Fixers

Fixers: Agents of Connected History and Literature

by Zrinka Stahuljak

These “interpreter-like” figures that I call fixers were neither neutral nor instrumentalized, but were agents and subjects who inserted themselves in the translational process and created a third space.

The Translation History in Global Perspective series on Hopscotch Translation seeks to highlight an ongoing conversation between scholars working on the history of translation and translators for a broader audience. The series continues the discussion begun at a roundtable of the same name at the 2024 meeting of the American Historical Association and will feature contributions from participants in that roundtable and others. In this fourth essay in the series, Zrinka Stahuljak introduces us to the multifarious figure of the “fixer” in the premodern era.

Who were the people helping pilgrims, crusaders, and merchants communicate in the early, premodern Mediterranean? And why did so many “clients” feel taken advantage of, literally robbed, by their “interpreters”? These were some of the questions that I asked in my recently published book, Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature.^[1] In the process, I came to understand that entire swaths of historical lived experience—and especially oral communication and situationality—had been marginalized because of the dominance and popularity of translation studies in the twentieth century. Textual translation, and its poetics, ethics, and politics, privileged the relationship between (source-target) texts and languages—at the expense of the role of the translator and the interpreter—and emphasized an extrasituational (or extracontextual) ethics and deontology. The focus on textuality—relations between texts, between ideas, and between traditions—rather than on sociality—relations between people or relations between people and translational outcomes—has been especially the hallmark of research on the European Middle Ages. But as the stuff of lived experience, communication (oral, non-verbal, non-professional) and situationality are critical to our understanding and interpreting of the (historical) world and its realities. And unlike textual translation, they are regulated by different rules of engagement.

In the early, premodern past, translators and interpreters were not professionals, while they performed a variety of functions beyond language, acting additionally as interpreters, local informants, guides, brokers, personal assistants, and more. They were multifunctional intermediaries with multiple linguistic, social, cultural, and topographical skills and knowledge. They were enablers, facilitators, and mediators—linguistic, logistic, cultural, religious, military, commercial—who negotiated and worked through spaces of unintelligibility and, as a consequence, enabled various networks of exchange. I have called these multifunctional linguistic agents fixers.

On the one hand, fixers were intermediaries who always did linguistic work, something that is not a constant for a more generic term of intermediary. On the other hand, fixers were never just interpreters—a term that they are often erroneously reduced to—since their work encompassed the work of intermediation broadly conceived. In the activities they exercised, the linguistic skill was the medium but not the end in itself. Fixers’ multifunctionality was the response to the multifaceted nature of situations of unintelligibility, whereby unintelligibility exceeded linguistic non-understanding. Recent scholarship in history and anthropology has used “intermediary,” “go-between,” or “broker,” terms often also used interchangeably. Unlike “fixer,” these terms do not easily denote or incorporate the linguistic element. And unlike “interpreter,” “fixer” is more exact given the scope of fixers’ activities that far exceeded the linguistic work.

For scholars of the premodern, a continued acceptance of modern terms and paradigms, that the term “interpreter” imposes, requires a constant description of these figures that populate the premodern world in every narrative (whether historical or fictional) in the negative mode: they were not neutral, not professional, not faithful, they were “informal interpreters,” etc. Scholars spend time justifying the existence of the “more-than-linguistic” as if it were a problem, without ever resolving the problem of how to talk about the more-than-just-the-linguistic as a situated phenomenon of the premodern. More problematically, defining the premodern in relation to the norms of the modern does not allow us to see these intermediary figures in a situated social history of premodernity. In the book, I have therefore focused on meaning given in an utterance (rather than in a language), on multifunctionality in a context (rather than the linguistic work alone), and on translator agency (rather than neutrality). I have also reoriented historical research toward loyalty (sociality) and away from fidelity (textuality), and shown that communication occurred as commensuration rather than equality. These “interpreter-like” figures that I call fixers were neither neutral nor instrumentalized, but were agents and subjects who inserted themselves in the translational process and created a third space. Instead of seeing them as an “in-between,” the third space that fixers created should be acknowledged in its own right in our historical research.

Most significantly, I have found that we see translation today as a binary process—source to target, original to translation—when in fact premodern translation is a ternary process. We are poorly served by modern categories of translation and lose an entire social history and a situated history of translation, as well as entire lifeworlds of people who communicated, if we do not see translation as a ternary relation. The fixer is the centerpiece of this ternary relationality: not an in-between or a go-between, a broker or a translator, and not a grey area, a middle ground, or a transitional space, a neutral conduit, but an agent in their own right. Seeing fixers in this light brings us closer to past lived experiences.

My favorite example from the Fixers is the moment when it becomes clear that the fixers serving medieval Christian pilgrims visiting the holy sites in medieval Syria cannot be simply characterized as liars, thieves, non-professionals, disloyal, treacherous, etc. Giorgio Gucci, part of the group of twelve Florentines traveling together in the desert to Mount Sinai in 1384, tells us that “The money stolen from us went in part, as we understood, to the said interpreter, part to the cameleers and part to our robbers” (Èbbene parte, dei detti danari rubati, secondo che comprendemmo, il detto turcimanno, e parte i cammellieri, e parte quelli che ci rubarono).^[2] The loot is split in three parts and herein likely lies the answer: fixers in the desert are protecting the lives of the pilgrims just as much as theirs. They, too, participate in an economy, not only as takers or receivers of payments and food stuffs, the way pilgrims see them; they are in an economy of relation, made less to enrich themselves or to despoil the pilgrims than to flow through them as they connect the urban and desert economies of the Mamluk sultanate. Another pilgrim, Georges Lengherand, records a situation in 1461 that allows us to comprehend the difficulty of the fixers’ position: “Having arrived, we found the church full of the Sultan’s armed men, so many that our trip to Hebron was interrupted. We had to take another path and our dragoman was ‘composed’ of eight ducats by them” (Mais nous là arrivez, trouvames l’église plaine de gens d’armes du Soudam [sic] tellement que à ceste cause nostre voyage dudit Ebron en fut rompu, et nous failly prendre aultre train, et fut nostre trucheman composé de eulx de huit ducas).^[3]

Fixers themselves have to pay tributes, extortions, and mangeries (gifts of food) both to the sultan’s men and the Bedouins of the desert. They participate in the circulation of money, whereby they pass on the earnings as much as they mediate conflict. In fact, they pass on the money because they mediate tensions and negotiate mobilities across spaces organized by different rules of engagement. The contract that the pilgrim-clients conclude with their fixers opens the possibility of movement; but at each threshold of parallel rule, the tributes—whether as money or food stuffs—are to be given or taken. This is the ternary space of historical translation where fixers are themselves part of the circulation, not some neutral agent who is bound by the deontological rule of fidelity to text.

I therefore proposed fixers as a paradigmatic shift in terminology and methodology as a way to impact the historiography of the early, premodern historical periods. That is, before deciding on whether our approach is about scales or networks, comparative or connected methods of history, global or local, etc., we should opt for a serious reconsideration of the very conceptual grounding of translation for the premodern period. We must carefully choose our critical terminology and clarify our understanding of the categories that we have until now used to understand translation in the premodern era.

The enormous promise of a social history of translation for the whole of the early, premodern period is to allow an integrated and holistic analysis of people and texts, of orality and writing, of ephemeral phenomena and material traces. Indeed, the main argument of the book is that comparative, relational analysis of the fixer—instead of broker, interpreter, intermediary, trickster, or the focus on author or ruler—reinvigorates a connected history before and beyond spatial and temporal connectivities, while allowing a situated understanding of premodern (pre-1700) historical conditions of communication, transfer, and exchange.^[4]

NOTES

[1] Stahuljak, Zrinka. Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

[2] Gucci, Giorgio. “Pilgrimage of Giorgio Gucci to the Holy Places.” Visit to the Holy Places of Egypt, Sinai, Palestine, and Syria in 1384, by Frescobaldi, Gucci & Sigoli, translated by Theophilus Bellorini and Eugene Hoade (Jerusalem: Franciscan Press, 1948), 93-156, at 121; Gucci, Giorgio. Viaggio ai luoghi santi. In Viaggi in Terra Santa di Lionardo Frescobaldi et d’altri, edited by Carlo Gargiolli (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1862), 269-438, at 349.

[3] Lengherand, Georges. Voyage de Georges Lengherand, Mayeur de Mons en Haynaut, à Venise, Rome, Jérusalem, Mont Sinaï & le Kayre, 1485-1486, edited by Godefroy Ménilglaise (Mons: Masquillier & Dequesne, 1861), 145. Translation into English is mine.

[4] For a take on methodologies of historical research inspired by Fixers, see Stahuljak, Zrinka, “How Early Before It Is Too Late? ‘Medieval’ Periodization, Epistemic Change, and the Institution,” Viator 54:2 (2023): 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.142207.

Zrinka Stahuljak is professor of comparative literature and French and director of the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of seven books, including Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature, The Adventures of Gillion de Trazegnies: Chivalry and Romance in the Medieval East, and Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation.

Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, October 8, 2024