Lecture tries to decipher Cervantes work

Every Literature Humanities class may discuss “Don Quixote,” but Miguel Cervantes thought a different book would be his masterpiece.

That work, “The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda,” was the topic of “Writing the Outsider: Perspectives from Spain,” a lecture presented Tuesday by Barnard’s Center for Translation Studies. Sonia Velazquez, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, used the text to explore Renaissance concepts of speech and barbarism.

Using a slide presentation of antique dictionaries and period maps, Velazquez discussed a time when burgeoning globalization forced issues of language and foreignness to the forefront. “Persiles and Sigismunda” narrates journeys to unknown lands, inspired by the newly discovered Americas. This intercontinental scope allowed Cervantes to depict diverse groups of people and their languages, from Irish to Polish to Arabic.

Cervantes’ approach, Velazquez argued, departs from both classical and Renaissance conventions of writing about barbarian speech—for instance, in Homer’s “Odyssey,” even the crass cyclops speaks intelligible Greek. Early modern writers usually presented unconventional speech as a sign of dubious character. Cervantes, however, embraced the roughness of exotic languages but questioned the connection between linguistic sophistication and moral quality.

In an interview, Velazquez said, “In his novels, he [Cervantes] depicts the melting Mediterranean world of people trying to communicate in a blend of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish.” She praised Cervantes’ “humanity and sympathetic ear towards the Other,” citing as an example his charitable attitude towards a Christian who feigned conversion to Islam in “Don Quixote.”

Velazquez stressed the relevance of translation to connect her lecture to the mission of the Center for Translation Studies. The CTS was founded in fall 2009, with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It sponsors translation courses in addition to academic colloquia. “I think it’s great that Barnard has a center for translation,” Velazquez said.

Valezquez attributes a recent trend of such centers, including one founded at Princeton University in 2007, to a growing awareness “that we live in a multilingual world, and that in order to be able to succeed in both a very material sense and also as human beings, we need to understand that language is very important.”