Shifting Geographies and Literary Space in Pierre d'Avity’s The Estates, Empires, & Principallities of the World (1615)

Abstract

This essay examines the English translation by Edward Grimestone of Pierre d’Avity’s The Estates, Empires, & Principallities of the World (1615), in relation to the French original, entitled Les Estats, Empires, et Principautez du Monde (1614), in order to show the interpenetration and contamination of geographic discourse in French and English. The argument is based on the notion of “literary space”—as in Maurice Blanchot's L'espace littéraire (1955)—which is the space developing "violently" (Blanchot 29) during the mutual contestation between the power of saying (“pouvoir de dire”) and the power of hearing (“pouvoir d’entendre”). D’Avity's geographic and cultural treatise is a metatext, combining human geography (sociology, history, religion, arts and literature) with economic geography, as well as demography and ethnography, as texts cross-polinate with other classical and early modern historical and geographic discourses. Literary space in d’Avity’s treatise is closely related to word, text, and image, so the French original and the English translation work like shifting and overlapping tectonic plaques, which interpenetrate with each other. Whereas the English version focuses pragmatically on European culture and its avatars, adding or omitting several places, according to the translator’s experience, the treatise in French offers a hugely comprehensive view of the world’s geographic space through the territories and the peoples it evokes. The treatise is inscribed in the niche of emerging seventeenth-century literary geography discourses, and the fact that its popularity has not survived for too long after this period is not a result of the text’s shortcomings, but of the competitive development of geographic and ethnographic knowledge.