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1DOI: https://doi.org/10.46991/TSTP/2024.SL2.009
Early Modern Indirections: An Open Door to Forms and Uses of Indirect Translation
Theo Hermans* https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8436-2540
University College London
Abstract: The paper explores the role of different forms of translation in the historical movement of ideas. Its main object of study is Abraham Rogerius' description of Hinduism, firs t published in Dutch in 1651 and soon translated into German and French. Both translations add material provided independently by the translator. The German version and its addenda left echoes in a German oriental novel that was, in its turn, translated. An abridgement of the French version became part of a survey of the world's religions that was also translated in its turn and helped shape the Enlightenment. The main aim of my paper is to document the various modes of translation, adaptation and appropriation that enabled this dissemination.
Keywords: translation; history of ideas; history of religion; orientalism
1. Introduction
This essay explores a small chapter in the historical movement of ideas, covering a period of about a hundred years. It is mainly concerned with the nature and afterlife of one book, first published in Dutch in 1651, but also draws on a second book, first published in English in 1653. The Dutch book, in particular, is of considerable importance in the intellectual history of Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe, especially the history of comparative religion. Indirect translation is involved throughout, but always alongside other forms of translation and adaptation. As we will see, my starting point, the Dutch book of 1651, already contains forms of indirect translation itself and will in turn be translated, reworked and used in a variety of ways.
Indirect translation has received scholarly attention in recent years. There have been useful attempts to map the phenomenon and its terminology (Assis Rosa, Pi^ta & Bueno Maia 2017; Pi^ta 2017), as well as individual studies and special issues of journals. In the introduction to one of these special issues (Pi^ta, Ivaska & Gambier 2022), the study of indirect translation is designated a subfield of translation studies.
* t.hermans@ucl.ac.uk
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Received: 12.12.2023 Revised: 20.02.2024 Accepted: 25.02.2024 © The Author(s) 2024
This is not the direction I want to take. On the contrary, the story that follows shows the complex process of books and ideas being not just translated, directly and indirectly, but mangled, mauled, used, usurped, exploited and repurposed in all manner of ways. To gain a sense of the vagaries of the migration and diffusion of ideas, and the role of different kinds of translation in it, we should embrace this complexity. The last thing we need is a division of the field of investigation into subfields.
The starting point for the present exploration is a book by Abraham Rogerius, called De open-deure tot het verborgen heydendom (The Open Door to the Secrets of Paganism), published in Leiden in 1651. It offered, in Dutch, the first detailed and relatively unbiased account of Hinduism to appear in Europe, based on the author's conversations with Brahmins (upper-caste Hindus) in South-East India.
The significance of Rogerius's book may be gauged by placing it in the context of some of the contemporary developments and debates that, taken together, began to question the traditional Biblical and other orthodoxies and thus presaged the Enlightenment. There was, for instance, the debate about the chronology of world history. In 1650, just a year before Rogerius's book, the Irish archbishop James Ussher used Biblical sources to calculate that the earth had been created 4004 years ago. The Brahmins with whom Rogerius spoke in India thought the world had come into being hundreds of thousands of years ago, and their Vedic texts were much older than the Bible (Emmer & Gommans 2012: 101-2). The mid-century also debated the origins of indigenous Americans, who were not mentioned in the Bible and whose existence the Bible therefore could not explain (Huddleston 1967). Early Modern orientalism, fed by numerous travel accounts and a growing body of linguistic and ethnographic scholarship, led to a fashion for oriental tales (Parker 1999), of which we will encounter one specimen below. They showed European readers the vivid detail of customs, rituals and beliefs utterly alien to them. By the 1650s several translations of the Qur'an were in circulation, followed in 1687 by the publication of Confucius Sinarum philosophus (Confucius the philosopher of the Chinese), the first full translation (into Latin) of the Confucian classics, with extensive annotations by the book's Jesuit editors.
As travel and translation confronted Europe with different belief systems, the interest in comparative religion grew. An early and influential exponent of this interest was Pansebeia, or a View of All Religions in the World (1653) by Alexander Ross, a 550-page compendium of historical as well as contemporary religious rites and beliefs across four continents. In contrast with Rogerius, however, Ross was a conservative writer keen to expose the gross errors of pagan ways in order to highlight the truth of the Christian religion. In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment authors would see Christianity as just one religion among others. They appreciated Rogerius and treated Ross with contempt.
Until that time, though, Ross's View of All Religions was extremely popular. It went through ten editions in its first fifty years and was soon translated into Dutch, German and French. The Dutch version (by Josua Sanderus) appeared in 1662. There were two different German translations, one published in Heidelberg in 1665 and the other in Amsterdam in 1667, the former claiming to be directly from English when it was actually based on the Dutch translation, as the translator himself explained in the
preface. The French version, published in Amsterdam in 1666, was by Thomas La Grue, whom we will meet again in the following pages.
2. Abraham Rogerius and His Open-Deure
Abraham Rogerius (c.1609-1649) was a Dutch clergyman in the service of the Dutch East India Company. He had studied in Leiden at the Seminarium Indicum, a training school for missionaries. He reached Batavia (now Djakarta) in 1631 and was subsequently posted to Paliacatta (now Pulicat, north of Madras, now called Chennai) on the Coromandel coast of South-East India. He remained there for about ten years, working as a Calvinist minister. He preached in Portuguese (the lingua franca in parts of Asia at the time) and Dutch, and made friends with some Brahmins, with whom he spoke at length about their beliefs. He returned to Batavia in 1642 and produced Portuguese translations of two Dutch breviaries. He arrived back in Holland in 1647 and died there two years later. His book, De Open-Deure tot het verborgen Heydendom ofte Waerachtigh vertoogh van het leven ende zeden, mitsgaders de Religie ende Gotsdienst der Bramines op de Cust Chormandel ende der landen daar ontrent (The open door to the secrets of heathendom or truthful account of the life and customs, as well as the religion and worship of the Brahmins on the Coromandel Coast and surrounding areas), appeared posthumously in 1651. The title refers to the 'secrets' of heathendom because Brahmins were not supposed to speak of their beliefs with outsiders.
The book featured a dedication (to the governors of the Dutch East India Company) and a preface, both of which explain that Rogerius gathered his knowledge of Hinduism from two Brahmins called Padmanaba and Dammersa. Their mother tongue was Tamil, but they conversed with the author in Portuguese, a language Dammersa was said to speak better than Rogerius' main informant Padmanaba. Rogerius wrote his book in Dutch on the basis of his Portuguese conversations with the two Brahmins. The book itself, then, contained several translation moves, from Tamil to Portuguese to Dutch and from spoken to written language. It also contained, at the end, 200 aphorisms by Bhartrhari, a fifth-century Hindu poet and philosopher who wrote in Sanskrit. These aphorisms will have been rendered from Sanskrit, possibly via Tamil, into spoken Portuguese by Padmanaba and Dammersa, and then into written Dutch by Rogerius.
In addition, the Open-Deure had a substantial number of annotations, which argued, by and large, that the religion of the Brahmins possessed a monotheistic core. The author of these footnotes signed only with the initials A.W. It has remained uncertain to this day but who hides behind them, but they may refer to the Leiden lawyer and politician Arnoldus Wittens (Schilt 2023).
In the decades following the publication of the Open-Deure, several Dutch descriptions of India's Coromandel coast, and of Asia more generally, made use of Rogerius' account of Hinduism. This was the case, for example, with the description of the Malabar and Coromandel coasts which another Dutch pastor, Philippus Baldaeus, published in 1672. Baldaeus mentioned Rogerius as his source on the religion of the
Brahmins; the description of Asia by Olfert Dapper, also from 1672, did not. Dapper's account, including the section plagiarised from Rogerius, was translated into English a year later (Sweetman 2003: 89-90).
But Rogerius' book also found direct international resonance, beginning with a German and a French version, in 1663 and 1670, respectively. In both cases the translators added their own materials, and their translations had further repercussions involving various and sometimes convoluted modes of translation and transmission. I will trace some of these developments in the coming pages, dealing first with the German translation, its appendix and the echoes of it that can be heard in a subsequent oriental novel. I will pick up the French translation after that.
3. Christoph Arnold and His 'Zugaben'
The German translation appeared in Nuremberg in 1663 and contained the complete text of Rogerius, including the annotations by A.W. and the 200 sayings of Bhartrhari. Its title page, Offne Thür zu dem verborgenen Heydenthum [...] samt Christoph Arnolds auserlesenen Zugaben von den Asiatischen, Africanischen und Americanischen Religions-sachen (Open door to the secrets of heathendom ... together with Christoph Arnold's selected addenda regarding Asian, African and American religions), mentioned the translator's name. Christoph Arnold (1627-85) was a German poet, philologist and Lutheran pastor. He is thought to have spent some time in England and the Dutch Republic around 1650 and later taught in Nuremberg but kept up his contacts in Holland. He owned a large private library and provided a 200-page addendum (Zugabe) to an edition (Heidelberg, 1674) of one of the German translations of Alexander Ross' View of All Religions. Apart from editing Classical texts he also translated Dutch travel books about the Far East.
His knowledge of Dutch, his library and his oriental curiosity will have stood him in good stead not just with the translation of the Open-Deure but also, and especially, with the addenda that he supplied of his own accord. The translation itself was a deft and no doubt difficult job but otherwise unremarkable, even as it added a further layer to the already complicated set of translational turns that had gone into the making of Rogerius' book. The addenda, by contrast, hold an interest of their own, particularly as regards direct and indirect translation.
They are very substantial, making up nearly half of the book's 1,000 pages. As the title indicates, they concern Asian, African and American religions, and reference a large number of sources, which Arnold quotes, translates, paraphrases and summarises, at first or at second hand, as he sees fit - and, presumably, as his linguistic competence permits. Most of his Latin sources he quotes in Latin, such as, for instance, Theophilus Spizelius' De re literaria Sinensium (On Chinese literature), which had appeared in 1661. Some Latin sources he quotes from adapted versions, like Nicholas Trigault's epoch-making book on the Jesuit mission to China, first published in 1615 but quoted here from a drastically shorn 1639 adaptation. In at least one case, Giovanni Botero's Relationi universale, first published in Italian in 1591, Arnold quotes from one of the
several part-translations into Latin that had appeared in the first part of the seventeenth century.
Arnold brings up Alexander Ross' View of All Religions, too, quoting, however, not from the original English edition or one of the reprints that had appeared in 1655 and 1658 but from the Dutch version of 1662 by Josua Sanderus (as we saw, the first German translation of Ross' book did not appear till 1665, two years after Arnold's Offne Thür). Right in his opening chapter Arnold describes, in German, the pagan beliefs of the Tatars by means of a paraphrase of Sanderus' 'recently published' Dutch translation of Ross (Rogerius 1663: 544). Elsewhere, too, he gives page reference to Ross as translated by Sanderus, including a two-page paraphrase concerning China, with the beginning and end of the paraphrase neatly marked (Rogerius 1623: 564-66). When Arnold refers to the French travel writer Vincent le Blanc, he makes use of a translation of Le Blanc by another Dutch translator, the prolific Jan Hendrik Glazemaker. In the same vein, Arnold calls on the Portuguese traveller Fernao Mendes Pinto through the Dutch translation of Mendes Pinto's (part-fictional) account by the same Glazemaker, except that Glazemaker did not know Portuguese either and had rendered into Dutch an anonymous French translation of Mendes Pinto's book while drastically reducing his French source from 1,200 to under 300 pages. Spread over several narrative passages, Arnold paraphrased about seventy pages of Glazemaker's version, always indicating exact page numbers. In these passages, then, Arnold was paraphrasing, in German, a Dutch abridgment-cum-translation of a French version of an originally Portuguese book. Whether he was aware of the nature and length of this chain remains uncertain.
4. Banise and the Stamp of Authenticity
Beyond paraphrase we can discern ever more diluted forms such as borrowing, summary, allusion and passing reference. It is in this depleted manner that Rogerius' Open-Deure and, to an even smaller extent, Ross' View of All Religions, served to buttress one of the most successful novels of the German Baroque. This was Die asiatische Banise (The Asian Banise) by the aristocratic Heinrich Anselm von Zigler und Kliphausen (1663-97). Published in 1689, the novel went through seven editions in thirty years. A full-length continuation appeared in 1724, there were opera libretti and plays based on it and finally, as the genre's popularity began to wane in the second half of the eighteenth century, a parody.
Die asiatische Banise is an oriental novel set in two fifteenth-century kingdoms, Ava and Pegu, in what is now Myanmar (formerly Burma). The story concerns the virtuous love affair between prince Balacin and the princess Banise - whose name, incidentally, is not oriental at all, being an anagram of the name of the author's wife, Sabine. The plot involves intrigue, passion, rivalry, captivity, epic battles and a happy ending. Translation has a place, too, but in an unexpected way. The story concludes with a performance - and the full text - of a play which the book's title page assures us is translated from Italian ("...eine aus dem Italiänischen übersetzte theatralische Handlung"). The claim is false, as Irmgard Scheitler (2013) has shown. Zigler had
done no more than to make alexandrines of a German prose translation (by Johann Christian Hallmann) of an Italian libretto (by Niccolo Beregan). Zigler's failure to mention either the libretto author's name or that of the translator, together with his claim to have translated when in fact he had merely versified, can be said to constitute plagiarism (Scheitler 2013: 57-58).
The title page also declared that the novel was based on historical truth, and the preface to the reader elaborated on this claim by stressing that the customs of Asian peoples had been truthfully portrayed, referring in this context to various travel accounts and mentioning both Abraham Rogerius' Open-Deure and Alexander Ross' View of All Religions. The wording is vague: "Rogeri Heidenthum, Rossens Religionen" (Roger's Heathendom, Ross' Religions) but, considering what we have seen so far, it is clear enough which books are meant. The references are, of course, not to the original works but to the German versions of Rogerius and Ross. On a number of occasions, the novel's narrative is interrupted by a footnote giving a page reference to Rogerius and Ross to back up descriptions of local customs and beliefs. They put a stamp of ethnographic and historical authenticity on the fictional story. The authenticity, for that matter, comes with varying degrees of reliability. For instance, of the six references to 'Roger's Heathendom' in Book 1 of the Asiatische Banise, only two concern Rogerius' book directly; the other four point to places in Christoph Arnold's addenda where he draws on Giovanni Botero, Mendes Pinto and (twice) Vincent le Blanc. For the author of the Asiatische Banise it obviously did not matter much where his authenticating information came from, as long as the source carried an air of respectability, however spurious.
Yet translation has the last word in this tale. The success of Die asiatische Banise attracted translations into other languages. Both the novel itself and its continuation of 1724 appeared in Swedish translation in 1741 and 1747, respectively. The French adaptation of 1771 contained the novel and its continuation as well, but now set out as a single continuous narrative, the original length of the story reduced by about half, and the whole presented as an original French novel, obscuring the German palimpsest underneath it (Menne 2013). There were several Russian translations as well, but they have remained in manuscript (Martin and Vorderstemann 2013: 335-431). The Dutch translation of 1769 holds an interest of its own because here Rogerius returns home. However, the translation simply repeats the original novel's claim to historical truth on the title page and its elaboration in the preface to the effect that several sources including the vaguely identified 'Roger's heathendom' (Rogers heidendom) have been consulted. There is no indication that the translator was aware that Rogerius' book was originally in Dutch or of its Dutch title. Linguistic evidence suggests, in fact, that the translator was a native speaker of German (V an Gemert 2013).
5. Thomas La Grue and Two Appendices
The French translation of Rogerius' Open-deure, like its German counterpart, came with extras of the translator's own devising, and had its own afterlife. The translator,
Thomas La Grue (1620-80), from Dieppe, in northern France, was trained as a Catholic priest but subsequently became a Protestant and settled in Amsterdam. He studied medicine and gave French lessons, compiling a French grammar and a (posthumously published) French-Dutch dictionary. His French version of Alexander Ross' View of All Religions appeared in Amsterdam in 1666 (Lods 1900). It was followed four years later by his translation of Abraham Rogerius' book, which appeared as La porte ouverte pour parvenir à la cognoissance du paganisme cache (The open door to attain knowledge of hidden paganism).
The translation is complete, including the annotations and the 200 sayings of Bhartrhari. As was the case with Christoph Arnold's German version of the Open-deure, La Grue's Porte ouverte, too, contains an appendix representing his own addition to the translation. In size, La Grue's appendix is a much more modest affair than Arnold's addenda, but historically it carries rather more weight. It consists of two parts, both translations, including translations of translations.
The first part of La Grue's appendix (Rogerius 1670: 342-65) covers four chapters from China illustrata, an encyclopaedic description of China which the well-known Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher had put together, in Latin, on the basis of accounts of China - and Asia more generally - by Jesuit missionaries. The book had appeared in Amsterdam in 1667. La Grue picked the four chapters that concerned Hinduism in India and elsewhere in Asia and translated them into French. One of these chapters contained a section (Rogerius 1670: 357-62) that was itself a translation. It described the ten avatars of Vishnu and had been translated or paraphrased from Sanskrit into Latin by the German Jesuit missionary Heinrich Roth when he was at the Moghul court in Agra in the 1650s and early 1660s. Roth had learned Hindustani, Persian and Sanskrit, and wrote the first grammar of Sanskrit in a European language (Camps 2000: 91-97). In writing about the avatars of Vishnu, Roth no doubt relied on the assistance of Brahmins, as Rogerius had done on the Coromandel coast in the 1630s. In 1664 Roth found himself briefly in Rome when Kircher was there working on his China Illustrata. The two men met and corresponded, and the section in Kircher's book on Vishnu's avatars was an almost verbatim transcription of Roth's manuscript translation from Sanskrit (Camps 2000: 94-95). Kircher had introduced the section as deriving from Roth's translation ("ex interpretatione P. Henrici Roth"; Kircher 1667: 157) and La Grue's Porte ouverte followed suit ("Selon la traduction du Père Henry Roth"; Rogerius 1670: 357). An interesting detail is that Rogerius' book itself also contained a description of Vishnu's avatars (Rogerius 1651: 119-26; Rogerius 1670: 158-68). His description differed from Roth's, but La Grue did not point out or comment on the differences.
The other part of La Grue's appendix (Rogerius 1670: 366-71) is much shorter but equally curious in its own right. It contained La Grue's translation of an anonymous account of the beliefs of the Brahmins of the Coromandel coast, apparently written by a Brahmin who acted as an interpreter for the Dutch East India Company. La Grue's title, "Un abrégé de la religion des payens qui habitent sur les costes de Chormandel, et mis entre les mains de Monsieur le Gouverneur Arnaud Heussen, par un de leurs Bramines (que d'autres nomment Brachmannes,) estant pour lors Interprete de la Compagnie, & traduit en nostre langue, comme il s'ensuit" (A brief account of the religion of the
pagans who inhabit the Coromandel coast, handed to governor Arnold Heussen by one of their Brahmins [others call them Brachmans] who acted as an interpreter for the Company, and translated into our language as follows) rehearses that of the Dutch original he translated. This was an eight-page pamphlet that had appeared, without an author's name, in Delft in 1651: Een kort begrijp der heydenen religie, op de kust Kormandel, door een haeres Bramenees, (Compagnijs-tolck sijnde) aen de heer gouverneur Arnoldus Heussen overghegheven, ende in onse spraecke overgeset, sijnde van woort tot woort, als volght (A brief account of the religion of the pagans on the Coromandel coast, handed by one of their Brahmins [being a Company interpreter] to governor Arnoldus Heussen and translated into our language, being word for word, as follows). Arnoldus Heussen was the Dutch East India Company's governor in Paliacatta from 1643 to 1650 (Abraham Rogerius had returned to Batavia in 1642), so the text was probably composed in those years. Its source material is likely to have been in Sanskrit or, alternatively, in Tamil or another South Indian tongue. Nothing is known about the author of the account, apart from the fact that he was a Brahmin and an interpreter, presumably from Tamil into Dutch or Portuguese or both. He may or may not be solely responsible for the Dutch version that La Grue translated into French. La Grue will have known about the pamphlet published in Delft only because he happened to be living in Holland at the time.
6. Comparative Religion
As was the case with Christoph Arnold's German translation of Abraham Rogerius's Open-deure, Thomas La Grue's French version had an afterlife when, in an abridged form, it was incorporated into a monumental survey of world religions that played a part of some importance in European intellectual history. The work in question was the Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Religious ceremonies and customs of all the peoples of the world) by Jean Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart, which appeared in seven folio volumes in Amsterdam in 1723-37. Picart was the work's illustrator, Bernard its publisher, compiler and main author. Both Bernard and Picart were French Protestants who had fled persecution in their home country for religious reasons and settled in Amsterdam. Their seven-volume compilation contributed significantly to the early Enlightenment because it embraced the radical idea that different belief systems could be compared dispassionately and on equal terms, without privileging Christianity as the one true religion (Hunt, Jacob & Mijnhardt 2010: 1-2). The work proved highly successful and was pirated as well as reprinted until well into the nineteenth century.
The first part of the first volume dealt with the religious beliefs of American peoples and then, with new pagination, moved on to India. The section on the Hinduism of the Brahmins of the Coromandel coast, called "Dissertation sur les mœurs et sur la religion des Bramines" (Dissertation on the customs and religion of the Brahmins; Cérémonies 1723: 22-77), is a drastically abridged version of Abraham Rogerius' book, as indeed the section's subtitle indicates ("Dressée sur les mémoires du Sieur Roger Hollandais," based on the memoirs of Mr Roger, Hollander). The
reference here is not to Rogerius' original book but to its French translation. The preface to the 'Dissertation' explains that Rogerius is the best source on the subject because he had obtained his material at first hand, but that his book was poorly written, too digressive and so badly translated as to be almost unreadable, hence the need to extract only the substance ("l'essentiel"). A footnote informs us that the French translation was the work of Thomas La Grue. In the abridgment, the annotations to Rogerius' account by A. W. have been omitted, and the sayings of Bhartrhari which concluded Rogerius' book are briefly reported on rather than reproduced or abridged. Later in this first volume of the Cérémonies, the introduction to the second part (with, again, new pagination) mentions that La Grue had also translated Alexander Ross' View of all Religions, a book now summarily dismissed as "mauvaise & inutile compilation, s'il en fut jamais" (the worst and most useless compilation that ever was; Cérémonies 1723, part 2: [4]).
That second part features, in addition, a reprint of the description of the ten avatars of Vishnu according to Heinrich Roth that had appeared as part of the extract from Athanasius Kircher's China illustrata which La Grue had appended to his Porte ouverte. Here in the Cérémonies, however, entirely in line with the critical approach taken by its compiler Jean Fredéric Bernard, Roth's account (1723, part 2: 125-27) is presented as only of several alternative explanations of Vishnu's avatars, and it is contrasted not only with Rogerius' account but also (Cérémonies 1723: 117-25) with the much more extensive one offered in Philippus Baldaeus' 1672 description of the Malabar and Coromandel coasts (Baldaeus 1672a: 41-130; Baldaeus 1672b: 470-559) - a book that had been published simultaneously in Dutch and in German translation and had seen an abridged English version by the time the Cérémonies appeared. In all, then the Cérémonies presented its reader with three different explanations of Vishnu's avatars and, unlike La Grue in 1670, drew attention to the differences.
The significance of the comparative treatment of the world's religions in the Cérémonies was recognised almost immediately, and the work, despite its large size and exorbitant price, soon saw translations into Dutch (6 volumes, 1727-38), English (7 volumes, 1731-37) and German (3 volumes, 1738-51). Of these, the Dutch version is of interest because here the materials concerning Hinduism that Bernard had taken from La Grue and that La Grue had translated from Dutch, were put back into Dutch.
In the Dutch version of the Cérémonies, the dissertation on the Brahmins appears in volume 3 (published in 1728). The subtitle indicating Rogerius as the dissertation's source is missing. The preface follows the French in identifying 'Abraham Roger' as the reliable eyewitness on whose observations the dissertation is based, and footnotes (all translated from the French) inform us that his book was translated into French by Thomas La Grue, whose French title is quoted and then translated into Dutch literally (La porte ouverte is rendered as "De geopende deur," the opened door; Naaukeurige 1728: 105). Nowhere in this preface does the translator, Abraham Moubach, show his awareness of the fact that 'Roger' is Rogerius or that Rogerius' book was originally in Dutch, called De open-deure and published in 1651. The place of publication of La porte ouverte is given as Amsterdam and Moubach knew it was a translation, but he appears not to have asked himself what language it was translated from - despite the
fact that he must have seen (even if he then omitted) the subtitle to the dissertation on Brahmins in the French Cérémonies that identified 'Sieur Roger' as being 'Hollandais.'
Later in the volume Heinrich Roth's explanation of Vishnu's avatars appears as well (Naaukeurige 1728: 207-9), together with the different and more extensive account offered by Baldaeus (Naaukeurige 1728: 199-207). This latter case again lacks any indication of an awareness that Baldaeus wrote originally in Dutch and that the French text that Moubach was translating into Dutch was probably based on a German translation from the Dutch. The translator's naivety regarding the books by Rogerius and Baldaeus suggests a lack of specialist knowledge. Next to nothing is known about Abraham Moubach except that he compiled and translated books on subjects as varied as the Russian empire, whaling, flute-playing and keeping canaries. Perhaps, faced with the Cérémonies, he was content to translate the words on the page, or he was pressed for time?
7. Conclusion
In considering Abraham Rogerius' Open-deure and the tracks it subsequently made, we have come across a variety of kinds and modes of translation. The Open-deure itself contained translation, including the movement from spoken to written language. We saw direct translation so close to its original as to allow virtually simultaneous publication: the publisher of Philippus Baldaeus' description of the Malabar and Coromandel coasts made the most of his investment in the book's lavish illustrations by having it immediately translated into German, thus greatly increasing the number of potential buyers. We witnessed translators adding their own as well as translated materials to their translations. There were integral translations alongside fragmentary renderings inserted into other expositions. We had chains of indirect translation stretching to four successive links, sometimes combined with additional operations such as abridgment and selective paraphrasing. There were gist translations, both interlingual and intralingual, in one case extending to a summary report, when Jean Frédéric Bernard relayed the nature of the sayings of Bhartrhari rather than rendering them. We could hear the resonance of a work becoming ever thinner, to the point of fading away in a couple of footnotes, as happened to Rogerius' Open-deure in the Asiatische Banise and its translations. We also followed texts being translated back into their own language via an indirect route, even if the texts at the start and end points of the process were turned out to be different.
All these different operations coexist in a single, limited case study. They demonstrate, I believe, the complex and sometimes convoluted ways in which ideas are taken up, transmitted, marshalled, challenged and made to fit a range of arguments bound to certain times and places. The picture is diverse and messy, but this unpredictability is the essence of the process. To grasp it, we cannot privilege one form of translation over others. That means we should take a holistic approach and avoid compartmentalising the study of translation into subfields.
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Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research. Ethical Standards
The author affirms this research did not involve human subjects.
