Paper short abstract:

This paper detects the process of 'cultural translation' applied by Roberto Nobili SJ (1577-1656) in the Ñāṉa Upadēsam, his magnum opus, in order to transfer Catholic concepts into the Tamil language.

Paper long abstract:

During his fifty years of missionary life (1605-1656), Nobili elaborated a method to translate and teach Catholic doctrine to the Madurai Tamil community. This effort led to the Ñāṉa Upadēsam, Nobili's last work: here the author introduced a Christian Tamil lexicon, coined technical religious vocabularies and accurately selected and accommodated religious concepts by intertwining the Biblical canon with the Sanskrit and Tamil literatures. In the encounter between Jesuits and Tamil Nāyakas, the process of translation consisted in a transfer of concepts, practices, habits, customs and social characters for a 'foreign' audience; an act of bringing a cultural message from a source-context into a target-context. The translation of textual narratives, on the linguistic as well as on the morphological aspects, is a complex negotiation of both linguistic and cultural differences. The missionary-translator challenged the boundaries of the sayable, where the 'ineffable' semantical relations require an effort to establish a communication of ideas, doctrines and meanings. The Ñāṉa Upadēsam is not a literal translation, as Nobili did not translate Catholic prayers, the Decalogue, the definitions of the Sacraments, but rather he transferred the Biblical cosmogony, the Christian parables and narrations, the Catholic social precepts as well as special word-categories (such as God, Heaven, Resurrection) into a Tamil-target. My analysis will focus on the connection, in terms of resemblances and\or distances, between Nobili's Ñāṉa Upadēsam and previous Jesuit works such as Henrique Henriques and Thomas Stephens' texts.