Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule - Softcover

Rafael, Vicente L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822313413 ISBN 13: 9780822313410

Verlag: Duke University Press, 1992

Inhaltsangabe

In an innovative mix of history, anthropology, and post-colonial theory, Vicente L. Rafael examines the role of language in the religious conversion of the Tagalogs to Catholicism and their subsequent colonization during the early period (1580–1705) of Spanish rule in the Philippines. By tracing this history of communication between Spaniards and Tagalogs, Rafael maps the conditions that made possible both the emergence of a colonial regime and resistance to it. Originally published in 1988, this new paperback edition contains an updated preface that places the book in theoretical relation to other recent works in cultural studies and comparative colonialism.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History at the University of Washington. He is the author of The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines and White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, both also published by Duke University Press.

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"This is a significant, original, and engaging book that should find an audience among those concerned with colonialism, discourse, and ideology."--Renato Rosaldo, Stanford University

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Contracting Colonialism

Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule

By Vicente L. Rafael

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1993 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-1341-0

Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition, 
Preface (1988), 
Introduction: Fishing Out the Past, 
Chapter 1: The Politics of Translation, 
Chapter 2: Tomas Pinpin and the Shock of Castilian, 
Chapter 3: Conversion and the Demands of Confession, 
Chapter 4: Untranslatability and the Terms of Reciprocity, 
Chapter 5: Translating Submission, 
Chapter 6: Paradise and the Reinvention of Death, 
Afterword: Translation and the Colonial Legacy, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Politics of Translation

Language and Empire

When we try to understand the relationship between language and colonial politics, it helps to recall that the beginnings of the Spanish empire in the last decade of the fifteenth century coincided with the first attempt to install Castilian as the dominant language of the emergent Spanish state. In 1492, the Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija published his Gramática de la lengua castellana in Salamanca. Dedicating his work to Queen Isabella, Nebrija claimed that "language is the perfect instrument of empire." Surveying the record of antiquity, Nebrija writes in his Prólogo that "one thing I discovered and concluded with certainty is that language was always the companion of empire; therefore it follows that together they begin, grow, and flourish, and together they fall" (p. 3).

The history of classical antiquity, particularly that of the Roman Empire, provides Nebrija with the basis for asserting the crucial role of the Castilian vernacular in the establishment of Castilian hegemony over the Iberian Peninsula. In the tradition of Spanish Renaissance humanism, he assumes a natural connection between language and politics: the assertion of one is accompanied by the spread of the other. The ability of Castilian to play such a role was due to its genealogy. Nebrija and the Spanish philologists who followed in his wake held to the belief that the vernacular was derived from Latin—but Latin of a corrupted sort rather than that of classical authors. In order to legitimize the Castilian vernacular and make it into a suitable language of the state, it was necessary to order it, to harmonize its parts, to standardize its orthography: in short, to endow it with a grammar. It would thus come to possess a value analogous to its "proper" precursor, classical Latin, whose immutability rested on the fact that its form had been fixed by grammatical laws. Castilian, therefore, had not only to represent the power of those who spoke it but also to reflect its structural origin. The spread of the vernacular, aided significantly by the rise of print capitalism in Spain, made it imperative to reformulate the status of Castilian in relation to the language it was usurping. By establishing the vernacular on the foundations—grammatical as well as mythological— of classical Latin, such Spanish philologists as Nebrija could put forth this linguistic transgression as a natural succession of languages and empires. The reconstruction of Castilian on the basis of Latin grammatical theory and the use of the rules of classical rhetoric in its literary productions made it possible to negate the past while simultaneously preserving its authority. Indeed, Nebrija asserts that the proper learning of Castilian led not to a forgetting of Latin but to its more efficient appropriation, "because after one has learned Castilian grammar well—which is not very difficult because it is the language that one already knows—when one goes on to Latin, it will no longer be obscure, so that one can learn it more rapidly" (pp. 7–8).

This view of a dialectical relationship between Latin and Castilian was by no means limited to Spanish intellectuals in the employ of the crown. Sixteenth-century theologians would echo similar notions when they defended their use of the vernacular in writing devotional literature and in translating sections of the sacred text. The Augustinian priest Luis de León, for instance, defended his use of the vernacular against charges of heresy leveled against him by the Inquisition by referring to classical models. He points to the works of Plato and Cicero as well as to those of the Church Fathers, claiming the legitimacy of his task as a translator on the basis of those models of antiquity who wrote in their own language. He argues that the suitability of the vernacular for expressing the Divine Will has to do with the way its prosody can be made to coincide with the rhetorical norms of classical texts. Furthermore, "words are weighty not because they are in Latin but because they are said with the gravity that is appropriate to them, whether they be in Castilian or French." And what gives language its gravity is ultimately the message it conveys, the very same message that can be deciphered from classical texts. Father de León's comparison of the vernacular languages with the "milk that children drink from their mother's breast" can thus be read as a strategic way of establishing the continuity not only of Castilian with the sacred languages but of the translator with his precursors. Language as nourishing milk enables the faithful son to express the truth of the Father.

It is not difficult to see how the political frame that Nebrija constructs around Castilian joins up with the theological context that Luis de León applies to the translation of doctrinal texts into the vernacular. Both presuppose the nonarbitrariness of classical languages, particularly Latin, by virtue of the authority of their original speakers and writers. It followed that the assumed universality and stability of Latin's grammatical and rhetorical structure would provide the ground from which the vernacular could be deployed for politico-theological ends. From this perspective, the task of translation can be viewed less as a decanonization of Latin than as an act of homage to a language that, like its original speakers, is dead. The turn to the vernacular is thus mythologized as a return—one might even say conversion—to Latin insofar as the language of antiquity continued to exemplify the means to convey the gravity of the same truth. Latin was invested with the sense of providing the structural model for the reordering and translation of all other vernaculars in the world. In this sense, the humanist appropriation of Latin paved the way for the reinvention of the vernacular. One's own native tongue—in this case Castilian—was to be spoken and written in terms of another language. To speak Castilian now was to acknowledge and thus to defer to the grammatical and rhetorical context of Latin. That Castilian could and did become the "language of empire" was due to its translatability into other languages; and this notion of translatability in turn hinged on the possibility of subordinating the speaker's first language to the structural norms of a second.

Dominating the Vernacular

The Spanish missionaries who ventured out to claim native souls in the Philippines were very much the recipients of the ideas about language outlined above. Confronted by the task of "dominating" the languages of the natives, they wrote and read grammar books and dictionaries that would provide them with the means of communicating the authority of God and king....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1992
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822313413
• ISBN 13: 9780822313410
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland