The Medieval Translator

Traditionally attributed to King Solomon and defined by Rabbi Aqiva as the Holy of Holies among the sacred Scriptures the Song of Songs is one of the most fascinating and controversial biblical books. Celebrated as a key to the supreme mystery of the union between God and the faithful this ambivalent book which combined a sensual celebration of love with a well-established tradition of allegorical interpretation was a text crucial to both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and held a particular appeal for poets. Indeed the Song of Songs played a significant role in the development of European poetry from its very beginning creating an exceptional convergence of sacred and secular languages and horizons of meaning.

Written by a group of distinguished international scholars this volume explores the complex and multifaceted processes through which the Song of Songs entered influenced and interacted with medieval and Renaissance European poetry (twelfth to seventeenth centuries). Focusing on both individual authors – including Peter Riga Dante Alighieri Richard Rolle and George Herbert – and particularly relevant poetic traditions – including Hebrew liturgical poetry and the Tristan and Ysolt tradition Middle English and Petrarchan lyric Renaissance verse versions and seventeenth-century musical compositions dissident and prophetic texts – the volume unveils the relevant role played by the biblical book in the development of European poetry thought and spirituality highlighting its ability to contribute to different poetic genres and give voice to a variety of religious political philosophical and artistic intentions.

The papers gathered in this volume focus on ‘Medieval Translations and their Readership’ the special strand of the 11th Cardiff Conference on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages. The volume discusses the role of the reader in the process of translation communities of readers and their active participation in translators’ choices and the translation as a result of a dialogue between author text and its reader.

Translations of works of theology and religious education the focus of most of the contributions to this volume constitute excellent material for research into medieval lay audiences. Vernacular religious educational texts from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century show a great deal of conformity. Individual authors resorted to similar strategies and techniques to meet any translation challenges to fulfil educational aims or to relate to their readers and to accommodate their expectations. Simultaneously the readers played a crucial role as they shaped the production of texts in many ways.

Research into Middle English pastoral and devotional literature and the conditions of its production still dominates scholarly work in the field. Religious texts in vernaculars other than Middle English have so far received little attention. This volume tries to tackle this lacuna by offering a careful comparative analysis of relevant vernacular texts across Europe including Slavonic works using historiographical philological and linguistic methods as well as literary scholarly approaches.

The sixteen chapters are organized in three sections. The first one ‘Authors and Readers’ brings together articles examining the idea of a model reader as expressed in translations of biblical texts and texts of religious instruction. The contributions in the second section on the ‘Dissimination of Knowledge’ focus on how translators addressed readers how people read and how they used the manuscripts and printed books made for them. The target audience or model reader of the first section is here put into perspective with the help of discussions of reading practices. The last section ‘Religious Education in Transition’ comprises contributions which focus on textual material from the period when printed books gradually changed the relationship between languages texts authors and readers.

In the first two decades of the fifteenth century the Hussite religious reform movement emerged in Bohemia; it used one of the realm's vernacular languages Czech both to disseminate its reform ideas and to establish strong foundations for the reform. The vernacular became a significant strategy for identification capable of binding together disconnected religious ethnic political and regional identities and generating a very potent aggregate of identifications. This volume considers material from the second half of the fourteenth century to the first half of the sixteenth beginning with the so-called Hussite ‘forerunners’ and ending with the early German reformation. Individual essays discuss the various functions of the vernaculars in different text types social situations and religious and political contexts. Together they correct former assumptions about the topic and provide a basis for further study of Hussite vernacular theology and contribute to the transformation of scholarly narratives about the Hussite movement by including works of vernacular religious education among the most important source material. It offers a basis for the comparative research on the role of the vernaculars in late medieval European religious reform movements.

Concentrating on the period of the emergence of the vernaculars in the context of religious text production in Central and Eastern Central Europe from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries the individual studies in this volume present material so far neglected by nationally defined historiographies and literary studies. The process of vernacularization created a new sociolinguistic field for the negotiation of social order through the choice of texts and topics. This volume seeks to answer the questions of whether why and how distinctive new communicative literary and political cultures developed after the vernacular languages had acquired ever higher levels of literacy and education. The volume fills a gap in contemporary scholarship on the role of the vernaculars and vernacular literatures in European medieval societies and with the focus on Eastern European regions it breaks new ground in regard to questions that have so far only been explored on the basis of material from Europe’s ‘West’.

Translation studies centering on medieval texts have prompted new ways to look at the texts themselves but also at the exchange and transmission of culture in the European Middle Ages inside and outside Europe. The present volume reflects in the range and scope of its essays the itinerant nature of the Medieval Translator Conference at the same time inviting readers to reflect on the geography of medieval translation. By dividing the essays presented here into four groups the volume highlights lines of communication and shifts in areas of interest connecting the migrating nature of the translated texts to the cultural political and linguistic factors underlying the translation process. Translation was in each case under discussion the result or the by-product of a transnational movement that prompted the circulation of ideas and texts within religious and/or political discussion and exchange.

Thus the volume opens with a group of contributions discussing the cultural exchange between Western Europe and the Middle East identifying the pivotal role of Church councils aristocratic courts and monasteries in the production of translation. The following section concentrates on the literary exchanges between three close geographical and cultural areas today identifiable with France Italy and England allowing us to re-think traditional hypotheses on sites of literary production and to reflect on the triangulation of language and manuscript exchange. From this triangulation the book moves into a closer discussion of translations produced in England showing in the variety and chronological span covered by the contributions the development of a rich cultural tradition in constant dialogue with Latin as well as contemporary vernaculars. The final essays offer a liminal view considering texts translated into non-literary forms or the role played by the onset of printing in the dissemination of translation thus highlighting the continuity and closeness of medieval translation with the Renaissance.

Alessandra Petrina is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Università degli Studi di Padova Italy. She has published extensively on late-medieval and Renaissance literature and intellectual history as well as on modern children’s literature and edited a number of volumes on early modern English culture.

The contributions to this volume are organised in a way that bear out the vitality of translation activity in the medieval period and the resourcefulness of modern scholarship in addressing the phenomenon of translation at large. No other period relies so heavily on this literary process to construct its cultural identity. Translations from Latin into the vernacular or from one vernacular into another or even from a vernacular into the Latin language are just a few of the many forms medieval translation can take. The codification of the translation process as appropriation transformation or accommodation does not sufficiently emphasize the overarching curiosity and interest that motivates any translation activity. Rather preceding the stages of appropriation and re-interpretation it is positive inquisitiveness and openness towards linguistic and cultural difference that generate the production of a new text and the transference of culture from one sphere to another. It is that positive inquisitiveness which this volume emphasizes.

The volume initially addresses the way in which translators dealt with texts from the early medieval period. It then considers the phenomenon of bilingualism and the privileged relationship that England held with the continent especially the Italian and French literary traditions. The third part of this volume tackles the problem of fifteenth-century religious translation in England and to a lesser extent France and complicates it by showing its inevitable political implications. Understood more particularly as an act of cultural transfer translation activity can also be considered beyond the linguistic process. The fourth part of the volume deals with several instances of translations from one genre into another and from one media into another. The contributions also point to new ways of considering the literary process of translation and by praising diversity and difference they suggest a less traumatic way of reading Babel than is usually implied.

Au cœur de toute activité de traduction le concept de déplacement permet de rendre compte des multiples états successifs d’un même texte et d’en interpréter les variations. Toute traduction est en effet une translation c’est-à-dire un changement d’environnement que ce dernier soit national social politique historique linguistique ou ecclésial. Les textes examinés ici témoignent chacun à sa manière des transformations qu’ils ont subies lorsque changeant de langue de style ou d’époque ils ont changé de destinataires. La dynamique qui les traverse se nourrit de subtils côtoiements: un désir légitime de divertir peut fort bien s’accommoder d’une intention didactique; un recueil de miracles locaux peut attirer des pèlerins contribuant ainsi à la vie économique d’un monastère; un texte et ses traductions peuvent devenir l’objet d’utilisations polémiques; se constituer en humaniste une bibliothèque de traductions peut aussi servir un dessein politique.

Par ailleurs les transpositions successives et leurs gloses comme en musique entraînent des changements de tonalité. Ce ‘surplus’ de sens qu’encourage Marie de France pourra cependant se heurter à des résistances: comment par exemple préserver d’une langue à l’autre toutes les harmoniques que libère un enchaînement de jeux de mots mystiques? Ainsi l’inévitable compromis qui s’imposera au traducteur sera souvent le choix d’un enrichissement doublé d’une déperdition.

Ce volume présente une sélection des communications entendues lors du septième colloque international consacré à la théorie et la pratique de la traduction des textes au Moyen Age qui s’est tenu à l’Université de Paris III — Sorbonne Nouvelle en juillet 2004. La période couverte par ces textes et leurs traductions s’étend de l’Antiquité jusqu’à nos jours. Ce sont au total vingt-huit études qui sont ici proposées. La richesse des domaines abordés la haute technicité des analyses de même que la place faite aux questionnements de la traductologie moderne illustrent la remarquable vitalité des études actuelles relatives aux multiples aspects de la traduction des textes médiévaux.

Complexité et fascination: deux mots qui reviennent souvent à l’esprit au contact des textes médiévaux au point qu’ils pourraient servir à caractériser la nature des rapports qui unissent ces textes à leurs traducteurs. Dans leur diversité les communications entendues à Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle illustrent chacune à sa manière de nombreux aspects de cette complexité qu’il s’agisse des sujets traités ou des problèmes techniques soulevés. Le rapport au temps qu’impose le texte médiéval se double d’un rapport à la distance car la différence culturelle se présente au traducteur comme un éloignement ce qui dans le travail de rapprochement que constitue alors la traduction introduit la notion d’interprétation. A son tour cette interprétation avec ses degrés est étroitement dépendante des objectifs pédagogiques culturels politiques ou religieux que s’est fixés le traducteur comme cela apparaîtra clairement à la lecture d’un certain nombre de ces communications. Plusieurs études de ce recueil confirment également que la traduction loin d’être un travail de solitaire est avant tout un acte social une activité de mise en relations. C’est cette patiente recherche d’adaptation à des publics différents en fonction d’époques et de goûts différents accompagnée de choix tour à tour réjouissants et frustrants qui constitue le travail de tout traducteur qu’il appartienne au Moyen Âge ou au monde moderne. C’est aussi cette richesse venue du passé mais toujours actuelle et cette recherche sans cesse reprise d’un équilibre toujours instable qui font que la traduction dans sa pratique comme dans sa théorie exerce sur tant d’esprits une réelle fascination.

Most of the papers in this volume consider translation in medieval England (in both Old and Middle English and Anglo-Norman) though translations into other medieval vernaculars are also represented (Icelandic Dutch German) as is translation of classical Greek into Latin. Most of the translations are anonymous though major translators are also included: Cicero King Alfred Robert Grosseteste Jean de Meun Chaucer. Several papers consider the troubled times during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in England when a number of major translation projects were undertaken; others explore the place of translation in daily life (pro forma letters gynaecological treatises forged documents in support of a local shrine texts rewritten so as to update legal references in them); another considers the importance of paper for the rapid dissemination of translated texts. Also featured prominently is the translation of different sorts of religious texts originally variously in monastic eremitical and mendicant milieux and including the 'translations' for their readers of divine messages received by female visionaries. The more generous understanding of the term indicated by the use of quotation marks for these latter is also reflected in a paper considering representations of heaven and hell in visual arts. All the contributions share an awareness of translation as culturally specific - as originating in and addressing specific contexts: of; for example; nationality politics class and gender. Above all translation as a new thing; with a life of its own may provide a fuller as well as a different realisation of what was only partly present in its original.