ABSTRACT
In the first half of the fourteenth century, an anonymous translator in Venice completed the manuscript of an astonishing, opulent translation of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani into the Venetian vernacular. The Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis is an Irish, monastic odyssey written not later than the tenth century. The anonymous author of the Navigatio was thus a translator of geographies, a translator across world constructions: he translated the Mediterranean, land-based geopoetics of the peregrinatio into the oceanic, aqueous, mostly insular geopoetics of the immrama. The Navigatio performs the far northwest of Europe, and its seas and islands as an accredited Christian topography. At the culmination of the Navigatio, the finding of the Earthly Paradise, the Venetian translation or, as we formulated it above, the Venetian counter-translation offers something surprising: a very extensive interpolation, more prominent than other additions we know from the medieval praxis of translation. Furthermore, the Venetian translation does not simply mirror the situational context from which it hails.
