The Plurality of Fontenelle's Worlds. Translations, Transfers of Knowledge and Natural Philosophy in Europe (1687-1788)

PLURIFONT focuses on the single greatest astronomical bestseller of the eighteenth century: Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), and its Italian, German and English translations as one interconnected case study, to be addressed from a transnational European perspective. I seek to appraise the several versions of the Entretiens over a timespan going from 1686 to circa 1780 as interventions in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural conversations on natural philosophy, while recovering the agency and voices of translators mostly unknown to present historiography. By addressing the wider topic of the production of translations as means of transmission of knowledge in the long eighteenth century, my main purpose is to examine some of the debates on natural philosophy at the core of the Enlightenment period in an innovative way: by reconsidering the traditional approaches employed within the interdisciplinary field of translation studies. My working hypothesis contends that the Entretiens constituted an open, flexible and porous ‘site of knowledge’ that travelled temporally and geographically across Europe, providing fertile ground for its many translators to revise the scientific ideas of the ‘source’ text through a wide range of paratextual devices and to adapt them to the debates of their times. As a result, these translations became conflictual sites of knowledge, conceptually removed from the original work, while remaining the vehicles of heterogeneous scientific discourses usually dismissed by the simplified narratives of ‘progress’ associated with Enlightenment’s historiographies.