This slim book appears in the series Neue Perspektiven der Frühneuzeitforschung and provides a rationale for systematic research on early modern translation. In the first sections, the author traces a succinct argument for how the cultural turn in Germanistik in the 1990s called into question the canonical national model of literary studies, and how it was easier to move beyond that model in the case of Altgermanistik, since the latter had always deployed a more expansive view of what constitutes its object of study. The trend to look for broader sociohistorical contextualization took over readily enough in Germanistik at the expense of the older, belletristic approach; and yet, the author contends, the many publications championing this change fundamentally lacked an interest in translation, a vital phenomenon in early modernity. Hence Toepfer's careful argument for augmenting the cultural studies paradigm with a more explicit engagement with translation. This also presupposes the concomitant cultural turn in translation studies, which stipulates, as Toepfer says, “As long as translations are not treated as texts in their own right with their own hermeneutical, aesthetic, epistemic and historical specificity, their potential for cultural studies remains unutilized” (12).
The author's own choice of conceptual approach may surprise the anglophone reader: Translationsanthropologie, an anthropology of translation that draws inspiration from the historical anthropology tradition. This particular move might reflect the tepid reception of translation studies that literary scholars in Germany have shown, while sociology and anthropology have found the concept of cultural translation far more useful—though to an extent, Toepfer admits, that verges on diluting translation to a metaphor (16). At heart is the familiar invocation of Clifford Geertz's “thick description” methodology, which runs opposite to the Gadamerian hermeneutic of “a real blending of horizons” that overcomes the tension between the historical text and the present (23). Instead, Toepfer points to a quasi-ethnographic method that accepts the alterity of the early modern text at the outset, and most importantly, ceases to fetishize the translation's faithful reflection of the source text as the main focus and criterion of study. Essentially, the real fun begins when the translation ceases to mirror its source and instead conveys the values and characteristics of its own time.
One might object that the invocation of anthropology could suggest a drive towards using individual translation texts as ways of reconstructing societal values and structures at a general level, essentially as cultural informants in the sense of anthropological fieldwork. This would run counter to the trend in Anglo-American translation studies to see in the work of the translator the value of individual agency, particularly by scholars such as Lawrence Venuti, who has often sought to foreground the invisible role of the translator in the West. But this key difference speaks to a broader tension between German “culture studies” (Kulturwissenschaften) and Anglo-American cultural studies, where the latter has often focused on the vindication of the marginalized, while the former looks to cultural systems detached from a desire to inspire transformative social action.
It would seem, however, that in Toepfer's case we are dealing more with a difference in degree than in kind here. While her contention remains that translation does indeed reflect the social imaginary as well as the concepts and norms of the time, she defines the desire of Translationsanthropologie as “to recognize and grasp in translations those human properties that are characteristic [kennzeichnend] for a particular epoch, a concrete context, a specific cultural situation, and a historically socialized individual” (22, my emphasis). Hence, the individual is not factored out, but construed at the center of concentric rings of cultural analysis. Proof that she hasn't tossed out the individual translator lies in her specimen analysis of Simon Schaidenreisser's Odyssea (Augsburg, 1537/38), which she examines in thematic detail against its Latin source text(s) and Homer.
In her analysis, Toepfer chiefly offers observations on themes such as the invocation of the muse, the concept of the hero, religious ideas, female agency, political processes, and moral judgment, but more in relation to early modern German culture than Schaidenreisser's personal agency or agenda. As such, Toepfer's method tends to treat the translator as a contemporary everyman. For those in need of convincing, the book makes a solid case.
