Translating geographies: The Navigatio Sancti Brendani and its Venetian translation

Abstract

Spatial and geographical issues are experiencing a period of prosperity within translation studies, so much so that we could speak of a “spatial turn” within the “translational turn”. This article locates itself within that space-oriented field of research, but proposes something new: rather than examining the “geography of translation”, it focuses on the translation of spaces, on the “translation of geographies”. The paper first introduces this concept, explaining how translation is a cultural activity that produces “new” spaces – or, more precisely, how translation, as a rewriting of geopoetic features, creates new “imaginative geographies”. Maintaining that such translational processes are not just contemporary phenomena but have always been part of human orientation practices, I then examine the Navigatio Sancti Brendani (tenth century) as a cultural translation itself and its Venetian version, La navigazione di San Brandano (early fourteenth century), as a counter-translation of geographies, namely as the rewriting of a West-oriented, Atlantic geopoetics into an East-oriented, Mediterranean one.