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as naïve or corrupt when adapting or modifying it. For the European Middle Ages,
such a valuation flies in the face of material evidence, where texts like the Roland or
the Cid come down to us in a single exemplar, versus the dozens if not hundreds of
surviving manuscript versions of translated corpuses such as Barlaam and Josaphat or
the Seven Sages of Rome. In the Mediterranean as elsewhere in the pre-modern world,
translation—the transmission and adaptation of texts across languages and cultures—
was a privileged form of cultural production. In Latin Europe, this process was
thematized in the topos of translatio studii, a version of the discourse of Western
Civilization typically cast as the transmission of learning and textual culture from
Greece to Rome to medieval France or the Empire. The actual lines of transmission,
however, were neither as linear nor as singular as this ideological model suggests
(Kinoshita, 2008a). Karla Mallette borrows the word “cabotage” (the port-to-port
transmission of goods across the sea, through which a ship’s cargo might be totally
altered over the course of its journey) to describe the transmission of texts across time
and Mediterranean space: “not faithfully preserved but thoroughly transformed by
those who transmitted it, creating it anew for historically and linguistically different
communities of readers.” Manuscript evidence shows us that in the case of Aristotle’s
Poetics, for example, Hermannus Alemannus’s Latin translation of Ibn Rushd’s
(Averroës’s) Arabic commentary was more popular than William of Moerbeke’s more
direct and literal translation from the Greek (Mallette, 2009: 584, 588).
“Mediterranean” works such as Barlaam or the Seven Sages were in fact parts of
larger text networks—Daniel Selden’s term for the pre-modern mode of textuality
produced by translation and variation, “arguably the most common type of diffu-
sional patterning” in a vast geocultural zone spanning much of Eurasia from antiquity
through the early modern period. Such works circulated “both within and across
languages ... in a bewildering number of differing exemplars.” Each variant, none
uniquely authoritative, was less a neutral translation than an appropriation and adap-
tation to “ethnically divergent contexts, which brought matters of local dominance,
assertion, and resistance unequivocally to the fore.” Text networks, moreover, high-
light their own cross-cultural transmission, focusing on the fact of or conditions sur-
rounding their translation or dissemination so regularly as to suggest that this is not
an accidental component but an integral part of the works themselves (Selden, 2009:
3–4, 13). Often of South Asian origin, such networks, transmitted to the Mediterranean
via Persian and Arabic, represent a cultural dimension of the close economic and
political links between Asia and the Mediterranean described elsewhere in this volume
(see especially Doumanis). Barlaam and Josaphat, for example, is the Christianized
version of the Buddha legend. From its South Asian Buddhist sources, scholars con-
jecture, it was transmitted into Middle Persian; from Middle Persian into Syriac and
Arabic (as the Book of Bilawhar and Budasf); from Arabic into Georgian (Christianized
as the Balavariani); from Georgian into Greek; from Greek into Armenian and
Latin; and from Latin into Old French, Middle High German, and a host of other
languages (at each stage, in permutations too complex to be relayed here).^3 Pride of
place, however, goes to the Alexander Romance, the fictionalized account of the
exploits of Alexander the Great. First attested in a Greek text ascribed to the “pseudo-
Callisthenes,” between the third century bce and the nineteenth century ce it
proliferated in over 100 surviving versions in dozens of languages “from Afghanistan
to Spain and Ethiopia to Iceland.” This astounding success—even leaving traces in