3 - ‘Useful’ Translations in the Milanese Enlightenment

Summary

ONE OF THE MOST obvious forms of textual transformation in all parts of the world is linguistic translation. Yet such translation is almost always accompanied by paratextual and material variation. Translations and other textual mediations have been interpreted as independent cultural forms with contexts and consequences stretching far beyond their original language editions. Moreover, as a result of growing interest in the dynamics of the circulation of ideas across the Enlightenment world and the ‘historical turn’ in translation studies, translators, much like printers, editors, booksellers, engravers and other intermediaries involved in the production and exchange of books, have been recovered as agents in their own right, whose actions bore direct, lasting and often significant effects on the forms, accessibility and reception of ideas. Accordingly, the study of eighteenth-century translations, translators and the satellite persons and processes orbiting translations has offered new avenues in thinking about the ideas, audiences and both material and human agents of Enlightenment.

Building on this approach, this chapter explores the role of the Milanese printer and bookseller, Giuseppe Galeazzi (1694–1779), in the circulation of ideas in the Milanese Enlightenment. The translations pursued and printed by Galeazzi, which ranged from works of natural history like Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon's Histoire naturelle to core cameralist textbooks such as Joseph von Sonnenfels's Grundsätze der Polizey, Handlung und Finanzwissenschaft, were vital in transporting diverse Enlightenment cur-rents to Habsburg Milan in a period of complex censorship and political upheaval. However, these vernacular translations also served a social and arguably ideological purpose. Not only were works selected for translation based on their perceived ‘utility’ for Lombardy – be it economic, political, or social – but the translations were variously and explicitly adapted to the Lombard context and to align with the political and philosophical ambi-tions of the Milanese reforming class, through the inclusion of prefaces, letters to the reader and other paratextual additions, as well as degrees of interpretative translation. In this combination of selection and adaptation, Galeazzi encapsulates what Peter Burke argues are the two opposing, yet compatible, early modern rationales determining translation: firstly, to ‘fill the gaps in the host culture’, and secondly, ‘the principle of confirmation, according to which people in a given culture translate works that support ideas or assumptions or prejudices already present in the culture.