Abstract
During the 6th Century, Italy experienced a series of shocks that tipped Roman society into collapse. In this study, I focus on the efforts of the senatorial class to maintain the Classical system of education through this chaotic time period, efforts that were superseded by a variety of monastic orders. It may come as some surprise that a central issue in the drive to preserve Roman education was the translation of Greek texts into Latin, and that the heroes of the day were the fidi interpretes working in the circle of the Symmachi, such as Macrobius and Boethius. Intriguingly, these translators continued to use the “word-for-word” and “sense-for-sense” binary familiar to us today, but they interpreted what we might understand in terms of equivalence in a radically different way. As Italy plunged ever deeper into war, famine, and plague, the translator’s work was understood to change, moving from a more secular transfer of knowledge between idioms toward a revelation of divine truth. Through comparison with the works of St. Augustine and Cassiodorus, and with nods to Walter Benjamin’s idea of “pure language” [die reine Sprache] and Jacques Derrida’s archival apocalypticism, I track how the exigencies of post-Roman Italy transformed the task of the translator at the dawn of the early Middle Ages in Europe. The lessons of the translators who lived and died during this fractious era have much to say to a modern world that seems to threaten its own end times.
Presenters
Ben GarceauLecturer, Humanities Core, University of California - Irvine, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Past and Present in the Humanistic Education
KEYWORDS
Translation, Education, Late Antiquity, Medieval, Italy, Apocalypticism, Societal Collapse
