Translation & vernacularity
More general subjects:
Nouvelles traductions et réceptions indirectes de la Grèce ancienne. Tome 2 : Traductions de traductions de textes grecs et translatio studii
L’essor des traductions directes du grec au français commence dans les années 1550. Du début du XIVe siècle jusqu’au milieu du XVIe siècle les auteurs-traducteurs en langue française qui représentent la Grèce ancienne n’ont sauf exception aucune connaissance directe des œuvres grecques. Les savoirs sur la Grèce qu’ils transmettent et réinventent sont médiatisés par des filtres divers. Leur réception est indirecte elle prend appui sur des œuvres antérieures textuelles et iconographiques dont les représentations de la Grèce ancienne sont déjà le fruit d’une ou de plusieurs réceptions.Les œuvres latines qu’ils traduisent et adaptentsont pour une part des œuvres antiques et médiévales qui ne sont pas des traductions et pour une part des traductions ou adaptations d’œuvres grecques avec parfois plusieurs transferts linguistiques à partir du grec. Elles sont très diverses : des textes antiques jusqu’aux traductions humanistes latines d’œuvres grecques réalisées en Italie et aux Pays-Bas en passant par des œuvres latines médiévales originales des traductions latines du français et des traductions arabo-latines et arabo-hispano-latines.
Les auteurs-traducteurs en langue française héritent ainsi de réceptions antérieures diverses qu’ils s’approprient et transforment poursuivant le processus d’invention de représentations de la Grèce ancienne. Comme les manuscrits et les imprimés de leurs nouvelles traductions sont souvent très illustrés les artistes offrent dans le même temps des traductions visuelles qui elles aussi s’appuient sur des sources diverses et des réceptions antérieures et donnent à voir de nouvelles images de la Grèce ancienne. La question de la réception de l’Antiquité grecque sera donc explorée par une entrée différente de celle qui a été adoptée jusqu’à présent et qui a consisté en l’étude de la transmission et de la traduction directes des œuvres grecques. Le présent volume se focalise sur les traductions au second degré de textes grecs.
A Latin-Polish Sermon Collection and the Emergence of Vernacularisation
This monograph offers an analysis of the so-called Kazania augustiańskie (‘The Augustinian sermons’) a unique manuscript which represents a very early phase in the vernacularisation of medieval Polish textual culture when vernacular or bilingual texts started to manifest their independent development. The relationships between Latin and the Polish vernacular in this text surviving in a contemporary manuscript sheds light on the ways in which Latin determined the development of written Polish in the textual genre of the sermon. The detailed and multifaceted analysis of the linguistic features of the Kazania augustiańskie contributes to the continuing discussion in medieval studies on the emergence of the earliest texts in the vernacular languages and on the preconditions and dynamics of vernacularisation.
At a first glance this book may appear to be the tale of a single manuscript told solely from the point of view of a historian of language. However it also explores both the birth of a particular medieval text and more generally the growing ability to compose vernacular texts. This capacity which developed over the medieval period was based on Latin models; over the centuries it contributed to vernacular texts becoming a fundamental component of European culture.
Don Quichotte en ses métamorphoses. Sur les traces des traducteurs anglais et français du « long dix-huitième siècle » *
Metamorphoses
Tracing the Translator in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1660–1830
Translators are crucial to the constitution dissemination and adaptation of literatures cultures and ideas. However their presence in the historical record often proves difficult to recognise or retrace. This volume places front and centre this key problem for historians of translation as well as for historians of literature culture and ideas. It sheds new light on the much-debated (in)visibility of historical translators by investigating in what contexts and through what strategies translators sought to render themselves either (in)visible and how critics and scholars can now trace these efforts. When and how does the visible metamorphose into the invisible and vice versa?
The volume focuses on the long eighteenth century a period which witnesses a metamorphosis in literature and culture that tells powerfully on translators. From relatively visible cultural actors they are reduced to enforced invisibility as cultural products stabilised their meanings around singular authors. Tracing this shift across a swathe of products and practices the book conducts its investigations across a range of genres ranging from radical politics over philosophy to opera; taking in languages and cultures across Western Europe.
Chapters employ case studies to develop methodological and theoretical models that will empower scholars of translation history to recover translators both from the direct evidence of their work and from the networks and tools that supported them.
‘Provided With Remarks and Corrections’. The Translator in Their Annotations in the Late Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic *
Linguistic Fragmentation and Cultural Inclusion in the Middle Ages
Translation, Plurilingualism, Multilingualism
Linguistic fragmentation contains the risk of cultural separation while the concept of inclusion implies the recognition of the difference of the Other which must be recognised in its specificity to develop a process of inclusion. One of the main means of overcoming the dangers hidden in linguistic fragmentation is unquestionably plurilingualism and relatedly translation. Translation enables the transmission of content from one linguistic-cultural system to another. Multilingualism is not just a peculiarity of the contemporary age it is a fundamental phenomenon of the Middle Ages. The conceptual relationship between linguistic fragmentation and cultural inclusion and the inter-relationships of these two apparently opposing poles with the communicative tool of translation requires some reflection within the broader framework of translation studies in the Middle Ages. This collection of essays examines the seemingly paradoxical concept of linguistic fragmentation as an instrument of cultural inclusion thanks to the practice of translation.
The essays explain the relationship through translations between many medieval languages and texts from Icelandic to Italian from English to French and more. They examine vernacular circulation of religious texts (translation of the Bible of hagiographic or homiletic texts etc.); circulation thanks to translation of literary texts (e.g. the translation of epic-chivalric cycles); translation from a koine language to another language and vice versa; and the relationship between the choice of the target language and the socio-cultural context.
Writing Distant Travels and Linguistic Otherness in Early Modern England (c. 1550–1660)
As Britain’s global interests expanded from the mid-sixteenth century geographic mobility encouraged many forms of multilingual practices in English writings. Translations lexical borrowings and records of exchanges between travellers and far-off lands and peoples diversely registered communicated engaged and politicised encounters with alterity. Meanwhile earlier continental European translations also influenced and complicated the reception of distant otherness entailing questions of linguistic hybridity or pluralism.
This volume explores some of the practices and strategies underpinning polyglot encounters in travel accounts produced translated or read in England as well as in artistic and educational materials inflected by those travels. Drawing on linguistic lexicographic literary and historical methodologies the twelve chapters in this volume collectively look into the contexts and significances of textual contact zones. Particular attention is paid to uses of multilingualism in processes of identity construction defining and promoting national or imperial agendas appropriating and assimilating foreign linguistic capital or meeting resistance and limits from linguistic and cultural otherness refusing to lend itself to a subjected or go-between status. Treating of indigenous languages newly anglicized words and new artistic and instructional materials the volume makes the case for the vibrancy and influence of early modern English engagements with polyglossia and the need for multiple scales of approach to – and interdisciplinary perspectives on – the subject.
Pseudo-Thomas Gallus, Three Writings on Mystical Theology
This volume contains a newly-edited exposition on the Mystical Theology contained in MS UV6 of the Biblioteca degli Intronati in Siena. The MS attributes the work to the abbot of Vercelli (Thomas Gallus) but this is shown to be a false attribution. A commentary on the Canticle of Canticles has also been attributed to Thomas Gallus but argued against by J. Barbet in Brepols' SRSA volume 10 (2005). This commentary is reprinted and accompanied with the first ever English translation. A treatise on the Seven Steps to Contemplation in Latin with an English translation is the third text. An introductory critical study evaluates all three works and argues that they all belong to the same author pseudo-Thomas Gallus.
‘The Gods Have Faces’
The Biblical Epigrams and Short Poems of Hildebert of Lavardin
Hildebert of Lavardin is one of the great poets of the Middle Ages praised for his elegant style by his contemporaries and by modern scholars alike. He occupies a seminal position in the revival of learning in the late Middle Ages known as the Twelfth Century Renaissance and his mastery of classical Latin style was so refined that some of his works were long considered products of Antiquity. This collection of Hildebert's biblical epigrams and short poems introduces English-speaking readers to the best works of this neglected poet and places them in the context of his life and literary career. The translations attempt to bring the reader as close as possible to experiencing these poems in their original Latin while still being readable and comprehensible facilitated by notes and commentary. Hildebert's poetry is sometimes challenging dense and complicated yet his rhetoric is often beautiful even magnificent.