‘Being in the Middle’: Translation, Transition and the ‘Early Modern’

Abstract

collocation ‘human nature’, and to their appropriation by Montaigne in conclusion. The words will, by then, have formed part of an argument about, and with, the monoglossic, monopolizing tendencies of ‘(early) modernity’, conducted by way of several further scenes of unacknowledged quotation and interrupted reading, one in Rabelais, others in Montaigne. The scenes of reading on which I shall focus are less historical examples than themselves concerned with the temporality of reading, with ways in which Renaissance texts imagine their readers, then as now, to be not at the start (early), nor at the end (post), but somewhere in the middle (always, already, modern). More Greek, and a moment of apparent boredom: a text read not at Delphi, but at sea, midway through a mid-century journey to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle, one day, that is, some time between 1548 and 1552. The reading is found towards the end of Rabelais’s Quart Livre, at a strangely interrupted stage in the travellers’ quest. The wind has died down, and the narrative is at a standstill; the narrator, as bored as anyone on board, reports that ‘we were all moody, matagrabolised, doremified and stuck’ (estions tous pensifz, matagrabolisez, sesolfiez et faschez). 2 The middle two