Translation and Transformission; or, Early Modernity in Motion

Abstract

Translation and Transformission; or, Early Modernity in Motion A. E. B. Coldiron Just walk into virtually any Renaissance document, and it is liable to open in its own small ways into multiplicity, into non-identity with itself. By attending to such examples of text’s [sic] mis-self-representation, we can gauge something of what I call its “transformission”—how it was transformed as it was transmitted. (And since we don’t have texts that aren’t transmitted, transformission should cover most everything.) (Random Clod 246) The concept of “transformission,” created by Randall McLeod, does indeed “cover most everything.” It proves broadly generative for studying early modernity and is especially applicable to early modern translations, as the essays in this issue demonstrate. The most direct contribution of the idea of transformission to translation studies is procedural: when looking at translations, we should look also at changes made to their material texts. The idea of transformission, however, originated in textual studies and editorial theory, and those origins help us understand its special relevance to translation studies. This Foreword to a special issue on transformission and translation first considers briefly the textual origins of the idea of transformission, particularly examining how the perennial problem of variant versions can be reimagined through the lens of transformission and related textual-studies concepts. From there, the idea of transformission connects readily to translation studies: translations, after all, are variant versions of a work, and they, too, are transformed when transmitted. Transformission asks us in particular to consider material textuality [End Page 205] as a co-factor in translation, concomitant with verbal or linguistic factors. The idea of transformission helps us keep an eye on process, on exactly how material texts convey a translation’s meanings, and it helps us attend differently to difference as a factor in the construction of meaning. In a final stretch, we might also connect the Heraclitean idea of transformission to changes in cosmography and historiography that have long been identified with early modernity/Renaissance. McLeod’s foundational and often hilarious essay “Information on Information,” like his longer, vivid essay “Obliterature” and other works, uses the facts of textual variation to intervene in several arguments in textual studies, such as the surprisingly stubborn ones around a so-called “fixity of print.” In textual studies, the idea of transformission can in part be understood as a sensible, enlightened extension of the work of D. F. McKenzie: if the material text uniquely inflects, shapes, or even constructs the meaning of the work it conveys, as McKenzie established, then in transmission, any other text(s) of that work will inflect, shape, or construct different meaning(s) of it. This is most obviously true of re-mediations, works that are born in one medium and reappear in another, such as transcriptions of spoken texts, or manuscripts put into print, or digitizations. In such cases of re-mediation, it is easy to see McLeod’s point that when a text is transmitted, it is necessarily transformed. It is also easy, and useful, to bring other concepts in to play with the idea of transformission. For example, Wai-Chee Dimock’s idea of resonance would apply when considering, say, mise-en-page as an instrument of transformission in early modern poetry; Walter Ong’s theories of orality and residue would apply in discussing transcriptions of spoken words or written accounts of performances as transformissions; and Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura, advanced in a 1935 essay, would apply when examining transformissions from script to print. (This notion might also apply to transformissions from print to script, as in the case of early modern commonplace books or other manuscripts copied from printed books; my question would then be, “can aura be reinscribed in transformission?”) McLeod, however, at least when writing as a material-bibliographer, seems more interested in cases of non-re-mediated transformission (i.e., of texts reiterated within the same medium, such as re-editions, reprints, or copies). Most modern readers assume such texts are identical, just as they too often assume that there should be equivalence, fidelity, or even identity between a translation and its prior foreign text. Whether or not re-mediation is involved...