VIR MAXIMUS · Moral & Intellectual Qualities of the Political Man in the Translations of Gracián's Work (XVII-XXI cent.)
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-09-02 → 2021-09-01
- EU contribution
- €184,708
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
Moral & Intellectual Qualities of the Political Man in the Translations of Gracián's Work (XVII-XXI cent.)
The VIR MAXIMUS project aimed to trace the differences in the notion of the qualities requested for an active member of the society (political leader, influential intellectual, etc.) through European languages and cultures, on the basis of the analysis of a corpus of translations of Baltasar Gracián’s “Oráculo manual” (1647). In his work, B. Gracián establishes a set of moral and intellectual qualities that should be developed by those who aspire for a leading role in the society. His work was spread all around the world through translation : at the end of the project, more than 200 translations were detected. But the ways of reading Gracián’s advice vary greatly between countries and historical periods. Tracing these differences permits to gain insight into the dynamics of the ‘soft’ policy transfer between European countries. By the end of the project, a multilingual lexicon of the differences between the first European translations of Gracián’s “Oráculo” was published. This Lexicon shows the ways in which the intellectual, moral and psychological qualities of an actor of the public life were translated, and can be consulted in the user-friendly form on the project’s web site. The lexicon demonstrates, for example, that the German “Sinn”, the English “discerning”, the Russian “разум” were chosen as analogous to the Spanish “gusto”, one of the crucial qualities of Gracián’s ‘maximum man’, while it’s translated as “goût” into French; and thus, only French culture had sufficient basis for the extension of a gastronomic term to the intellectual and moral domain. A series of instruments for the further analysis of the issue were elaborated during the project and published on in open access. Extended to other influential European political, moral-political and political-philosophical treaties that received a wide reception through translation throughout the world, the database can serve as a tool for the facilitation of intercultural communication and of different forms of soft policy transfer.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
VIR MAXIMUS is an innovative tool that helps trace the history of the ‘soft’ policy transfer in and outside Europe since 17th to the 21st centuries. It is based on the suggestion that the flow of ideas across borders and in time can be unveiled with the help of the sufficiently vast collections of translations of the same text. Such corpora will allow to intercept not only the transmission, adaptation and transformation of moral-political concepts in different countries, but also their evolution over time within a single culture (in cases when multiple translations of a text to the same language carried out in different epochs are available). More than 150 translations of Baltasar Gracián’s writings to more than 30 languages, sometimes by eminent personalities such as A. Schopenhauer, offer an extraordinary example of such a collection, but its potential is still underestimated: in fact, the complete list of these texts is still lacking. VIR MAXIMUS will provide a complete annotated catalogue of translations of Gracián’s work and a concrete example of the use of these texts: the database of the moral-political lexicon in about 50 different translations (the main European languages are considered) that will help to detect the dynamics of the local reception of Gracián’s thought and the shifts in the history of moral-political concepts.The MSCA Fellowship will bring Riva Evstifeeva, Russian language professor in Italy who holds a MA in Medieval European History and a PhD in Comparative studies, to Sorbonne Université where she will work in the research team headed by Mercedes Blanco, the top-rank scholar in Spanish studies and the leading expert in Gracián’s work.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- SORBONNE UNIVERSITE · ParisCoordinatorFrance
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union