The VIR MAXIMUS project aimed to trace the differences in the notion of the qualities requested for an active member of the society (political leader, influential intellectual, etc.) through European languages and cultures, on the basis of the analysis of a corpus of translations of Baltasar Gracián’s “Oráculo manual” (1647).
In his work, B. Gracián establishes a set of moral and intellectual qualities that should be developed by those who aspire for a leading role in the society. His work was spread all around the world through translation : at the end of the project, more than 200 translations were detected. But the ways of reading Gracián’s advice vary greatly between countries and historical periods. Tracing these differences permits to gain insight into the dynamics of the ‘soft’ policy transfer between European countries.
By the end of the project, a multilingual lexicon of the differences between the first European translations of Gracián’s “Oráculo” was published. This Lexicon shows the ways in which the intellectual, moral and psychological qualities of an actor of the public life were translated, and can be consulted in the user-friendly form on the project’s web site. The lexicon demonstrates, for example, that the German “Sinn”, the English “discerning”, the Russian “разум” were chosen as analogous to the Spanish “gusto”, one of the crucial qualities of Gracián’s ‘maximum man’, while it’s translated as “goût” into French; and thus, only French culture had sufficient basis for the extension of a gastronomic term to the intellectual and moral domain.
A series of instruments for the further analysis of the issue were elaborated during the project and published on in open access.
Extended to other influential European political, moral-political and political-philosophical treaties that received a wide reception through translation throughout the world, the database can serve as a tool for the facilitation of intercultural communication and of different forms of soft policy transfer.
