Indirect Translation and Discursive Identity in John Florio’s Two Navigations, in Translation and Transposition in the Early Modern Period. Knowledge, Literature, Travel. Edited By Karen Bennett, Rogério Miguel Puga, London, Routledge 2024, pp.187-206

Over the course of the Early Modern period, there was a dramatic shift in the way that translation was conceptualised, a change that would have repercussions far beyond the world of letters. At the beginning of the period, translation was largely indistinguishable from other textual operations such as exegesis, glossing, paraphrase, commentary, or compilation, and theorists did not yet think in terms of the binaries that would come to characterise modern translation theory. Just how and when this shift occurred in actual translation practice is one of the topics explored in this volume through a series of case studies offering snapshots of translational activity in different times and places. Overall, the picture that emerges is of a translational practice that is still very flexible, as source texts are creatively appropriated for new purposes, whether pragmatic, pedagogical, or diversional, across a range of genres, from science and philosophy to literature, travel writing and language teaching.The first English translation by the celebrated Elizabethan Anglo-Italian linguist and lexicographer John Florio (1553–1625) was a short and decidedly undemanding text, an account of a voyage of exploration supposedly written by the French captain Jacques Cartier (1491–1557), who, under a commission of King Francis I, had captained the French explorations of Canada in 1534 and in 1535–1536. The accounts of the two voyages circulated in print (1545) Florio’s English version was printed and published in 1580 by H. Bynneman under the following title: A Shorte and briefe narration of the two navigations and discoveries to the northweast partes called Newe Fraunce: first translated out of French into Italian by that famous learned man Gio: Bapt: Ramutius, and now turned into English by John Florio. This chapter takes its cue precisely from the explicit declaration in the title that this is a translation delivered at third hand. In fact, in both the title and introductory paratext, Florio dutifully mentions the translation from French into Italian by Ramusio, before introducing his own work from Italian into English, thus explicitly distancing it from Cartier’s original. This then makes the work into an example of what would be called an indirect or mediated translation in contemporary translation terminology.. After a general overview of the editorial history of Florio’s Two Navigations, this essay will try to engage with recent scholarship in order to give an insight into Early Modern forms of indirect translation, placing TN into that context. Special attention will be given to the paratexts, both as an instance of the kind of dialogue and inter-exchange encoded within the liminal spaces of Early Modern printed translations, and as the textual space where Florio affirms his debt to the Italian translator. I propose to adopt the communications-circuit model posited by Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda Hosington (2017) to accommodate Florio’s first translation within the perspective of the author-translator relationship, permitting us to visualise the interconnections of languages, agents and cultures. This will allow a few considerations on John Florio’s discursive identity at this early stage of his career.