From Babel to the Babel Fish: Translation, Transmission and the Technology of Language
Introduction
On Saturday 10 September 2022, as part of the Open Cambridge festival, the Old Library of St John's opened its doors to the public for five hours. 336 visitors viewed the 17th-century building and an exhibition on translation, alphabets, writing and codes; a version of that exhibition is presented here for posterity, and for those who were not able to make it on the day.
The Tower of Babel
Hartmann Schedel's work Liber Chronicarum (1493), also known as the Nuremberg Chronicle, is a Biblically-inflected history of the world. It includes a great many woodcut images, a number of them reused throughout the volume, representing monarchs, cities and other key details of its narrative; early on it features this marginal illustration showing the construction of the Tower of Babel.
From Genesis 11: ‘And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. […] And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and tower, whose top may reach unto heaven […] And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be retrained from them which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth[.]’
This volume is an ‘incunable’, a book from the early days, or the ‘cradle’, of European printing; it serves as an example of language, by way of a printed book, seeking to spread itself far, and to gather people in readership rather than separate them.
The library at Leiden
Johannes Van Meurs's Icones, elogia ac vitae professorum Lugdunensium apud Batavos (1617) contains a number of fold-out illustrations of the resources of Leiden University in the Netherlands. The library pictured here might have borne some similarity to the first Library of St John’s, which was situated in First Court. The canine population of St John’s at the time is unknown, but one similarity to Leiden was the use of chains on the bookshelves: books could be consulted but not taken away. The practice of chaining was abandoned at St John’s when the current Library began operations in the 1620s.
The rate at which books were added to the College’s collections meant that the librarians eventually abandoned efforts to organise the collection in accordance with different areas of knowledge – History, Law, and so forth – but we know from the old shelf lists at the ends of the bookcases that such a system was, for the first several decades, attempted.
A triple psalter
This early 12th-century manuscript presents the Psalms in three parallel columns, each representing a different translation: the Psalterium Gallicanum, the Psalterium Romanum, and the versio iuxta Hebraeos. All are in Latin, and derive from versions by St Jerome, who drew respectively from Greek, Latin and Hebrew texts. (‘Gallicanum’ refers to Gaul, where the Greek-to-Latin version was popular.) Such an approach encourages subtle comparison of the three versions; how much does it reveal about the nuances of the source languages, and how much about the translator’s inclinations?
In M.R. James’s 1913 catalogue of the College’s manuscripts, the decorative capital Cs are described as a ‘fiddler and two dancers’, but the ‘dancer’ on the left appears to be wrestling (or, yes, dancing aggressively) with a C-shaped dragon or similar beast. Are these images decoration for decoration’s sake? Or are they offering a commentary on the relationship between the three versions?
A babble of Bibles
The Old Library contains many Bibles in a number of languages. Among these is the first complete translation of the Bible into Icelandic, dating from 1584. The work of Guðbrandur Þorláksson, Bishop of Holar, it is known as Guðbrands Biblia. King Frederick II of Denmark helped to fund the publication, and ordered that every church in Iceland should purchase a copy; some were given away to the very poor.
Among the other items in the collection are the first complete Bible in Welsh (1588) – translated by the Johnian vicar William Morgan – and a second-edition copy of John Eliot’s Algonquin translation (1685), as well as a selection of verses for children in which key words are replaced with pictures (1794).
Also pictured: the first printed example of Anglo-Saxon, including the Lord’s Prayer (1566); and an image incorporating both the Tower of Babel and the Pentecostal speaking in tongues, illustrating a 1694 work by the linguist and theologian Etienne Morin.
Thinking freely
Among the medieval manuscripts in the Library’s collection is E.24, a 14th-century theological miscellany. At the beginning of a section offering accounts of various Roman leaders, somebody – the book’s frustrated scribe? a reader? a vandal? – has appended to the text a doodle of a bird, and that bird, for over six hundred years, has been speaking. Thought is free, says the bird, a lively flourish added to line after line, page after page, of painstakingly copied text.
1688 saw the publication of an English translation of The Alcoran of Mohamet, which is to say, the Koran. Alexander Ross composed the translation, based on a French version. As well as offering to satisfy ‘all that desire to look into the Turkish vanities’, the book begins with ‘a needful caveat, or admonition, for them who desire to know what use may be made of, of if there be danger in reading the Alcoran’. While the defence of the project is not especially progressive or enlightened (stating in essence that English-speakers will read the Koran to learn how false Islam is, and how true Christianity), it is notable for acknowledging that some readers might find frightening an encounter with foreign beliefs, and for arguing that knowledge should be prioritised over ignorance.
National languages, national histories
The Hystory and Croniklis of Scotland is a translation (seen here in its 1540 second edition), by John Bellenden, of Hector Boece’s Latin history of the country. And the ‘vulgar and commoun’ target language is Scots. ‘Vulgar’ of course means, in this context, ‘in ordinary use’ rather than ‘uncouth’; the people’s history, told in the people’s tongue.
The Library also holds a 1710 edition of Gawin Douglas’s Eneados, a Scots version of the Aeneid. Completed in 1513, Douglas’s poem was the first British translation of Virgil’s epic Roman foundation myth.
Alphabets and other deceptions
Language can communicate facts and beliefs; it can also lie. How to tell the difference? Meric Casaubon’s ‘true & faithful’ 1659 account of the Johnian spiritualist John Dee’s alleged conversations with otherwordly beings, in the company of the alchemist Edward Kelly, includes a chart of the ‘Enochian’ alphabet: a key, supposedly, to the language of angels. Is the account dishonest? Sincere but inaccurate? Truthful, but hard to accept on its own merits?
Pictured above are a 1739 study of cryptography (coded writing) by David Arnold Conrad, and a 1763 glossary of thieves’ cant (slang) by John Poulter.
The language and alphabet of The History of Tommy, the Black Boy from Jamaica, published anonymously around 1800, might be more familiar, but as a piece of pro-slavery propaganda (encouraging enslaved children to learn their alphabet, obey their masters, and expect freedom and success as a result) it too is coded, deceptive, in its way.
The Johnian poet and patron Edward Benlowes’s long religious poem Theophila (1652), the author’s personal copy of which is part of the Library's collection, contains several impressive illustrations of saints, angels, and an abstracted geometrical God. But the prefatory stanzas pictured above, describing the work’s goals, are rather earthier, as human forms pose as, even contort into, the shapes of the initial letters. This might be intended to suggest something about the poem’s humble origins, reminding the reader that transcendence requires something to transcend.
Thomas More’s political satire Utopia (seen here in the Library's 1516 first edition) describes a country whose name means both ‘good place’ and ‘no place’; the supposed Utopian alphabet is provided at the beginning, adding depth and veracity to More’s reflections on government, economics, religion, crime, punishment and more.
George Psalmanazar, on the other hand, intended less to satirise than to mislead when he published, in 1704, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan: Psalmanazar, from France, claimed to be a native of Formosa (modern Taiwan), and wrote this speculative, essentially fictional work describing the country of his alleged birth.
Music, both human and insect
Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon is a similar text to the Liber Chronicarum featured at the beginning of this exhibition: an attempt at a complete world history, in this case given a seven-part structure in a reference to the seven days of creation in Genesis. Hidgen composed the work in Latin in the 1300s; the printed version on display here, an English translation by John Trevisa, was published in 1495. Significantly, this printing contains the first example of musical notation to be printed in England. A language other than the verbal: printed, distributed, and able to be translated off the page into sound.
Evidently such innovations were not only of relevance to the music of humankind. Charles Butler’s 1634 work The Feminine Monarchie is a study of bees, and includes what purports to be the bees’ song. Or an approximation thereof, ‘because in that confused noise, which the buzzing Bees in the busy time of their departing do make, my dull hearing could not perfectly apprehend it: so that I was fain to make up that, as I could. But I am sure, if I miss, I miss but a little.’
Douglas Adams
The Johnian author Douglas Adams created, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (variously a groundbreaking radio series, a bestselling novel sequence, a television version and a Hollywood film), the Babel fish: a small animal that, inserted through the ear, functions as a universal translator. A large collection of Adams’s papers has been on loan to St John’s for several years; we are limited in what we can show online, but among the various letters, scripts, notebooks and so forth is a Babel fish figurine by Susan Moore, a propmaker who worked on the TV series.
Adams jokes that the universal understanding brought about by the Babel fish causes not harmony but violence and misery: now that everybody knows what everybody else is really saying about them… But Adams was interested in closing the distances between people, and in how knowledge might be shared around the world. The collection includes promotional material for h2g2, a pre-Wikipedia collaborative online resource that Adams and The Digital Village designed as a real-life version of his titular Guide.
Finally, major spoiler alerts for the novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, in which Coleridge’s poem ‘Kubla Khan’ (or rather, Adams’s expanded version thereof) is recast as coded extraterrestrial communication; and in which the compositions of Bach, one of Adams’s great loves, are derived from an alien computer’s compilation of data, making them the songs of humanity, the music of the spheres.
Poetry and metaphor
Translation, with which much of this exhibition has been concerned, comes from a Latin term meaning ‘carry across’. And the term ‘metaphor’ – a word that appears in the Library’s first edition of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary – derives from Ancient Greek and means, too, ‘carry across’. Further, one might note that Johnson deploys the word ‘import’ in the sense of ‘meaning’; to ‘import’ something is, yes, to carry it in. So, at least etymologically, translation, metaphor and meaning are arguably bound up together; language, it might be said, is a translation or an importing of meaning from the abstract into the concrete. When the dynamics of this process are made explicit, one might find oneself using the word ‘poetry’.
Handwritten on the blank pages of a 1558 French book of hours (a prayer book and religious calendar) is a sequence of manuscript poems by William Alabaster. Written in a hand other than the poet’s, and as such presumably transcribed from elsewhere, this sequence is one of the three major sources for the versions of Alabaster’s sonnets in print today. The sixty-third sonnet begins with an address to St John (‘High towering Eagle’), and concludes with an image of piercing Christ’s breast and penetrating his heart: translating, as it were, a biblical image of Christ’s suffering into a new metaphor.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge attended Jesus College, and collaborated with the Johnian poet William Wordsworth. Coleridge defined poetry as ‘the best words in the best order’, and the Library’s copy of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ in an 1816 printing contains a number of significant edits and notes in the author’s hand, the words evidently not being all that they ought to be. Meanwhile, one of several copies of the poem ‘The Scales of Disaster’ in the papers of the Johnian poet and academic Hugh Sykes Davies includes, in manuscript, points of intertextual and autobiographical clarification: these ‘meanings’ might be secondary to the poem’s forecast of nuclear apocalypse, but they are nonetheless present and apparently, in the poet’s eyes, worth noting.
Writing and teaching
Books can cross – can bridge – linguistic, geographical and cultural boundaries; they are resistant, too, to time. Words let ideas survive from the past into the present, and by way of education they are handed into the future. Roger Ascham was a 16th-century Fellow of the College who tutored Elizabeth I in Greek and Latin when she was a teenager. Ascham wrote The Scholemaster, which was hugely influential after being published posthumously in 1570; it discusses not only the teaching of Latin specifically but philosophies of education in general.
An example of Ascham's fine handwriting can be seen in the signature carved into the stone of a fireplace in the Old Treasury, surely one of the College’s more attractive examples of graffiti. Such defacement is not encouraged...
... but parties inclined to take it up regardless might first consult Giovanni Battista Palatino’s 1561 work on calligraphy.
Benjamin Hall Kennedy, a 19th-century Johnian, was another teacher of Latin and Greek. He authored various editions of a Latin Primer, versions of which are still used in schools today. The edition pictured here, published in 1888 (a year before Kennedy’s death), owes its existence to Kennedy’s daughters Marion and Julia, who carried out much of the work of revising, updating and reintroducing the text,. They did not receive credit for many years, partly because of the knottiness of copyright law and partly because of the obstacles faced by female academics. Their father was a supporter of women’s education; Marion and Julia involved themselves in the women’s colleges of Girton and Newnham, and in the suffrage movement, helping to bring about, for future generations, opportunities that had been denied to them.
