Translation terroirs – East Asian and European maps between Language, Ritual and Space

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Dagmar Schäfer
• Subject Area: History of Science ; Asian Studies ; Early Modern History
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 405038942

At the core of this project stands the analysis of cartographic materials of a 16-19 c globalizing world. Maps with Asian language inscriptions (in particular Chinese), drawn according to the European cartographic projections, appear from the end of the 16th century onwards. World maps by Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) following the oval projection of the Typus Orbis Terrarum (1564) by Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) are the earliest and the most famous examples of such maps, the survived copies dating from 1602 and 1603. The maps are usually referred to as “Chinese” because of the language of legends, place-names and incorporated textual passages, but they are in effect adapted translations of both meaning-giving and symbolic values from Western prototypes. The same applies to the “Japanese” and “Korean” as well as recently discovered Manchu language examples. Simultaneously, Chinese maps started to be translated for the Western audience and, in their turn, influenced shaping the so-called “Western” maps of East Asia, especially those composed during the 17th century, e.g. the Novus Atlas Sinensis (1655) by Martino Martini (1614-1661). Various examples illustrating the very process of ‘translating’ Chinese maps became available for observation with the publication of Michele Ruggieri’s (1543-1607) manuscript atlas (Lo Sardo 1993). With the expansion of Jesuit’s activity in China, the Western methods of cartographic survey and mapmaking became applied for drawing Chinese maps directly, what still required a translation. The Kangxi (1661-1722) atlases of the early 18th century being the results of this application (Cams 2013), in their turn, became the basis for drawing maps of East Asia by Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1697-1782). Research has long seen the exchanges of cartographical information as a form of transfer or unilateral knowledge exchange (from/to), however, little research has been done on how the object ‘map’ has been functioning within translation culture (Burke 2007). In the proposed project we use the notion of ‘terroir’ to highlight the role of maps as brokers between the “taste” of places on the one hand and, on the other hand, their function as global objects. We study a fine selection of rare ‘Chinese’ cartographical items circulating in Europe from the late 18th – 19th centuries. These maps are rediscoveries (Batchelor 2015) which have not yet been studied by historians of science, translation studies and cartography. The aim is to look behind the idea of ‘Chinese’ maps, investigating their role in the ‘translation’ of the foreign into Europe. Translation is here understood as a reciprocal process of brokering abstract and concrete meanings of linguistic, ritual and spatial contents.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2130: Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Times