The Translation of Paradise: Thomas More’s Utopia and the Poetics of Cultural Exchange
In: FuturescapesSearch for other papers by Gabriela Schmidt in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
This essay is an attempt to interlink the origins of utopian literature with the history of humanist translation. It conceives of translatio – in the broad linguistic, spatial and cultural sense for which the term was used during the 16th century – as a crucial structural principle and interpretive key to Thomas More’s Utopia, the founding text of the genre. From the very first pages of its 1516 principal edition, More’s enigmatic dialogue is steeped in problems of translation, which are symbolically anticipated in the imaginary Utopian alphabet and quatrain with which his text begins. Whether in the mythical origins of his model New World commonwealth, in its dealings with other nations, or in the envisioned transmittance of its moral and cultural accomplishments to early modern Europe, translation in Utopia is always simultaneously present as an ideal and as an illusion. By emphasising the fallacies inherent in the humanist dream of a perfect translatio between Classical antiquity and the present, More to some extent reconceives of translation as a dialogue in which both sides actively influence and profit from each other. This kind of productive openness is constitutive for the entire hermeneutical framework of More’s book, as its reader – faced with the impossibility of simple ‘translation’ – is forced to engage with the text in a creative process of adaptation and exchange.