«Translating Events, Glossing Experience. European Texts and American Encounters»

E. Michael Gerli
«Translating Events, Glossing Experience. European Texts and American Encounters»
Medievalia, n.º 17, 2014

Medievalia | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona | Institut d’Estudis Medievals | Barcelona | ESPAÑA


Extracto de páginas 52-53, 42-43y 51-52 del artículo en PDF. Véanse en la publicación original del artículo completo las referencias correspondientes a los autores que se citan en el texto extractado a continuación.

«The elaboration of glosses constituted an important component of composition and exegesis, and they functioned much like reference tools, seeking to tease out the meanings and uses not just that the author but that his readers could find in any particular text.

»At the same time, as C. Dinshaw asserts, “Glossing is a gesture of appropriation; the glossa undertakes to speak the text, to assert authority over it, to provide an interpretation, finally to limit or close it to the possibility of heterodox or unlimited significance.” The gloss “reveals and makes useful the text’s hidden truth, recloaking the text with its own interpretation,” and it opens the possibility of “the delight of understanding [the text’s] spirit” just as it can “overwhelm the text as well” (Dinshaw, 1989, p. 122). To be sure, as Rodríguez Velasco (2010) has shown, the practice of glossing in late fifteenthcentury Spain still remained widespread, and the gloss could often eclipse the very authority of the text that was its object in the manner described by Dinshaw.

»Glossing encouraged the reader to draw upon known elements which carry symbolism and meaning, and to combine them to form a complex hermeneutical network of associations in an exercise of interpretation. Their more profound objective was not only to group concepts and events together but also to suggest and constitute meaningful abstract relationships between them. In the texts we have examined, they constitute the European attempt to register, assimilate, and domesticate the powerful nature of otherness: the range of geographies, experiences, cultures, representations, and individuals with whom people like Díaz were suddenly forced to interrelate. In them, we are able to discover at the level of language, text, thought, and sensibility one of the basic gestures of colonialism: the urge to appropriate, inhabit the territory of, and dominate the Other through the Other’s transformation into familiar images of the self.

»The texts we have examined all seek to bridge the gap of New World Otherness. The density of analogies and comparisons that one finds in early Spanish descriptions of, and narratives on, America does not, however, signal successful understanding of the historical subjects that were the objects of their interest. On the contrary, the cultural realities and understandings of the Spaniards and the Americans made any form of mutual comprehension almost impossible. In the texts we have reviewed, the relation and comprehension of an unknown world implies its association and inscription in preexisting representations defined by a dominant European subjectivity and textual tradition.

»The point is simply that, even if failed, the eff ort to understand was for lack of a two-way dynamic, and for the fact that in their initial experiences in the New World, the Spanish could only absorb America by colonizing it physically, socially, and textually; by transforming it into Europe, even at the level of rhetoric and writing. To paraphrase and slightly bend Todorov’s well-known declaration of purpose at the beginning of his The Conquest of America, through these textual references to European narratives, the self found the self in its vision of the other (Todorov, 1984, p. 3).

»[…]

»On all the occasions I have just described adventurers in uncertain circumstances turn to ballads or other imaginative texts to help them not only relate but reference, fl esh out, perceive, frame, and make familiar the events at the center of narratives that purport to recreate experience.

»The textual references serve, in eff ect, as a gloss to a lived experience, framing it within a known cultural and epistemological context, assimilating the event to the discourses of the European imagination.

»These are not mere literary evocations, but rather textual recollections that provide a grid of references (a Foucauldian “dispositif”) which facilitates the translation, repositioning, or recodification and understanding of something unknown in terms of something known and familiar. Via the borrowed literary references, experience undergoes a semantic transformation in the pursuit of relating the sense of an entirely new reality that seems to elude easy integration.

»Through these references, new peoples, landscapes, and geographies are rendered into a European code and are moved into familiar territory, making known strange events through analogy and a process of re-cognition, or a mental reprocessing by which new knowledge can be used and understood.

»[…]

»I have dwelt on Bernal Díaz precisely because I think that he is perhaps the most representative example of the way the early chroniclers sought to reference and translate the novelty of the American experience in European terms. Díaz epitomizes the economies of thought used by Europeans to confront New World realities.

»The direct allusions to, and the subtle rhetorical subterfuges of, Amadís, Celestina, the romancero, and Generaciones y semblanzasI have underscored, in addition to the myriad other comparisons Díaz draws between Aztec Mexico and Europe, are more than observed similarities; they are gestures for approximating the known to the unknown as well as for exercising dominion over the latter. The references function as glosses to recalled experience.

»They are constituted parenthetically, almost like the interlinear glosses and translations of texts with cross references to similar passages one finds in medieval manuscripts. In this way, they seek not just to explicate but to create a standard of reference, like the so-called sedes materiae (literally: seat of the matter) in medieval commentaries of civil and canon law, or in a broader cultural setting, they function like Levi-Strauss’ bonnes à penser, or things with which to think (Levi-Strauss, 1962, p. 32). In its proper form glossing can clarify what is obscure in texts and strip away the external covering in which writers clothe the truth in their texts.»