by Giovanni Lista

When Bernard de Fontenelle published the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes in 1686, little did he know that the roaring international success they would meet resulted in the creation of a plurality of worlds by way of the several translations of his work. Much like the renowned engraving by Juan d’Olivar depicting the cosmos as a multitude of Cartesian vortices constituted a new visual paradigm for a plurality of planetary systems, the numerous adaptations of the Entretiens formed a vibrant universe of semantic shifts, displacements of meanings, and structural changes when compared to the original text. Such a universe expanded across Europe until the end of the eighteenth century, crossing linguistic borders and transcending the straitjackets of national historiographies. Exploring the evolution of the Entretiens’ translations and the multifarious forms of knowledge they disseminated over time can, therefore, provide us with valuable insights into the entwined phenomena of standardization and specification of some of the discussions at the core of the Enlightenment period.

In this sense, the agency of translators as cultural mediators and ideological gatekeepers, able to affect the trajectory of texts and the divulgation of ideas across Europe, has long been recognized. Through the usage of all sorts of paratextual devices, translators figure amongst the main actors in the collective practice of manufacturing, polishing, and circulating knowledge within the republic of letters. Recently, Helge Jordheim looked at the Entretiens to elaborate the dynamic concept of “sites of knowledge,” describing printed works as expansive objects, flexible and permeable to the miscellaneous publication practices of their editors and translators. According to the cultural and temporal contexts of their production, different iterations of a single “work” would thus require different reading approaches to pinpoint the formal, material and textual elements transmitting different types of knowledge.

A first, central object of scrutiny is the literary genre Fontenelle chose in order to depict the captivating image of a plurality of worlds. The Entretiens takes the shape of an elegant dialogue, which displays a philosopher entertaining a noblewoman with the hypothesis of extra-terrestrial life across the solar system. In a total of five and later six conversations taking place while strolling along the French countryside, the philosophe introduces the latest strands of astronomy and physics to an uneducated marquise, in an attempt to illustrate the laws ruling a secularized universe and its inhabitants, ranging from the Moon to Saturn. In Michel Foucault’s words, this “astronomie fontenellisée” contributed to initiating a golden age of scientific dialogues in eighteenth-century Europe, aimed at demonstrating the politeness of natural philosophy to a cosmopolitan readership across different institutions of sociability. The Entretiens’ gender-specific commitment to knowledge transfer, originally designed for the fauna of the Parisian salons, was replicated in works like Francesco Algarotti’s Newtonianesimo per le dame (1737) or Samuel Formey’s La belle Wolfienne (1741-53). The development of vernaculars as part of the construction of “national” identities during the Enlightenment constitutes an additional theme when considering these socio-cultural and formal elements within the process of trans-latio.

This proved to be true of the Neapolitan lexicographer Annibale Antonini, who, in the 1720s, established himself as a maître d’italien in Paris by publishing a series of Italian textbooks and grammars for an audience of absolute beginners. Instead of drawing old-fashioned rules from the dogmatic Tuscan tradition, Antonini’s Grammaire italienne à l’usage des Dames (1728) gathered courteous formulas and ready-made dialogues to promote mannerly exchanges amongst the international aristocracy of the French capital. In 1748, Antonini edited the Ragionamenti sù la pluralità de’ mondi, presenting an Italian adaptation of the Entretiens as the skillful translation exercise of one of his pupils. While preserving Fontenelle’s format devised “for the ladies,” Antonini sought to confirm his reputation as a tutor and to convey linguistic rather than astronomical knowledge: in the preface, for instance, Antonini praises the wealth of the Italian vocabulary, flexible and broad enough to accommodate scientific terms. However, it is the material aspects of Antonini’s edition to furnish decisive details towards this interpretation. Firstly, a frontispiece representing a noblewoman in the act of learning—fashioned after the natural philosopher Émilie du Châtelet being crowned by Fame—replaces the astral engraving by d’Olivar, to represent the diligent student whose assignment we are about to read. Secondly, the types and illustration designs of the title page match those employed for the series of Italian classics reissued by the publisher Laurent-François Prault, which included Antonini’s own editions of Tasso and Ariosto. In the light of these choices, it appears Antonini regarded the Ragionamenti as a work of Italian literature in its own terms whilst exploiting the popularity of Fontenelle’s bestseller in order to fit his personal agenda intended to promote Italian culture.

From the perspective of natural philosophy, translating the Entretiens brings to the fore the question of their scientific relevance, besides their function of “chef-d’œuvre de vulgarisation” as put by Christophe Martin. In endorsing the heliocentric Copernican system and ridiculing Scholastic physics of Aristotelian derivation, Fontenelle’s dialogues illustrate a cosmogony entirely grounded in the Cartesian theory of vortices, in order to explain the universe’s inner workings from a mechanist point of view. In the framework of the history of science, master narratives have, however, identified the origins of Enlightenment modernity with Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687): until recently, scholars mainly glossed over the process of scientific progress to underline how Newtonian sciences and the law of universal gravitation simply replaced Fontenelle’s version of Cartesian physics. Instead of picking up on the incompatibility of the labels “Cartesianism” and “Newtonianism”—both rhetorical constructions deployed by Fontenelle in France for polemical use—historicizing the Entretiens’ translations allows us to assess how translators positioned themselves in the debates on planetary motion and to reconstruct their own periodization of the history of science.

A case in point is the long series of German editions started in 1726 by the classicist scholar Johann Christoph Gottsched in Frühaufklärung Leipzig. Contrary to Antonini’s version, Gottsched’s Gespräche von mehr als einer Welt (1726) exhibit a spectacular number of footnotes, which form a distinct treatise of natural philosophy running parallel to the translated text. In the words of Larisa Schippel, Gottsched made himself a “sichtbare Übersetzer,” constantly interrupting the philosophe by adding commentaries, revised computations, and astral maps. In the preface, Gottsched warns his readers that he believed it necessary to include so many footnotes because of the work of the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, one of the several disciples of Descartes—such as Nicholas de Malebranche, Johann Bernoulli, and Giovanni Cassini—who had tried to reconcile Cartesian vortex theory with the latest astronomical calculations that seemed to prove the latter impracticable. In the 1690s, Huygens had formulated a description of the centrifugal force in order to recalculate the speed and movement of the vortices and redesigned their orbits to square them with Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, which Newton had empirically proven. In the context of the experiential turn of German philosophy, the Gespräche’s footnotes refer several times to Huygens’ updated vortex system to adjust what Gottsched perceived as the Entretiens’ scientific inaccuracies.

Gottsched’s exegesis of the source text also aims to convert an agile intellectual display of libertinage érudit into a veritable academic textbook for his audience, made of university students. Disapproving of Fontenelle’s clear-cut narrative that employed Descartes as a watershed between les Anciens et les Modernes, Gottsched stretches the chronology of the scientific discoveries listed by the philosophe backwards, to spin a narrative of continuity: next to Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, and Galileo, the Gespräche invite into their annotations classical philosophers such as Democritus, Epicurus, and Xenophanes, as well as Jesuit scholars like Giovanni Riccioli and Gabriel Huet. The encyclopedic approach Gottsched used impacts the dialogical structure of the text and struggles to force it into a site of scientific erudition on the model of Christian Wolff’s rationalist philosophical system.

If we move to consider the metaphysical implications of the Entretiens—like those regarding the sensitive topic of the humanized beings inhabiting other planets—an additional set of issues arises for the multi-confessional group of their European translators. In mediating with their own religious contexts or to avoid censorship, the latter often toned down the materialism of the source text, “re-theologizing” their adaptations by putting God back at the center of the picture and using the argument from design. Natural theology and its eighteenth-century form of discourse physico-theology would serve as the framework to explore the correlation and interactions between the spheres of nature and revelation, and for certain translators to balance Fontenelle’s heretical scientific hypotheses with the sources and narratives provided by the Bible. A relevant instance when addressing an astronomical work is the far-reaching philosophical issue of causation, variously expressed at the turn of the century in terms of Newtonian voluntarism, Cartesian occasionalism, or Leibniz’s pre-established harmony.

In the Italian Peninsula, the censorship of the Catholic Church limited the circulation of the Entretiens until the middle of the eighteenth century, although early manuscript copies were produced anonymously since the 1690s. In 1751, the typographer Michele Bellotti used the official episcopal printing press in Arezzo to issue the Trattenimenti su’ la pluralita’ de’ mondi in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Their author, the Pietist cleric and member of the Accademia Etrusca in Cortona Bernardino Vestrini, had completed the translation privately at the request of the local noblewoman Teresa Tommasi Vagnucci a few years before. Vestrini’s figure is remarkable for the interest in natural philosophy, which emerges from the audacious parallels he traces between modern scholars like Pierre Gassendi or Thomas Stanley and the Holy Scriptures in his collection of essays Lettere teologiche (1749-51). For Vestrini, there is no question that God is the architect of the universe and the cause for all motion of matter by direct action. However, in their infinite wisdom, God shaped such actions as understandable, universal laws manifesting themselves to human beings through apparent causality. This deterministic variant of occasionalism—reminiscent of the late Malebranche—brings Vestrini to affirm that only a proper observation of nature can help interpret the otherwise obscure meaning of the sacred texts in such a way that would make them compatible with present science. In a letter to Teresa Tommasi Vagnucci, which Vestrini included as an afterword to the Trattenimenti, the latter adopts the same perspective when appealing to Huygens, Kepler, and Newton to reject Descartes’ original description of the formation of the vortical system elaborated in the Principia Philosophiae (1644). While extreme occasionalist readings of the latter would only accept inertia and communication by impact as physical laws derived from God’s primeval creation, Vestrini incorporates the latest astronomical observations at the end of the translated text, yet without embracing Fontenelle’s integral naturalism. As for the hypothesis of other planets being inhabited, Vestrini cautiously expresses the certitude that the undisputable faith of his noble addressee will know what to make of it.

Due to their enduring popularity and wide circulation, looking through the prism of the Entretiens and their translations offers a privileged perspective on the large spectrum, multivocality, and particularistic tendencies of eighteenth-century Europe. The pluralistic nature of the work strongly resonates with the tremendously different takes of its translators, as the three cases briefly presented above have shown. Yet, what makes following Fontenelle’s masterpiece across languages and decades particularly fascinating is the inherent transnational framework it provides to explore a wide array of topics common to many authors, scholars, and translators. Instead of using a comparative approach between ex post facto national reconstructions, it is possible to understand cultural transfers as the building block of a broader, genuinely European history of knowledge and its universe.

Giovanni Lista is an associated member of the Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung (IZEA) at the Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. After completing his PhD in intellectual history at the European University Institute (2018) and holding the position of Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen (2018-2019), his research interests moved from early modern British and European republicanism(s) to cultural history, history of science and translation studies. His latest project revolves around the Italian, German and English translations of the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (ca.1687-1788), which he addresses from a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective as one interconnected case study.

Edited by Artur Banaszewski

Featured Image: Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, MS. 3768, Trattenimenti sopra la Pluralità de Mondi Del Signor Fontanelle […] Trasportati dall’Idioma Francese nell’Italiano da R. G. nel 1730, c. [II]r.