IMC 2010: Sessions

Session 1518: Translating Alchemical Texts as Modern Science, Literature, or Both?

Thursday 15 July 2010, 09.00-10.30

Sponsor:	Societas Alchimica
Organiser:	Teresa Burns, Department of English, University of Wisconsin - Platteville
Moderator/Chair:	Erika Lauren Lindgren, Department of History, Wartburg College, Iowa
Paper 1518-a	Found in Translation: Heliocentrism and Gravity in John Dee's Hieroglyphic Monad (Language: English) Nancy L. Turner, Department of History, University of Wisconsin - Platteville Index terms: Language and Literature - Latin, Philosophy, Science
Paper 1518-b	The Alchemy of Navigation: John Dee's Propaeduemata Aphoristica (Language: English) Teresa Burns, Department of English, University of Wisconsin - Platteville Index terms: Language and Literature - Latin, Maritime and Naval Studies, Philosophy, Science
Paper 1518-c	The Translation of Science or the Science of Translation?: John Lydgate and the Secrets of Old Philosophers (Language: English) Richard Garrett, Department of English, University of Wisconsin - Platteville / University of Iowa Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Language and Literature - Latin, Philosophy, Rhetoric
Abstract	This session examines how the process of translation and mistranslation, and theories associated with what translation itself means in a given time, have affected both the creation and transmission of alchemical texts and their consideration as scientific and literary works. Turner and Burns discuss how the understanding of two different texts of polymath John Dee have suffered due to modern attempts at translation which ignored Dee's overall context, while Garrett discusses how the medieval 'science of translation' itself affected the writing of Lydgate, which is at one a translation and an individual creative work.