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Translating the Archive, Archiving the Translator: Everyday Histories of Venetian Dragomans in Early Modern Istanbul
Abstract
In the 1670s, the issue of the purchase of alcohol was brought up in two different Ottoman documents involving the Tarsias, an Istanbul-based dragoman (diplomatic interpreter) family. The first is an imperial order from the corpus of carte turche (Turkish Charters), granting the Venetians a license to purchase a certain amount of alcohol in Istanbul. Before sending it to Venice, one of the Tarsia dragomans translated the document into Italian in which he adhered to— what I discovered to be— a scribal convention by using the loanword "mitri" in Italian for the Ottoman "müdre," a term of liquid measurement. The second is a sicil (court register) in which another Tarsia dragoman appeared as a claimant at the Tophane court to have an extra müdre of alcohol registered after the ship carrying his order sank—an instance signaling to what extent an imperial order had everyday implications for dragomans. Based on such relationality between documents, my paper offers an everyday perspective on how inter-imperial bureaucracy, place-making, and mobility can be studied by looking at the translation, (re)production, and circulation of documents between the Ottoman and Venetian Empires. I argue that an inter-textual and inter-genre analysis of the paper trail between these empires reveals not only how documents were copied, translated, and mediated into/out of the Porte by dragomans but it also provides a window into the everyday lives of dragomans in early modern Istanbul. To this end, I put together archival materials that have yet to be studied together, namely, Ottoman sicils, registers of foreign states (ecnebi defterleri), and carte turche from the Ottoman and Venetian archives, respectively. I first explore the translation and scribal practices adhered to by dragomans. Here I look at the coupling of the Ottoman and Italian documents in carte turche to address how the sociolegal lexicon of everyday life of the Istanbulite dragomans was translated into Italian. I then add to this discussion corresponding and related documents from the corpora of the ecnebi and sicil defters to see how categories and nomenclature used to define the everyday matters of the dragomans were rendered across documents and genres. I conclude by pointing out how dragomans entangled themselves in the circulatory regime of paper that they mediated while also becoming the quotidian subjects of the documents that gave shape to the very same regime.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Europe
Islamic World
Mediterranean Countries
Ottoman Empire
Sub Area
None