The Republic of Letters Comes to Nagasaki: Record of a Translator's
8 The Republic of Letters Comes to Nagasaki The Republic of Letters Comes to Nagasaki: Record of a Translator’s Struggle David Mervart, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid The narrative frame of this paper is supplied by the story of what was probably the first recorded translation of the peculiar and difficult metaphor of the “republic of letters” into an East Asian language.* This microscopic case study in the intellectual history of a conceptual translation is then plotted onto the larger background of the history of knowledge transmission and formation that had, by the eighteenth century, assumed a global character. It thus provides an occasion for a detailed enquiry into the complex conditions of the possibility— material and logistical as well as social, cultural, and intellectual—of such transcultural mediation. At the same time, the story of the translation of the expression “republic of letters” itself is presented as an example of the ongoing processes of communication that, already by the eighteenth century, had arguably brought into existence something like a republic of letters on a Eurasia-wide, if not global scale. In other words, the story, along with the other episodes mentioned, reflects a situation where some conversations were already drawing simultaneously on sources derived from a variety of spatially, linguistically, and conceptually disparate milieus. In pursuing this enquiry, therefore, the paper also offers an implicit commentary on what some have called “global intellectual history”1 in that it * While working on this paper, I greatly benefitted from comments and suggestions provided by Pablo Blitstein, Fabian Drixler, Martin Dusinberre, Enno Giele, Carol Gluck and my wife, Ana Maria Goy.
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