In this fascinating and ambitious book, Zrinka Stahuljak aims to correct the presentism of translation and interpretation studies, extend the genealogy of the modern “translator,” and rewrite the literary history of the Latin west by creating a robust portrait of the medieval “fixer.” “Fixers,” in her definition, “are intermediaries who always do linguistic work.” At the same time, like fixers in late twentieth and twenty-first century war zones, “their work encompasses the work of intermediation broadly conceived” (7). The fixer must reconcile the competing aims of parties who do not speak each other’s language, so fixers are negotiators, skilled in the fine art of haggling. Stahuljak’s medieval literary fixer decolonizes translation studies by recognizing the agency of the premodern dragoman or interpres (7; 29). At the same time, she challenges traditional accounts of late medieval literary history, proposing the fixer as a means of separating the figure of the author from the rise of the nation-state: “Rather than as the slow emergence of the author, the literature and society of northwestern medieval Europe are viewed as the long death of the fixer” (8-9). Thus, the fixer will unsettle the literary history of the Latin west by demonstrating the centrality of works that the traditional historical narrative sees as contingent and liminal--works created at the margins of European settlement, across the Mediterranean and the Eurasian continent; works that reflect on European colonial expansion as central to the European literary project.
The five chapters that form the core of the book follow a rough chronological arc.
Chapter 1 focuses on Latin crusading treatises written to support efforts to convert Muslims to Christianity during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These treatises, she argues, show that “invasion and conquest...may rest on a leader, but maintenance and permanent occupation...rest on fixers” (43). Authors like Riccoldo of Monte Croce, Roger Bacon, Pierre Dubois, and Ramon Llull describe the training of fixers who can support the crusaders’ efforts to win hearts and minds in the eastern Mediterranean: Latin Christian settlers who are thoroughly trained in local languages. The linguistic education described in these treatises forges agents whose job description is more than mere interpretation: a thorough grounding in “liberal arts” will “enable agency in interpreters and make them into fixers” (54). And yet, to be of use to the crusading project, the fixers described in these treatises “are not entirely free agents; they need to be loyal” (58). Neither local fixers hired for pay nor local Christians can be trained for the purpose, and even the descendants of Latin Christian settlers are suspect (61-62). Only Latin Christian settlers with proficiency in local languages will serve the purpose. Stahuljak recognizes the parallels to modern colonial projects but argues that one essential difference distinguishes the premodern settlers: these “occupiers do not impose their language, but learn the language of the occupied” (67).
Chapter 2 focuses on the economy of translation after the fall of Acre, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, following Latin Christian missionaries to the Mongols (William of Rubruck and Plano Carpini) and pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land (like Frescobaldi, Fabri, Breydenbach, and Sigoli) to examine the “economy of translation...where translation appears less as a product or outcome, but more as a process of commensuration and relationality” (71). In these exchanges, the travelers find themselves immersed in an economy that is invisible to them. Because they don’t know local languages, and Stahuljak does not show us the perspectives of those who do, sometimes--as in the case of William of Rubruck--we watch them learn in real time as they travel. William relies on “networks of linguistic affinity” (79) to receive his information: the insights of expats resident in the foreign lands where he travels. Where these networks fail, Stahuljak argues, Franciscan travelers reach the limits of their religious economy. The Franciscans’ refusal to accept the gifts that grease the wheels of travel limits the mobility of God’s word, demonstrating “that the word of God was not universal, that there was cultural difference” (82). The Latin Christian pilgrims crossing the desert on the way to the Holy Land, in contrast, never seem to glean the workings of the Bedouin economy that facilitates their travel, and their response to what they see as extractive economic practice--mere robbery (96-97)--is querulous. It seems that these travelers are using a familiar economic template to interpret an unfamiliar script. Because they don’t understand local economies of gift exchange, they see the actions of the Bedouins who lay possession to their goods as equivalent to piracy at sea or brigandage on land. The problem, as these Latin Christian travelers describe it, is that they must rely on local fixers, whose loyalty is to the locals and not to them.
The western Christian fixer who hustles for the western Christian traveler returns in chapter 3, which focuses on fourteenth-century French and Latin sources describing the Latin Christian capture of Alexandria in Egypt in 1365 and the Ottoman defeat of western Christian armies at Nicopolis in Greece in 1396. Here, the loyalty of the fixer becomes paramount in Stahuljak’s interpretation of the textual record. Accounts of European literary history focus on veracity as metric, and the distinction between verisimilitude--realism--and non-realistic modes of representation is one way to distinguish between premodern and modern literatures and to describe “progress” in literary representation (see, e.g., 12, 17, 116). Stahuljak does not cite Auerbach, but his argument in Mimesis seems relevant. In contradistinction to this argument, Stahuljak proposes that the foundation of the western Christian literature of the Middle Ages is “personal loyalty, and not fidelity of translation” (116), that the writer’s “own truthfulness and allegiance to chivalry and Christianity” (143) is front and center in the texts they produce.
Yet, once again, the chivalric and knightly writers whose accounts Stahuljak reads operate on the border of an aporetic economy that they cannot interpret. We are in Alexandria. The brief Christian occupation has failed, but Christian prisoners remain captive in the city. It falls to “Venetian and Italian” merchants to negotiate the ransom that will secure their release (126-31). Stahuljak interprets the negotiators’ success as a failure, in the view of the French-language sources: “A knight does not negotiate and commensurate; a knight is not a fixer.... Knights are judged by their loyalty, and merchants according to their in-network power, and each obeys their code” (130). The merchants, in this case, did not leave a record of their actions to speak to their own loyalties. The Mamluks, however, did. Jo Van Steenbergen’s discussion of the five extant Arabic-language sources that give accounts of the Christian sack of Alexandria (which appears in Stahuljak’s bibliography but which she does not cite or discuss) does not mention the Italian negotiation for the hostage release. However, Steenbergen’s essay includes a tantalizing detail that vibes with Stahuljak’s discussion of modern historians’ tendency to be dismissive of the kind of premodern sources that she places at the center of her own account. Steenbergen quotes a modern historian’s quibbles with one of his sources, which he rejects because of the author’s “approach...of a storyteller with an emphasis on the dramatic and the legendary.” [1] Historians of Arabic literature, like historians of Latin Christian literature, valorize (what they see as) verisimilitude; yet premodern Arabic-language histories, like premodern histories in the languages of the Christian west, valorize other qualities.
The French and Latin sources on the sack of Alexandria and the battle at Nicopolis discussed in chapter 3, as Stahuljak argues, “record and embody the emergence of writers as fixers in the world” (143). Her analysis shows us how these knightly writers exclude the Italian merchants and negotiators from the dispensation of “European” literature, as they are framing it in the pages of their accounts. Chapters 4 and 5, both set in the fifteenth-century Court of Burgundy, trace the apotheosis of the writer as fixer--as power broker with agency at court and in the court of letters--and the book collector as fixer, wielding agentive power in the libraries they assembled. But surely this trajectory--“European” literature emerges from the crucible of failed European expansion across the Mediterranean, then reaches its apogee in the French-language literature of the Court of Burgundy and the ravishing manuscripts that preserve that literature--could only be produced by the literary historian as fixer. Surely, there are other itineraries that could be tracked using the template that Stahuljak provides: other loyalties animate premodern authors, and their works recount other voyages of conquest (successful and failed, actual and metaphorical). The literary historian as fixer with loyalty to another archive might track a different path across the Mediterranean, to tell a story that ends in the language, the capital city, and the century of their choice. Stahuljak’s core argument--premodern literature privileged loyalty, and literary production relied upon fixers whose loyalty might prove either steadfast or problematic, as characters or as writers--is a fascinating and important provocation. However, claiming this as the origin uniquely of “European” literature seems problematic, in an era when European exceptionalism has been exhaustively challenged. The premodern literary landscape was a patchwork of loyalties, and in an era before linguistic standardization, fixers were essential for the most banal as well as the most exalted exchanges and literary records.
But this quibble is not meant to undermine Stahuljak’s achievement in Fixers. Most tantalizing is the recursive dimension of her argument: like the premodern writers to whose work she is loyal, the literary historian is a fixer who writes a history of literature “of the fixers by the fixers for the fixers” (17, 35). Stahuljak wrote a French-language book from this same material but intended for a general readership. [2] That book begins with an account of her experiences as fixer in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and laments that the academic researcher cannot take her own life as her point of departure without running the risk that her academic readers will reject her intervention as unscientific. I would argue that in 2024, a scholar with tenure and promotion behind her could do exactly that, and that book might find an eager audience among academics--especially among younger scholars, for whom such daring is not (yet) possible.
Stahuljak has written a manifesto for the literary historian as fixer, and I hope that scholars of world literature far beyond that vision of northwestern Europe to which Stahuljak is loyal take up her challenge and fix unique literary histories from the perspective of their own archives.
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Notes:
1. Jo Van Steenbergen, “The Alexandrian Crusade (1365) and the Mamluk Sources,” in East and West in the Crusader States III: Context, Contacts, Confrontations, ed. Krijna Nelly Ciggaar and Herman G. B. Teule, Leuven: Peeters, 2003, 123-37 at 135.
2. Zrinka Stahuljak, Les fixeurs au moyen âge: Histoire et littérature connectées. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2020.