Following the Science: Nothing and the Translation of the East into Western Thought

Toward the end of the novel that bears his name, Don Quixote observes that reading a translation “is like viewing Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although you see the pictures, they are covered with threads which obscure them."  For Don Quixote, translation obscures as much as it illuminates.  We see this same process of illumination through obfuscation or obfuscation through illumination in the translation or movement of ideas across borders, across languages, and across time.  

In this webinar, we will consider the history of nothing, an idea born in the East, whose translation into Europe changed Western thought.  When merchants from Muslim lands introduced nothing in the form of zero into Christian Europe in the 13^th century, they brought with them an Eastern concept that would first undermine the foundation of Western medieval thought and then take its place in the very heart of the modern intellectual movements to follow.  In a COVID moment when we are exhorted to “follow the science,” we should remember that what we call “science” is a modern form of knowing, one that carries within it the traces of the nothings that sometimes obscure as much as they reveal.

Grace Burton, Associate Professor, Spanish (Department of World Languages and Literatures) and Theater Department affiliated faculty, is a student of Early Modern Spanish theater, including the works of Tirso de Molina, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and Miguel de Cervantes. Her work focuses on the intersection of painting, politics, and theater, and on Early Modern conceptions of nothing, be that nothing physical, mathematical, philosophical, or theatrical.