A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American … and the University of North Carolina Press)

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Description

In early Pennsylvania, translation served as a utopian tool creating harmony across linguistic, non secular, and ethnic differences. Patrick Erben challenges the long-standing historical myth–first promulgated by Benjamin Franklin–that language diversity posed a threat to communal coherence. He deftly traces the pansophist and Neoplatonist philosophies of European reformers that informed the unconventional English and German Protestants who founded the “holy experiment.” Their belief in hidden yet persistent links between human language and the word of God impelled their vision of a commonplace non secular idiom. Translation changed into the seek for underlying correspondences between diverse human expressions of the divine and served as a model for reconciliation and inclusiveness.
Drawing on German and English archival sources, Erben examines iconic translations that engendered community in colonial Pennsylvania, including William Penn’s translingual promotional literature, Francis Daniel Pastorius’s multilingual poetics, Ephrata’s “angelic” making a song and transcendent calligraphy, the Moravians’ polyglot missions, and the average language of suffering for peace among Quakers, Pietists, and Mennonites. By revealing a paranormal quest for unity, Erben presents a compelling counternarrative to monolingualism and Enlightenment empiricism in eighteenth-century The usa.

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