The composition of the astronomical-and-astrological treatise known as the Libro de la ochava esfera involved several translators and compilers. They produced oral and written versions of aṣ-Ṣufī’s Book of the Figures of the Fixed Stars (itself based on a translation of Ptolemy’s star-catalog), and they consulted previous Arabic and Latin versions of these works. This article follows the traces that the collaborative-translation process left in the treatise’s many multilingual phrases, which combine alternative names for the constellations in Castilian, Latin, Arabic, and Greek. It argues that this translation practice worked as a conceptual model for the type of knowledge(s) ( saberes ) the treatise offered. The analysis and argument are inscribed in a discussion of the paradoxical place that the Libro de la ochava esfera occupies in the history of Spanish literature, and they offer a formal ground for challenging dominant conceptualizations of textual production and interpretation, which are based on a monolingual model.
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