Translating Magic from the Long Middle Ages
by Brian Johnson
After finishing any research project, I always tend to linger over the topic for a while — following up peripheral threads in the scholarship, filling in the historical background, or pondering theoretical issues raised by the process of synthesizing and rearticulating what I've learned. When I finished Necromancy in the Medici Library, incorporating the largest amount of text I've ever translated from a single source, I found myself preoccupied with questions of how meaning is rendered between languages, between cultures, and between past and present. So, naturally I sought the wisdom of an expert on such quandaries: Umberto Eco.
In a collection of his essays reflecting upon what it means to translate a text, Eco writes that a faithful translation "must aim at rendering, not necessarily the intention of the author (who may have been dead for millennia), but the intention of the text — the intention of the text being the outcome of an interpretative effort on the part of the reader, the critic or the translator."[1] Faced with a text of ritual magic, however (the author of which has indeed been dead for well over four hundred years), the translator finds that reconstructing this interpretative dialogue between text and hypothetical reader takes on additional layers of complexity.
A grimoire is, on one level, an instruction manual; its "intention" is the performative reproduction of the ritual actions described within its pages. This intention, however, is precariously balanced upon another interpretative stratum encoding an entire cosmological, theological, natural and metaphysical system in which the performance of those actions can be efficacious in some meaningful way. This magically-operative paradigm, in which the agency and identity of the active reader are centered and defined, is thus embodied by the text and reproduced by the efforts of its interpreters.[2]
Preserving the ability of a text to realize this kind of intention is not always a straightforward task; the gulf of time, space, and zeitgeist separating the Roman necromancer writing in 1494 from the English-speaking reader in 2021 is no small reach. Eco distinguishes two strategies for translating texts composed in a chronologically or culturally distant milieu[3]: one may either retain what is unfamiliar in style and substance, immersing the reader in a foreign landscape and trusting that they will acclimate to the surroundings as necessary, or one may attempt to "domesticate" the source material, assimilating it to the reader's particular socio-historical circumstances.
I have largely adhered to the former approach, making recourse — as translators of popular fiction are less often permitted — to footnotes where explication is necessary. Happily, writing for a relatively niche audience, my own imagined readers most likely possess at least a superficial familiarity with the rhetorical norms of similar magical texts, and a certain amount of otherwise obscure knowledge may be taken for granted. Still, the occasional allusion to an odd bit of biblical apocrypha or the technicalities of astrological timing did warrant some comment. Indeed, to translate a medieval grimoire, "one must know a lot of things, most of them independent of mere grammatical competence"![4]
Of course, working from a text in a unique manuscript copy, rather than a published edition, confronts the translator with a number of other difficulties and decisions. When a quotation from the Psalms is mangled beyond sense, providing a corrected translation (with a footnote to explain the discrepancy) is little burden upon the editorial conscience; and when the scribe has mistaken an injunction to place a bundle of cloth under one's head for the rather puzzling direction to place a tiny jar atop it, one may feel confident in trusting the text of an alternative manuscript witness. But when it comes to the names of demonic royalty, where orthography can be as slippery as identity, and proper forms of address are integral to magical efficacy... best, perhaps, to say caveat lector and move along.
Attentive readers of the reflections above may have found themselves cocking an eyebrow at one particular choice of words. Yes, just as in my introductory chapter, I characterize the Medici necromantic codex, MS Plut. 89 sup. 38, as a typical (late) medieval text of ritual magic. Why "medieval", when the manuscript was composed well within the era to which the term "Renaissance" is commonly applied (at least as it pertains to Italy)? Historiographic questions of periodization aside, the fact is that the magical operations in this codex evince an obvious continuity with ritual forms seen as early as the fourteenth century in texts like the Liber Juratus.[5] As Frank Klaassen[6] has argued, texts of ritual magic may have accreted concepts from scholastic astrology and image magic by the time they were copied into sixteenth-century codicies (as this one clearly did), but those additions were strictly at the service of a much older necromantic substrate. In that sense, at least, the Medici codex is an archetypal exemplar of the "long middle ages" of magic in Europe.
[1] Umberto Eco (2004), Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation, London: Phoenix, p. 5
[2] See Ildikó Glaser-Hille (2020), The Demonic Book Club: Demonology, Social Discourses, and the Creation of Identity in German Demonic Ritual Magic, 1350-1580, PhD dissertation, University of Concordia, p. 89-90
[3] Eco, pp. 81 ff.
[4] ibid., pp. 17-18
[5] Jan Bulman (2005), ‘Notice of the Liber juratus in Early Fourteenth-century France’, Societas Magica Newsletter 14: 4-6
[6] Frank Klaassen (2013), The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Brian Johnson is an independent scholar, freelance editor and research consultant, and translator of historical documents pertaining to the occult. His work is largely concerned with reconstructing the esoteric worldviews and practices of historical individuals, based upon the study of primary source documents. His works with Hadean Press include Necromancy in the Medici Library, The Testament of Solomon: Recension C, and Naming the Heavens: Orations from the Summa Sacre Magice.
Image shown is by Michel Wolgemut, Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, and is in the public domain.
© 2021 Brian Johnson
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