heavens.
The last was connected to the other four, and was as important to men and women as the earth they occupied. Astronomy, the oldest of the exact sciences, was a crucial part of everyday life and the heavens came in useful to every ship’s captain and every king.
Sign from above
A famous example? Two hundred years after the horrific persecution of Christians following the Crucifixion, the numbers of the faithful in the Roman Empire had so swelled that, by 313 AD, Emperor Constantine thought it wise to convert to Christianity and call his dominions the ‘Holy Roman Empire’. How did he convince his subjects that his holy kingdom needed to be expanded? A sign from the heavens! Conveniently, just before a critical battle, he had looked up at the sky and seen a great cross of light. It said to him, “In this sign, conquer!” Then, as now, people were more willing to believe a Constantine than a Galileo.
The birthmarks of astronomy and its vast inheritance pop up in terminology and deposits of language rich with intralingual intricacies... in Egypt, Babylonia, Mesopotamia (where the signs of the zodiac originated), Sumeria and Akkad. The Ptolemies who ruled after Alexander developed the polite practice of temporarily confiscating the scrolls of any visiting ship that docked for a spell so that their astronomical charts could be copied by an army of scholars who depended on royal patronage and virtually lived in the great library of Alexandria. These scrolls were marked ‘from the ships’ to indicate that they were copies.
By 6 BC, India had already established cultural ties with the Mediterranean peoples. Between the third and fifth centuries, Chinese and Buddhist scholars translated works of astronomy that originated in India. Though the translations themselves no longer exist, records of their titles appear in the catalogues of the Song and Tang dynasties.
For thousands of years before Constantine, people must have looked up at the sky for signs. The farmer for weather patterns, the sailor for sea routes. The development of astronomy was shaped by its passage: the transfer of collective knowledge in varied tongues over centuries.
Sailing by starlight
A saying often attributed to Horace is that savage Rome conquered Greece physically, only to be counter-conquered culturally by Greece. Roman astronomy emerged almost entirely from the translation and rewriting of Greek texts. There even came a time when highly academic material was ‘retold’ for an eager public in the form of handbooks. Plagiarism reigned; sometimes second and third gen compilations even replaced their more accurate originals. An interesting aside in this drama is the origin of the word compile, which comes from the Latin verb ‘to plunder’. Publishers, take note!
By the Middle Ages, many had become convinced that a study of the heavens was of immediate relevance to the human situation (sowing, harvesting, sea travel, and the like). Right until the time of Copernicus (15th/ 16th century), Ptolemy’s second century work, Almagest , remained the standard work on astronomy.
In the intervening centuries, translators, sailing by starlight so to speak, moved the Almagest into other seafaring cultures. The word comes from the Greek megiste ‘the greatest’, and combines with the Arabic al-majisti . Scott Montgomery in Science in Translation (2000) cautions us against getting carried away by sentiment or legend. The translators and copyists of those times, he says, lived in a manuscript culture. The material was often substantially deformed or exaggerated through misinterpretations or abridgements.
As we leave behind yet another World Translation Day (September 30), let us remember that the achievements of translators include the circulation of ideas and the development of a scientific vocabulary. The ship of translation covers all points of the language-compass as it sails, carrying the continuous modification and shaping of the languages through which knowledge transmigrates.
Mini Krishnan edits translations for Oxford University Press, India.
