Translating Aries

Abstract: This article explores how the concept of translation can illumine the treatment of the constellation Aries in the Aratean tradition from Aratus in the third century BCE to the Aries entries in three medieval manuscripts, the famous Basel, Harley, and Madrid Arateas . The main senses of translation I deploy are the movements of forms and bodies covered by the English "transfer," the literal reflex of Latin transferre . Also included are translation as transformation or metamorphosis (as in stellification), and as transposition across different media (such as ekphrasis) or belief systems (as in the medieval practice of moralization), as well as the now more current meaning of translating one text into another (of which commentary is a particularly medieval, often intralingual form). These extended instances of translation enable me to trace how features of the constellation appear and disappear across the Latin verse Arateas , their scholia, their medieval moralizations, and the medieval astronomy manuscripts in which those elements are compiled together with images. The article shows how these incremental attempts to translate Aries into ever more visible and memorable forms both serve the aims of astronomers and defeat them, since they risk making the actual stars in the sky unrecognizable and unlocatable.