3 - Lost in Translation: Greek Beginnings and Latin Corruptions, c. 400–c. 112

Summary

Translation is the art of failure.

It is somewhat ironic that the above quote, the title of an essay by American poet and translator John Ciardi (1916–86), is popularly misattributed to the Italian medievalist and semiotician Umberto Eco (1932–2016). What Ciardi is talking about, of course, is translating literary works from one language into another – in his case, Dante's Inferno from medieval Italian into English. But the idea that translation is a failed process could not be more relevant to the story of early medieval onomancy, for it was in the period between about 600 and 800 CE that the ‘Sphere’ was translated from Greek into Latin. As we will see, the corruptions brought about by translation rendered the whole device useless on its own terms. Despite this, onomancy was popular in Latin translation from as soon as it appeared, throughout the early Middle Ages until the twelfth-century translation movement and beyond.

Beginning with the Neoplatonic movement of the fourth century, this chapter will trace the origins of Latin onomancy in late Antiquity and establish a typology of ‘Sphere’ texts found in Latin manuscripts from the period c. 800– c. 1125. The ‘Victorious and Vanquished’ cannot be included here, since this type of onomancy does not appear in any known surviving manuscripts produced in the Latin West in this period. Whether it was a product of the new translation movement of Graeco-Arabic texts into Latin, or a copy of something that had circulated in Latin earlier but is now lost, cannot be known. There were huge problems in translating the ‘Sphere’ from Greek, and possibly from other languages, into Latin. As well as errors in copying, the main problem was that every Greek letter had a corresponding number, but Latin ones did not. The computistical context of the early medieval ‘Sphere’ will be examined to demonstrate the accretive attraction discussed in the previous chapter between this onomancy and texts of astronomical time measurement, in terms of both content and aesthetic appearance.

Finally, we will look at the ways in which early medieval authors added authority to the ‘Sphere’, first through attributions to various authorities, and second through decoration.