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Translation Studies
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Translation and religion: Issues of materiality
Anne O’Connor
To cite this article: Anne O’Connor (2021): Translation and religion: Issues of materiality,
Translation Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2021.1893805
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2021.1893805
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Translation and religion: Issues of materiality
Anne O’Connor
School of Languages, Literatures and Culture, NUI Galway, Galway, Ireland
ABSTRACT
This article argues that the study of religious translation can greatly
benefit from a material turn, that attention needs to be paid to the
carriers and forms of religious translations, and that such an
approach can ultimately add different understandings of the
translation process and alternative readings of religious texts.
Drawing on theories of material culture, it proposes engagement
with the material structures, practices and spaces that accompany
translations. The article explores the modalities of engagement
with the religious translation and the values and meanings that
are associated with the object. It suggests a consideration not
merely of the translated object, but also its related
entanglements and sensory engagements, situating the text
within its associated practices, assemblages and networks. It
furthermore proposes an empirical engagement with the object
and an exploration of the variations in form which exist in the
possible afterlives of texts.
KEYWORDS
Religious translation;
materiality; practices;
assemblages;
entanglements; St. Jerome
Introduction
At first glance, the field of religious translation might seem rather unsuited to a study of
materiality. With its spiritual concerns, religion could indeed be conceived as far
removed from materiality, but this dichotomy is in fact more perceived than real. Reli-
gion as a communicative system needs an apparatus or carrier for the transmission of
its ideas and tenets, with beliefs taking material form as they circulate through externally
recognizable media. This article will argue that the study of religious translation can
greatly benefit from a material turn, that attention needs to be paid to the carriers and
forms of religious translations, and that such an approach can contribute to new engage-
ments with translations. A focus on the medium and materiality of translation is particu-
larly important for religious translations where the haptic has a special meaning, and
where the sacred and the profane intertwine on multiple levels.
1
In considering religious
translation as a material act, reliant on tools, the article will discuss the importance of
highlighting the mechanical and pragmatic aspects of producing and using translations.
It will apply the methodologies of material culture to the study of religious translation,
using its multi-layered conceptualization of objects to unpack aspects of religious
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
CONTACT Anne O’Connor anne.oconnor@nuigalway.ie
TRANSLATION STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2021.1893805
translations which have hitherto received scant attention. There are many benefits to be
gained from this perspective: the combination of interdisciplinary approaches related to
material culture encompassing (but not limited to) anthropology, sociology, art history, cul-
tural studies and book history can help translation scholars better grasp the totality of the
translation and understand its relationality. The rich methodologies developed for the
study of material culture are an important, but neglected, resource for translation scholars
offering alternative engagements with translated texts. The benefit of addressing materiality
is mutual to both translation studies and religious studies and can assist in understanding the
embodiment, embedding and transformation of religion through translation.
The study of religious translation has broadened greatly in recent years from its strong
textual tradition and a sustained focus on equivalence and translatability (DeJonge and
Tietz 2015; Long 2005; Nida and Taber 1969), to wider conceptualisations of the inter-
action between translation and religion in conceptual terms, not least in relation to per-
formativity, power structures and commensurability (Blumczynski and Gillespie 2016;
Israel 2011,2019). This article suggests that attention to the materiality of religious trans-
lation is now an important step that needs to be taken in order to unlock aspects of reli-
gious translations that are not always revealed by traditional approaches. Since Karin
Littau’s publications underlining the significance of materiality in translation, there
has been a renewed focus on the material channels of translation and the role of technol-
ogies, forms, media and networks in the creation of meaning (Coldiron 2015,2016;
Cronin 2013; Littau 2011,2016; Mitchell 2010), thus raising awareness of the need to
address these issues in relation to translation.
Religious studies have similarly become aware of the importance of materiality, with
material religion now a fully-fledged branch of the field, along with the more established
areas of philological studies of scriptures, and philosophical studies of cosmology and
religious ontology (Morgan 2017, 272). Using a material analysis of objects and sites
as primary evidence in the study of religion has become very diffuse, and since 2005
the Journal of Material Religion has argued that religion is “fundamentally material in
practice”given that it is not something “one does with speech or reason alone, but
with the body and the spaces it inhabits”(Editorial statement 2005, 5). Since then,
various scholars have asserted that all religion has to be understood in relation to the
media of its materiality (Engelke 2011) and that the interplay between religion and mate-
riality is a fundamental part of the study of religion (Houtman and Meyer 2012; Mat-
thews-Jones and Jones 2015; Morgan 2016,2017).
Key proponents of material religion have set themselves the task of understanding
“how religion happens materially”(Meyer et al. 2010) and what happens when objects
become “saturated with religious meanings”(Morgan 2011). The precise duality
between the sacred and the profane is a central question in the field, as attempts are
made to understand how something perceived as transcendental can function in the
realm of lived experience. Scholars have questioned how objects can be sacralized
through rituals, modes of use, interpretations and meanings. Attention to the materiality
of religious works enables, in the words of Colleen McDannell, a “scrambling of the
sacred and the profane”(1995, 4), with these terms no longer considered a dichotomy,
along with spirit and matter, piety and commerce, but instead components of a religious
assemblage. The material framework provides a mode of analysis for sacrality, with a
specific focus on mediations, intersections and combinations. The material analysis of
2A. O’CONNOR
religion furthermore emphasizes the affects which link the spiritual and the material,
examining how sacrality is experienced, how the senses are engaged, the ritual settings,
the performative elements and the role of objects in linking collective practices of religion
to individual experience. A broad understanding of sacrality underpins the approach in
this article which does not confine itself to ethereal matters and the traditional sacred
canon of texts at the core of many religions but instead looks at wider manifestations
of sacrality in texts which are used for devotional and ritual practices. Religious texts
are understood here as texts integral to the practices of a believing community, with
the focus not on the status of the original (and associations with divinity), but rather
on the purpose and role of these texts which can be read through their materiality.
This article will take the novel step of considering how and to what extent religious
texts in translation can benefit from being considered in a material light: while studies
of religious translations have often looked at language and content, here attention will
be drawn to the necessity of also considering the medium, its technical properties, and
the significance an object acquires from its form. It will question how translations articu-
late religion and sacrality, and how the seemingly profane nature of a material object can
be imbued with sacred associations. Furthermore, I will examine the extent to which reli-
gious translations can offer insights into the material functioning of religion and how
engagement with religious translation does not need to be removed from the lived experi-
ence. The interface between materiality and religious translation is thus a critical encoun-
ter, one where the practice of religion is embedded in religious props and where the
transnational circulation of religious words is viewed not just at a linguistic, cultural
or conceptual level but also at the material and medial level.
To consider religious translations as material expressions of faith, this article employs the
methodologies of material culture which have been regularly used to discuss the religious field,
but never the field of religious translations. In this context, it is necessary to consider the object
and its related entanglements, with meaning not residing singularly in an object but also deriv-
ing from its circulation, use, haptic engagement, and affective connections (Meyer et al. 2010,
209). The critical notion of entanglement, most cogently argued by Ian Hodder (2012), pro-
poses that the linking of humans and things is a condition of being in the world. Through
assemblages and networks, entities are entangled, often co-dependent and cannot be
studied in isolation. The interest in materiality is therefore also an interest in relations and
intersections, a questioning of the input of those who contribute to the creation, circulation
and use of an object. Book history, which has intertwined very profitably with translation
studies in recent years to focus on communication circuits,
2
features here as a point of depar-
ture in studying the specificity of religious translations, with supplementary dimensions
added from the study of material culture which emphasize practices, entanglements and
object-determinism. Even though the present case study centres on a book, the application
of materiality to religious translation should not be considered as confined to books.
Indeed, the discussions are relevant for many elaborations of religious translations including,
for example, those in new media, multimodal translations and non-textual iterations.
3
Within the methodological framework, the aforementioned notion of assemblage is
important: it is a concept and ontological framework first expressed as “agencement”
in French by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus
(1988;1980) and later developed into a theoretical approach by Manuel DeLanda
(2019). In analysing translations, the term can be productive as it helps to understand
TRANSLATION STUDIES 3
how entities are made up of relationships between component parts: an assemblage is
understood to be formed of multiplicities and is, importantly, relational in nature. The
component parts are productive, creating new realities and working together as a
whole for a defined time. Assemblage thus provides a framework for analysing how
fluidity and exchangeability enable multiple functionalities and mutable connectivities,
elements that need to be taken into consideration when discussing a translation in a
material light. The notion of assemblage is supplemented by Actor-Network Theory
which questions how things, people and ideas are connected and assembled; a “sociology
of association”(Latour 2005). These central elements of relationality, the interaction with
a physical environment, and the interplay between humans and non-humans form key
discussions in material culture and will be applied to translations to determine how
this analytical framework can result in novel insights in the field.
Another key term in this article is “practice”which will be employed to examine how
“material practice”interlinks with religious translations, and how rituals and practices
contribute to meanings and relationships. Traditionally, issues of practice and material
culture revolved around practices of production and consumption (Miller 1987). The
notion has since expanded and now encompasses a wider understanding of how practice
engages with an object, ranging from production and consumption, to gifting and iden-
tity construction, with multiple discussions on how people accumulate, value, touch,
revere, exchange and keep objects (Hicks and Beaudry 2010). The ritualistic use of
objects by religions provides important insights into material culture expressed
through structured practices (Nugteren 2019). Practice can thus be considered as the
social processes through which the material becomes part of the religious experience,
and this article will examine how translation interacts with religious practices, not just
in public rituals but also in domestic engagements with objects. Sensory encounters
and phenomenological engagements with the translation process and product add
further dimensions to the materiality and practices of translations, while the participa-
tory and communicative functions of practice as well as the unstable, changing nature
of practice over time also need to be addressed.
There are of course many different approaches to material culture, ranging from
object-oriented to new materialism, and these approaches often diverge on understand-
ings of the human-object nexus. Some argue that objects gain their meaning through
their engagement with people, while others propose the importance of object-based
agency.
4
It is not, however, within the scope of this article to valorize one approach
over another, but rather to suggest how these approaches that have been integrated
into the “toolkit”(Prown 1982) of material culture scholars, could likewise be a useful
addition to the toolkit of those who analyse translations. In order to examine how this
toolkit might be utilized in relation to religious translations, this article will first
consider the material geographies of one visual representation of religious translation,
and, secondly, will apply various material culture analyses to a specific religious
translation.
Images of materiality: St. Jerome in his study
Visual depictions of the materiality of religious translation are an instructive point of
departure for considerations of the interaction between translation, religion and
4A. O’CONNOR
objects. During the Renaissance, there was a vogue for paintings and engravings featuring
one of the best-known figures in religious translation, St. Jerome, at work in his study.
These artworks show the famous translator of the Bible surrounded by material
objects related to the translation process. In Ghirlandaio’s fresco St. Jerome in his
Study (1480), the saint is at work at his desk while in the midst of objects such as
open books, a letter, reading glasses, inkwells, scissors and a candle holder (see
Figure 1). There are two inkwells in the image, red for rubricating and black for
writing, and the drops of ink near the inkwell point towards the immediacy of the
work at hand. On the cartouches are Greek and Hebrew letters indicating the multilin-
gualism of the activity.
An analysis of this image reminds us of the physicality of the practice of translation
and the materiality of textual production. It also reminds us of how the translator is
part of a material world, where the medium interacts with the ideational. Recent work
by Outi Paloposki and others has drawn attention to the translator’s desk, to the
clutter that encroaches on their work: source text editions, dictionaries, reference
works and previous translations in a variety of languages (Paloposki 2019). It is
argued that these objects carry meaning and affect the way that translators think and
work, thus impacting the translation process. Many other artistic representations of
St. Jerome in his study from this era also signal the material practice of translating: for
example, in a woodcut from the Malermi Bible of 1490, Jerome is seen using a rotating
Figure 1. Domenico Ghirlandaio, St. Jerome in his Study (1480), fresco, Church of San Salvatore di
Ognissanti, Florence.
TRANSLATION STUDIES 5
book wheel, a device where multiple books could be opened and rotated for consultation
while the writer worked at his desk (Thornton 1998, 58). This object points to the use of
multiple sources in the process of translating the Bible and highlights the need for con-
stant and immediate references in multi-layered textual composition. Antonello da Mes-
sina’sSt. Jerome in his Study (c. 1475) similarly depicts the translator at work surrounded
by texts, many of them opened out for ease of consultation. Antonio da Fabriano’s paint-
ing of the same subject (1451) includes multiple texts and parchments on the saint’s desk,
while also giving prominence to the saint’s hands involved in the physical process of
writing and consulting. In many of the images, paper markers can be seen inserted
into books for easy reference and a corpus of multilingual texts surrounds the translator
for scholarly use, highlighting the philological activity of Jerome. The many items on and
around St. Jerome’s desk remind us of the interaction between objects and the process of
translation. These are the very tools and objects that make translation and communi-
cation possible; as Michael Cronin (2003) and Karin Littau (2016) remind us, without
tools, translation does not exist.
These depictions of Jerome also highlight the perceived interplay between the material
and the immaterial, the human and the divine in the creation of a religious translation.
The images of Jerome feature the saint at work, generally in a moment of divine inspi-
ration or contemplation. In the mingling of shafts of light and contemplative poses in
the setting of a study, the act of translation comes across as an ethereal moment that
is embedded in a workplace, replete with material objects which will give form to the
translation. The imagery combines action and reflection, reason and faith, humanity
and divinity, materiality and immateriality. Religious translation is conceptualized as
an act of divine inspiration firmly based in a material world. The combination of the
human and divine, the word made flesh, is a central tenet of Christianity and it is there-
fore unsurprising to see the combination of the material and the immaterial in images of
Jerome. The translator is not merely a tool of divine will, an instrument channelling the
word of God, he is actively engaged in materializing the religious message. He is a person
who has to put in the hard graft to deal with multiple texts, languages and versions. This
is an intertwined world with many components: as Allison Burkette observes, “Not only
should the message and the media be considered discursive partners, the translator also is
part of the same ongoing cycle of co-creation”(2016, 320). The imagery of the religious
translator at work reminds us that a focus on the materiality of translation is not to the
exclusion of the human agent, instead, it is to place the human at the centre of a materi-
alized reality.
The agency of translation thus needs to be viewed as distributed across “assemblages
of subjects and objects, human and nonhuman actors”and human agency understood as
entangled with the agency of materiality (Hazard 2018, 794). This is to acknowledge the
human as the producer of the translated text, but also to recognize the entangled agency
that enables textual production, where, for example, translators, printers, booksellers,
paper and ink suppliers, authors of dictionaries and reference guides, are all part of
this intertwined material world. Furthermore, it is to recognize the agency of things in
themselves, which are not just bound in a constant subject-object dialectic, but instead
impact on human translation practice. Much research in material culture has tradition-
ally revolved around the study of human agents and their creation of, or interaction with,
objects. In recent developments, however, there has been a tendency (evident also in
6A. O’CONNOR
Littau [2011,2016]) to return to the object itself and to discuss its own agentive nature,
rather than merely seeing it as an extension of human activity. Termed “new material-
ism”, this approach argues that material things have a range of capacities that go
beyond the human sense of knowing and that things must be considered in themselves,
and not always positioned in relation to their impact on human concerns (Hazard 2013,
64). Scholars propose that things wield an agency that can shape human practice and
culture (Fowler and Harris 2015) and attempt to tease out the implications of binding
objects in a dialectic with humans. An application of this approach to the Ghirlandaio
fresco acknowledges the role of the saint in the creation of the translation, but also
asks how the tools he had at his disposal affected the translation he produced.
In analysing the image of the religious translator at work, it is also useful to take a step
outside of the “frame”and to think of the artwork itself as a material object. The fresco
was commissioned by the Vespucci family for the church of Ognissanti in Florence. The
position of Ghirlandaio’s fresco within a public space in a church had a very performative
function in respect of the visual politics of religious translation: it placed Jerome’s trans-
lation work in a vaunted and prominent position and reflected his popularity in the
Renaissance (Simon 2019, 160–170). Indeed, Jerome’s expertise in Hebrew, Greek and
Latin, his philological zeal and his reformist and challenging translation work appealed
to the values of Renaissance humanism and resulted in public demonstrations of his
valorization such as the Ghirlandaio fresco. The elements of the fresco which speak to
these humanist values (including the multilingual volumes) are thus in dialogue with
the external context of Renaissance Florence. Another important aspect of Ghirlandaio’s
fresco is that it was created in tandem with, and located opposite, a fresco by Botticelli
which depicted St. Augustine at work in his study.
5
It is impossible to analyse the mate-
riality of Ghirlandaio’s work without making reference to this companion piece as, in
Latourian terms, they are an assemblage of component parts. The image of St. Jerome
in his study is very much in conversation with that of St. Augustine, a man with
whom he had a lively correspondence from ca. 394 to 419 AD. During this exchange
of letters, the two men discussed Jerome’s translation of the Old Testament from
Hebrew, with Augustine questioning departures from customary traditions of translation
and asserting the authority of the Septuagint. In the correspondence, Jerome’s adherence
to a philological methodology in his translation work created a debate on differing
approaches to religious translation, and the discussions between the two Church
Fathers can therefore be positioned at the foundation of Western translatology (Robin-
son 1992). The relationship between the two saints was closely connected with (and
grounded in) translation, and the artistic works depicting the two men, individually at
work in their studies, have been described by one art historian as being “so intimate
that they illuminate each other”(Stapleford 1994, 69). The dialogue that existed
between the two men in life thus continues in their artistic representations in the
church of Ognissanti.
6
Moving “outside the frame”to consider the material situation of the work effectively
allows us to turn “from theology of pictures to an anthropology of visual practice rep-
resentation”(Belting 2016, 235) and add additional layers to our understanding of the
fresco. Although it is not within the scope of this article to fully explore the agentive func-
tion of the frescos in creating “assemblages of meaning”(Morgan 2018), the form and
context of the image, with the intertwining of Renaissance and humanist ideas on
TRANSLATION STUDIES 7
translation and textual practice, must be acknowledged as participatory elements in the
materiality of the image. The relationship of the Ghirlandaio fresco to Botticelli’s depic-
tion of Augustine, to the church of Ognissanti, and to the context of Renaissance Flor-
ence therefore elaborates how the form of the image, its relationality and positioning
are constituent elements of its material layers.
To return “within the frame”of Ghirlandaio’s fresco, the image is replete with objects
including a cardinal’s hat, fruit, an hourglass, a necklace, a purse and vases. Is this fresco
merely for art historians to analyse? Or does it also have something to say to translation
scholars? In many of the images of Jerome at work, he is given the clothing and parapher-
nalia of a cardinal, even though he never held this position in the Catholic Church. Does
posthumously conferring on Jerome the garb of cardinal add to our understanding of the
value placed on religious translation in the Renaissance? The setting of the image of
Jerome in a study, a private space filled with objects to support the translation activity,
creates a relationship with the translated object and points to the material conditions
of translation. The objects in Jerome’s study cannot of course be considered as historical
documentation of how he worked, rather they point to the Renaissance conceptualization
of a religious translator. Although some images of Jerome feature him working in the
desert, leading an ascetic life (for example, Giovanni Bellini’s painting of the saint),
most Renaissance artists preferred to depict him in his study. Was this because the act
of translation could not be conceptualized as happening without material props? What
does the positioning of the objects in the image tell of Renaissance attitudes to trans-
lation? Anne Coldiron has recently termed translation scenes and portrayals of transla-
tors as “paratextual visibility”(2018), and these representations both materialize the
translator and also spatialize the translation process, incorporating the “material
environment of translation”which, in the words of Littau, is “a matter of micro-geogra-
phies, bringing together physical, social and mental spaces”(2019, 369). Thinking of the
religious translator and the religious text in material terms encourages us to consider the
textual, scribal and physical strategies of religious translation and how these were con-
ditioned by technology available to the writer, their spatial working environment and
the geographies of their materialities.
Material entanglements
Moving from the geographies of a visual representation of translation, I will now use the
example of a single religious publication to illustrate possible material readings of the
translation and how such an approach can result in alternative engagements with the
text. The text I have chosen is a translation from French into English by Mary Sadlier
of Abbé Mathieu Orsini’sLife of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God which was pub-
lished in America in 1872.
7
Within studies of material culture, one form of analysis focuses on the object as a thing
in itself, highlighting its physical features, investigating elements such as structure,
texture, age and so forth. Taking its lead from book historians who regularly examine
the materiality of the text to further understandings of the book’s function and position
in society, an object-centred analysis pays attention to the book in its totality, revealing
important insights relating to paper, binding, typography, layout, finishing, ornamenta-
tion, images and print form. The 1872 Orsini translation published by D. & J. Sadlier was
8A. O’CONNOR
bound in leather in full calf over wooden boards with embossing in gilt of geometric
design. It had a cameo of the Madonna with a child on the upper board and a Latin
cross on the lower board. It had gilt paper edges, raised bands on the spine, text
within a lined border, a colour illustration to the title page and also illustrations through-
out the book.
8
I will be discussing a copy of this translation which was personalized
through a supra libros on the upper board of the leather with the owner’s name, Mary
O’Keefe (see Figure 2). This refined book was clearly designed to be a prized, durable pos-
session. The inscription on the exterior of the book transformed the mass-produced
object into a unique personalized possession, opening up alternative meanings and
uses for the translation. Questions about the book’s material appearance and constitution
thus lead to expanded questions about interactions with the object, its function and the
practices associated with its existence.
When studying a translation as an object, another layer of analysis must be added
which involves a comparison between the materiality of the original text and that of
the translated text. Are both printed in the same format? Has the finishing changed?
Are the illustrations the same? Is it still targeted at the same reading public? The original
French text by Orsini was published in France by Félix de Boisadam in 1837 and num-
bered over 700 pages. It had an attractive binding in half calf, tan, with raised bands, gilt
and blind decoration to the spine; there was marbled paper to boards and blue speckled
edges. Like the Sadlier translation, this text was materially packaged as a refined product,
designed for durability and domestic use. Even when the text was translated into a new
environment in America, it still bore the hallmarks of a high-end product. From a
Figure 2. External cover of Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1872) personalized with the name Mary
O’Keefe. Reproduced from the original held by the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh
Libraries of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA.
TRANSLATION STUDIES 9
translation studies perspective, a material approach highlights the importance of consid-
ering changes in the physical form of the translated work and it is insightful to examine
how the book is materially altered as part of its translational re-elaborations, how “trans-
formissions”form part of its afterlives.
9
The publication of the translation in such a deluxe edition provides additional infor-
mation on the value and the use of the book, and the elaborate and expensive finishing
made it an important physical object which could occupy a prized position in the home.
The translation was more than just a religious work to be read; it also had a display func-
tion and a value linked to its personalization. As Jules Prown outlined (1982), it is impor-
tant to highlight the different levels of value that can be linked to material objects,
ranging from the intrinsic value of the object to the value linked to the object’s function.
For religious translations, this value is multi-layered, encompassing the physical value of
an object, and also the spiritual and participatory value it derives from a concomitant
religious community.
Practice, meaning and engagement
Through their use and associated practices, objects can gain meaning and value as they
are charged intellectually and affectively, and framed within relational systems. The reli-
gious translation can be attributed meaning and sacred qualities, and it can also be posi-
tioned in a network of emotion and feeling that emerges from ritualistic or valued
practices. How believers engage with the objects is as important as what the objects do
in themselves, necessitating a focus on how the object is used and reused, cherished or
lost, prized or forgotten. Indeed, Lynne Long has proposed that what makes a text
holy is how people use it, the status they give it and the significance it has for them
(2005, 14). What people do with the object activates meanings and significations that
do not primarily or exclusively reside in the object itself (Morgan 2008, 228). Material
culture reminds us to examine not only the presence and circulation of objects but
also the importance of the practices and rituals relating to the objects. To use Arjun
Appadurai’s phrase, the “social life of things”is a natural and necessary consideration
that stems from the interweaving of actors, makers, receivers in the creation, circulation
and reception of things (1986).
A religious translation can thus be seen as an object that creates meaning through its
interaction with people, their practices and environments. When examining the object,
the sensory experience of owning the text must also be considered: these were books
to be held while praying, to be read in a domestic setting, to be placed in a prominent
position in the household. The material dimensions of the object draw attention to the
need to consider tactile significance: for example, the 1872 edition of the Sadlier trans-
lation contains pages inside the book that were left blank for family records; these
included pages with headings for marriages, births, deaths and miscellaneous, and embel-
lished religious borders surrounded the spaces for the lists (see Figure 3). The handwrit-
ten insertions in the text modified its existence and gave rise to added practices linked to
the object. By memorializing family events within the pages of the book, it was no longer
merely an object containing words to be read, instead, it was an object inviting haptic
involvement. Although the attention of scholars is often drawn to the textual features
of a book, the blank spaces are also significant. The inscription and memorializing of
10 A. O’CONNOR
personal moments of Catholic ceremony within pages of the Life of the Blessed Virgin
Mary left material traces of domestic life and ritual. The interplay of things and practices
is an integral part of the complexity of the religious experience with profane objects
obtaining sacred dimensions through their use in ritualized moments of religious
activity. In this context, it is useful to think of how materiality encourages participatory
practices where the physical cues and features of a text prompt an engagement that
moves beyond the reading of words (Blatt 2018; Jenkins et al. 2013). The material
traces in the Orsini translations show how, particularly for religious texts, interaction
with the work can encompass textual engagement and also a participatory dimension
of devotion and piety.
Community, identity and the object
Many scholars, drawing on approaches proposed by Appadurai (1986), view objects as
symbols or signs which reveal or signify underlying beliefs. It is also argued that the cul-
tural values which are embedded in and transmitted by an object can provide insights
into cultures and societies that produced and used the objects (Berger 2009). In this
context, it is useful to question how religious translations contributed to the creation
of meaning and identity for those within the religious group, and what the texts tell us
about the culture that used them. The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1872) was a
French work translated by an Irishwoman and published in America, and as such is a
product of the networks of global Catholicism. Ownership of this work was a marker
of belonging to this wider community spread across geographical and linguistic
borders; it was a badge of identification and a statement of religious consumerism and
participation. The devotional works translated for the Catholic community in America
can be seen as aids in forming a sense of identity, facilitating participation in the
global flows of a transnational religion. Objects help people to individuate, differentiate,
and identify, while allowing humans to situate themselves in space and time (Auslander
Figure 3. Pages from Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1872) containing family records. Reproduced
from the original held by the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of the Uni-
versity of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA.
TRANSLATION STUDIES 11
2005, 1019): the translation and circulation of The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary enabled
this process, with the translated book serving as a tangible trigger for creating meaning
and identity.
Religion relies on material objects and practices to impact on and structure a sense of
identity, to provide a tangible sensory experience of religious meaning. The phenomen-
ological approach to religious material culture places much emphasis on the human
sensory experience and the importance of things as part of the lived experience of
humans (Morgan 2010). The study of material culture and religion demands a re-evalu-
ation of objects and a recognition of their function in evoking emotion, attachment and
identity. Many different meanings can converge in one object: a religious book can be
viewed as a badge of identity, a transnational link, a status symbol, a family heirloom.
With this pooling of significance in an object, it can encompass shared multiple and
fluid meanings, often non-linear in nature, ranging from personal domestic meaning
to objectified social meaning. The value of the religious translation gains additional sig-
nificance when it is situated within a community which is shaped through its use of
objects, practices and sensory experiences; shared devotional activities; rituals which
inform the emotions that are attached to objects and bind people in their religious
identities.
Materiality, empirical questions and assemblages
While the values and cultural significance embedded in objects are important, a material
analysis also necessitates concerted attention to empirical questions such as How many
copies of the translated work were in circulation? How many forms of this object existed?
How unique was it? How did it come into existence? A brief analysis of WorldCat reveals
that Abbé Orsini’s original text, La Vierge: histoire de la mère de Dieu appeared in at least
seven editions between 1837 and 1842, and is held by fifteen WorldCat member libraries
worldwide. In comparison, the English translation appeared in ninety-five editions
between 1800 and 1986 and is held by 422 WorldCat member libraries worldwide.
10
Although these figures relate only to WorldCat, they nonetheless give an empirical
idea of how the translation had a different afterlife to that of the original with many
different elaborations in new contexts.
The variants of the afterlives of this work are not merely textual changes, they are also
material re-elaborations or transmediations of the original book, encompassing a diver-
sity of print and textual forms. Attention to these details of the book can tell us a great
amount about how the text has been packaged for and used in the target culture. The
study of religious translation must therefore take account of elements such as editions,
print runs, packaging, prices, marketing and advertising. The actual translation of the
Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Mary Sadlier did not change from the 1850s to the
1870s; however, in this period it was packaged and promoted in a variety of manners
to attract additional readers. A study of the materiality of the text reveals the strategies
used both to recruit readers and to impact the way the text was used. The Life of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, for example, was offered to the public in many different formats,
the copy that Mary O’Keefe owned and personalized was just one form of the text and
there were many other options open to buyers with variations in finishes and prices as
can be seen in advertisements for the book (see Figure 4). These reveal the different
12 A. O’CONNOR
paths for the consumption of the translation and a variety of trajectories for the afterlives
of the text. The diversity of publishing formats allowed for altered engagements with the
object: small, cheap and portable versions could be held and used by a wide cross-section
of the Catholic population, becoming domestic, personal objects; while deluxe editions
could be displayed prominently and fulfil a more performative role.
Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory encourages us to pay attention to how objects
relate to each other; how they gain meaning through proximity, and how they interact
with their environment (1996;2005). For religious translations it is crucial that they
are considered as embedded in a relational structure, and that the embodied effects of
material culture are seen as networks or entanglements and not merely single objects.
When analysing the Sadlier translation, it is therefore necessary that it is contextualized
alongside the other objects with which it was sold and packaged. In the case of the Life of
the Blessed Virgin Mary, the translation was not published on its own and was in fact
bound together with other works: a translation by Sadlier of Meditation of the Litanies
Blessed Virgin Mary by Abbé Edouard Barthe; a historical calendar of feasts of the
Blessed Virgin, foundations and dedications of churches in honour of our Blessed
Lady, and the litany of the Most Blessed Virgin, accompanied with meditations. The
translation must be studied in dialogue with these other texts alongside which it was
packaged. Rather than see an object as a single item or a standalone text, material
culture encourages consideration of how the object is connected, produced and
assembled and of how an examination of these aspects can reveal insights into
different social experiences and models of circulation.
Publishers and sellers of religious translations in the nineteenth century did not just
sell books, they also had a wide offering of religious objects such as prints, rosary
beads and statues. For example, the catalogues of the Sadlier Company in America con-
tained religious books and translations as part of a continuum of religious products both
Figure 4. Advertisement from the catalogue of D. & J. Sadlier, in Sadlier’s Catholic Almanac and Ordo,
New York: D. & J. Sadlier, 1865, p. 4.
TRANSLATION STUDIES 13
for domestic use and for public worship. Translated works were part of the material
culture of nineteenth-century Catholicism, where church ornaments, pictures, vest-
ments, building designs, rosary beads, music and church furniture circulated across
national boundaries. During the changing patterns of domestic piety in this period,
with greater emphasis on personal, standardized devotional practices, believers used
printed aids and other props to attend to their devotional life as part of a ritualized
process (Heimann 1995; Taves 1986). The value of the objects used in this context is
much greater than their intrinsic value as they formed part of the ritualistic enactment
of the religious devotion.
The study of material culture is often conceived as an inclusive practice where dom-
estic and inconsequential objects share the stage with élite objects (Auslander 2005). In
the context of religious translations, the focus on the material aspect helps move from
élite institutional concerns to the mass production and consumption of religious texts,
where meaning is not just confined to the text, but is also interactive, creating
different forms of experience in the practices and use of objects. The analysis of the trans-
lated text and its materiality opens up the discussion of the values associated with that
text. These values are multi-layered and can be linked to the object itself, to its function
in a public or domestic setting, to its associated sacrality, and also to its links to a wider
transnational community of believers. A study of the materiality of religious translations
allows us to explore these layers of value by examining how they are embedded in or trig-
gered by the object. As a religion communicates across languages, its practices are rooted
in the material world, providing insights into identities, values and indices which are con-
nected to this materiality of being.
Conclusion
Nowhere in this article have I discussed the translation strategies employed by Mary
Sadlier in translating Orsini’s work; there is no mention of her faithfulness or otherwise
to the original French text. There is also no discussion of the translator herself. This
article has instead proposed that a material analysis of her published translation can
offer different insights into the work than those provided by textual or biographical
approaches. A material focus locates the object within its associated practices, assem-
blages and networks. To examine the materiality of religious translations is to examine
their production, social function, aesthetic composition and consumption; for religious
translations, materiality can provide a link between a text and its use in devotional prac-
tices. Isolating the text from the material culture that surrounds it disconnects the trans-
lation from the entanglement of social, institutional, and personal activities linked to the
object. The benefits of this approach are multiple and not merely limited to insights relat-
ing to the translation brought about by a shift in focus from textuality to materiality. The
study of religious translation in a material light can also provide insight into specific reli-
gions, illustrating how the religion itself is embodied, transformed and perpetuated by
translation. The consideration of how religions deploy and respond to translations as
material objects therefore can enhance both understandings of the translation itself
and also how religious regimes of identity can be constructed through translation.
11
The study of religious translation should therefore be accompanied by a study of the
14 A. O’CONNOR
objects, spaces and practices surrounding the texts, and the act of translation itself con-
sidered, like St. Jerome in his study, as embedded in a material world.
Notes
1. Religious texts have been used haptically throughout history: one only needs to think of tra-
ditions surrounding the placing of hands on Bibles, and of making oaths while in physical
contact with a religious text more broadly, to understand the centrality of this dimension.
The focus in this article is on Christian texts and the broad focus on material translation
in the Christian tradition is all the more appropriate given that in this religious tradition,
the word “translate”has been used not just for the movement of words, but also the move-
ment of relics and people.
2. For an overview of these intersections, see Colombo (2019).
3. For a recent publication on how such a research approach could work in the field of digital
religion, see Mandair (2019).
4. For an overview of these approaches see, for example, Hazard (2013), Hicks and Beaudry
(2010). See Saramifar (2018) for an object-centred approach which calls for more agency
to be attributed to the religious object.
5. The two works were originally even closer than their current positions: they were moved
from the chancel to opposite walls in the nave of the church during the sixteenth century.
6. The interconnection is such that some have interpreted Botticelli’s work as a depiction of the
moment when Augustine allegedly had a miraculous visitation from Jerome (Meiss 1970),
an interpretation which has been subsequently challenged (Stapleford 1994). For more on
visual representations of both Jerome and Augustine in this period, see Gill (2012).
7. For analysis of cross-sections between the book history approach and translation studies, see
Colombo, Ó Ciosáin, and O’Connor (2019).
8. The first edition of this translation was published by D. & J. Sadlier, New York, in 1853, and
a second edition of the text appeared in 1854. These publications coincided with the declara-
tion of the Immaculate Conception and so were very topical in the world of Catholic
publishing.
9. Coldiron has argued that transformission “asks us in particular to consider material textual-
ity as a co-factor in translation, concomitant with verbal or linguistic factors”(2019, 201).
The notion of “transformission”and its applicability to early modern translations is elabo-
rated in Belle and Hosington (2019); Coldiron (2019).
10. This is a rather reductive analysis of a messy afterlife of a text which existed in many
languages, formats and editions, both in the original and in translation; the purpose here
is merely to highlight different textual trajectories and possible quantitative implications
in a material study of the translated text.
11. On how translations can contribute to construction of regimes of identity in religions, see
Israel (2019) and also the contributions to the Special Issue of Religion which that article
introduces.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
The author would like to acknowledge the support of a Cushwa Research Fellowship which
enabled research at the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame, U.S.A.
TRANSLATION STUDIES 15
Notes on contributor
Anne O’Connor is Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Emily Anderson Centre for Translation
Research and Practice in the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of Trans-
lation and Language in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A European Perspective (2017) and is PI on
the ERC-funded project Pietra: Religious Translation, the Catholic Church and Global Media: a
study of the products and processes of multilingual dissemination.
ORCID
Anne O’Connor http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2458-2223
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