| Translation is a topic fascinating enough to have generated a
library's worth of writing, but on the restricted subject of scientific
translation, this book by Scott Montgomery seems to stand alone on the shelf. A
good thing, therefore, that it is so full of good things, both in the content
and the prose. Arranged and written more topically than chronologically, it is
more of an essay than a history, but it can be read both ways. Montgomery does
his best, despite his wealth of specific examples and illustrations, to locate
scientific translation, together with the science it has made possible, in the
intellectual and cultural life of the whole planet. For a teacher of World
History it is the perfect way to get a quick brush-up and better detail on how
the canonical scientific achievements of the West ("scientific"
meaning the work of the Newtons, not the Watts), got their start in the islamic
world and were passed on to Japan, China and the English-speaking scientific
world of today.
Science in Translation draws almost all of its examples from the
history of translation in only three scientific cultures: that of the
pre-modern West, that of Japan, and that of 20th-century global English (and
the "localized forms of English" that are responsible for its
ambiguities). The largely astronomical and mathematical science of the
pre-modern West is so broadly and extensively treated that the whole bizarre
odyssey of Greek science through Latin, Pahlavi (Persian), Syriac, Sanskrit,
Hebrew and Arabic is traced. On the other hand this plan of focusing on only
three scientific cultures requires Montgomery to assume, despite all his
extraordinary breadth of learning and many protestations of openness and
internationalism, a western definition of what constitutes science. It also
raises a very large epistemological question which Montgomery does not address
until very late in the book: whether the assumption that nature is the same
everywhere implies that all science, too, must be the same, in some deep sense,
regardless of the language it's written in or the culture in which it may have
developed.
Perhaps the best of the book's many delightful challenges to
conventional wisdom comes in the first section on the translations of Greek
science. Here we learn why it is ridiculous to use a phrase like "the
Renaissance recovery of the Greek classics;" that in fact the Renaissance
recovered very little from the original Greek and that it was long before the
Renaissance that Aristotle and Ptolemy, to name the two most important
examples, were finally translated into Latin. What the Renaissance did was to
create a myth by eliminating all the intermediate steps in the transmission. To
assume that Greek was translated into Arabic "still essentially erases
centuries of history" (p. 93). What was translated into Arabic was usually
Syriac, and the translators were neither Arabs (as the great Muslim historian
Ibn Khaldun admitted) nor Muslims. The real story involves Sanskrit compilers
of ancient Babylonian astronomy, Nestorian Christian Syriac-speaking scholars
of Greek in the Persian city of Jundishapur, and Arabic- and Pahlavi-speaking
Muslim scholars of Syriac, including the Nestorian Hunayn Ibn Ishak (809-873)
of Baghdad, "the greatest of all translators during this era." (p.
98) In a negative sense, it also derives from the indifference of
practical-minded Roman translators, from Cicero onward, to mathematical
astronomy and Aristotelian physics, an indifference which left the Latin
speakers of late antiquity and the Middle Ages (Augustine, for example) bereft
of translations and thereby cut off from the scientific triumphs of Hellenism.
The whole story is fascinating and full of contingencies, featuring the great
multicultural, polyglot cities of the pre-New York past: Hellenistic
Alexandria, Sassanid Jundishapur, Abbasid Baghdad, Almoravid Toledo and Latin
Christendom's Venice and Paris. Doubtless it was this section that inspired
historian John Stachel to write that Science in Translation "strikes a blow at one of the founding myths of 'Western
civilization'."
If Western civilization received Greek science from several sources
and multiple translations over time, Japanese civilization received modern
science from the West and in a hurry. Teachers of World History and their
students, especially those in the West, should be fascinated by the tales that
result. Modern science in Japan was called "rangaku," which
means "the study of Dutch." (p. 213). The reason is that although
Japan had been following the cultural lead of China for centuries, adopting the
complex "Neo-Confucian" view of nature pioneered in the 12th century
Song dynasty and walling itself off from Christians and westerners after their
16th-century encounter, there remained two small leaks in the dike. The first
was European Jesuits in China making translations of western technical texts
into Chinese. The second was the tiny Dutch trading mission on an island,
Deshima, in Nagasaki Harbor where a Japanese scholar could find European
Enlightenment science books written in Dutch. It was this second leak that
caused the flood. One example: Dutch books imported through Deshima in the 18th
century described the new phenomenon of "elektriciteit" which
a Japanese scientific translator rendered as "erekiteristato"
using the Japanese syllabary, katakana. A fascinated rangaku scholar, Hiraga Gennai (1729-1780), procured a broken Dutch electrostatic
generator and began copying it. He renamed erekiteristato "erekiteru,"
which he spelled using the phonetic values of kanji, the Chinese
characters naturalized into the Japanese writing system centuries before, and
he explained it as the manifestation of the fifth element, fire, in the
cosmology of Shingon Buddhism. Not long after Mirage's death, the Japanese
explanation of electricity was recast in a way that 18th-century westerners
like Ben Franklin could have understood more easily — but the word for it
was changed to "dinky," Chinese for a form of the
neo-Confucian cosmic energy, using the Chinese character for lightning. (p.
211)
After the wonders of Japanese syncretism, Montgomery moves easily
into the less showy problems posed by modern 20th-century scientific English,
the main language for the majority of scientists in nearly ever discipline all
over the world, and the second language for almost all the rest.
Having learned so much about how science affects translation and not
so much about how translation affects science, we are treated in the last
chapter to an unassuming but powerful treatment of some of the deeper issues in
the philosophy of knowledge. Translating science poses in a particularly
fruitful way a philosophical question that has been raised repeatedly by
thinkers from Carnap to Kuhn, and has become extravagantly important in the
heyday of Bruno Latour and the postmodern sociologists of science. Is science
universal? If it is universal, is it because across all cultures it converges
on a single epistemology? If not, is it ontologically universal, describing a
uniform nature behind our cultural and epistemological varieties? Are different
theories of the same natural phenomena "commensurable" across
cultures, or across times and languages? (p. 291) Translation does not exactly
answer these questions; but it brings them into superb focus as we try to
understand, for example, exactly what the difference is between "elektriciteit,"
"erekiteru," "denki" and electricity, which
began, after all, as a word for the odd properties of amber (Greek "elektron")
when you rub it. Are such differences merely linguistic? Cultural? Or do they
touch the workings of nature itself? We non-philosophers may think we know the
answers, but there is some good reasoning, going back to Charles S. Peirce in
the 19th century, that says we can never know. That does not make the
questions any less fascinating or the contributions of a patient, learned and
modestly stylish translator like Montgomery any the less worth reading. |
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