Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory [1 ed.] 9781843843290, 1843843293

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Cover image: Tower of Babel. Manuscript of Ovide moralisé (first quarter of fourteenth century). Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS O.4 (1044), fol. 23r. Collections de la Bibliothèque municipale de Rouen. Photographie Thierry Ascencio-Parvy.

RETHINKING

Emma Campbell is Associate Professor in French at the University of Warwick; Robert Mills is Lecturer in History of Art at University College London.

Medieval Translation

Medieval notions of translatio raise issues that have since been debated in contemporary translation studies concerning the translator’s role as interpreter or author; the ability of translation to reinforce or unsettle linguistic or political dominance; and translation’s capacity for establishing cultural contact, or participating in cultural appropriation or effacement. This collection puts these ethical and political issues centre stage, asking whether questions currently being posed by theorists of translation need rethinking or revising when brought into dialogue with medieval examples. Contributors explore translation - as a practice, a necessity, an impossibility and a multi-media form - through multiple perspectives on language, theory, dissemination and cultural transmission. Exploring texts, authors, languages and genres not often brought together in a single volume, individual essays focus on topics such as the politics of multilingualism, the role of translation in conflict situations, the translator’s invisibility, hospitality, untranslatability and the limits of translation as a category.

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Campbell and Mills

“Engaging and informative to read, challenging in its assertions, and provocative in the best way, inviting the reader to sift, correlate and reflect on the broader applicability of points made in reference to a specific text or exchange.”  Professor Carolyne P. Collette, Mount Holyoke College.

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Rethinking Medieval Translation Ethics, Politics, Theory

Rethinking Medieval Translation Ethics, Politics, Theory Edited by

Emma Campbell and Robert Mills

D. S. BREWER

©  Contributors 2012 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2012 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978–1–84384–329–0 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

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Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

List of Contributors

ix

Acknowledgements xii Introduction: Rethinking Medieval Translation

Emma Campbell and Robert Mills

  1  On Not Knowing Greek: Leonzio Pilatus’s Rendition of the Iliad and the Translatio of Mediterranean Identities

1

21

Marilynn Desmond

  2  Translation and Transformation in the Ovide moralisé 41

Miranda Griffin

  3  Translating Lucretia: Word, Image and ‘Ethical Non-Indifference’ in Simon de Hesdin’s Translation of Valerius Maximus’s Facta et dicta memorabilia

Catherine Léglu

  4  Translating Catharsis: Aristotle and Averroës, the Scholastics and the Basochiens

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84

Noah D. Guynn

  5  The Ethics of Translatio in Rutebeuf ’s Miracle de Théophile 107

Emma Campbell

vi contents   6  Invisible Translation, Language Difference and the Scandal of Becket’s Mother

125

Robert Mills

  7  Medieval Fixers: Politics of Interpreting in Western Historiography 147

Zrinka Stahuljak

  8  The Task of the Dérimeur: Benjamin and Translation into Prose in Fifteenth-Century French Literature

Jane Gilbert

  9  The Translator as Interpretant: Passing in/on the Work of Ramon Llull

184

William Burgwinkle

10  Rough Translation: Charles d’Orléans, Lydgate and Hoccleve

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204

Ardis Butterfield

11  Bueve d’Hantone/Bovo d’Antona: Exile, Translation and the History of the Chanson de geste 226

Luke Sunderland

  Untranslatable: A Response

243

Simon Gaunt

Bibliography 257 Index 285

List of Illustrations

Figure 3.1. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), The Death of Lucretia (c. 1524). Oil on panel. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. © Bridgeman Art Library

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Figure 3.2. Suicide of Lucretia. Manuscript of Simon de Hesdin and Nicolas de Gonesse, Faits et dits mémorables (c. 1450–75). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 287, fol. 110v. © Bibliothèque nationale de France

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Figure 3.3. Suicide of Lucretia. Laurent de Premierfait’s translation of Boccaccio, De casibus (Lyon, c. 1435–40). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 229, fol. 91r. © Bibliothèque nationale de France 75 Figure 3.4. Sextus Tarquinius and Lucretia; suicide of Lucretia. Manuscript of Simon de Hesdin and Nicolas de Gonesse, Faits et dits mémorables (early fifteenth century). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 282, fol. 242r. © Bibliothèque nationale de France 76 Figure 3.5. Suicide of Lucretia; expulsion of the Tarquins; Publicola. Manuscript of Simon de Hesdin and Nicolas de Gonesse, Faits et dits mémorables (Paris, c. 1450–75). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 41, fol. 198r. © Bibliothèque nationale de France

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Figure 3.6. Suicide of Lucretia. Manuscript of Simon de Hesdin and Nicolas de Gonesse, Faits et dits mémorables (Bruges, 1479). London, British Library, Royal 18.E.IV, fol. 71r. © British Library Board 79

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list of illustrations

Figure 6.1. The emir’s daughter reaches London and is recognized by Gilbert’s servant Richard. Queen Mary Psalter (early fourteenth century). London, British Library, Royal 2.B.VII, fol. 288v. © British Library Board

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Figure 6.2. Baptism of emir’s daughter by bishops. Queen Mary Psalter (early fourteenth century). London, British Library, Royal 2.B.VII, 140 fol. 289r. © British Library Board Figure 6.3. Consecration of Thomas Becket by bishops. Queen Mary Psalter (early fourteenth century). London, British Library, Royal 2.B.VII, fol. 291r. © British Library Board

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Figure 6.4. Gilbert Becket embraces the emir’s daughter. North window, St Michael le Belfrey, York (early sixteenth century). Photo © 142 Emma Campbell Figure 9.1. Conversion and pilgrimage of Ramon Llull. Thomas Le Myésier with Ramon Llull, Breviculum (1321–36). Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St Peter, perg. 92, fol. 1v. © Badische Landesbibliothek 193 Figure 9.2. Ramon Llull’s dispute with his Arabic-speaking tutor. Thomas Le Myésier with Ramon Llull, Breviculum (1321–36). Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St Peter, perg. 92, fol. 3v. © Badische Landesbibliothek

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Figure 9.3. The army of Aristotle. Thomas Le Myésier with Ramon Llull, Breviculum (1321–36). Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, 196 St Peter, perg. 92, fol. 6v. © Badische Landesbibliothek Figure 9.4. Three trumpeters leading the army of Ramon Llull. Thomas Le Myésier with Ramon Llull, Breviculum (1321–36). Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St Peter, perg. 92, fol. 7r. © Badische Landesbibliothek

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Figure 9.5. Ramon Llull crosses the Mediterranean to north Africa and is imprisoned for preaching to Muslims. Thomas Le Myésier with Ramon Llull, Breviculum (1321–36). Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St Peter, perg. 92, fol. 10r. © Badische Landes­ bibliothek 198 Figure 9.6. Ramon Llull meets Thomas Le Myésier in Paris. Thomas Le Myésier with Ramon Llull, Breviculum (1321–36). Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St Peter, perg. 92, fol. 11v. © Badische Landesbibliothek 200

List of Contributors

William Burgwinkle is Professor of Medieval French and Occitan at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Author of Love for Sale: Materialist Readings of the Troubadour Razo Corpus (1990), Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (2004), and (with Cary Howie) Sanctity and Pornography: On the Verge (2010) and co-editor of The Cambridge History of French Literature (2011), he is currently working on the AHRC-funded research project Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France. Ardis Butterfield, until recently Professor of English at University College London, is taking up a chair at Yale University in 2012. She is the author of Poetry and Music in Medieval France from Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (2002), editor of Chaucer and the City (2006) and, most recently, author of The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (2009). Her current projects include a new Norton Edition of Medieval English Lyrics; a book on lyrics and lyric form in the European Middle Ages supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship; and a biography, Chaucer: A London Life. Emma Campbell is Associate Professor in French at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography (2008) and co-editor of Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality and Sight in Medieval Text and Image (2004). Her next project, which is supported by an AHRC fellowship, explores the relationship between translation and the untranslatable in medieval francophone texts and manuscripts. Marilynn Desmond is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University (State University of New York). She

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list of contributors

is the author of Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (1994), Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence (2006) and (with Pamela Sheingorn) Myth, Montage and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine De Pizan’s Othea (2003), and editor of Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference (1998). Simon Gaunt is Professor of French Language and Literature at King’s College London. His publications include Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Literature: Martyrs to Love (2006) and (with Sarah Kay) The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (2008). He is currently completing a book on Marco Polo’s Le devisement du monde, as well as working on the AHRC-funded research project Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France. Jane Gilbert is Senior Lecturer in French in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London. She has published on Old French and Middle English literature both separately and comparatively, including a recent monograph, Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature (2011). She is currently working on the AHRC-funded research project Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France. Miranda Griffin is a Fellow and College Lecturer in French at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Object and the Cause in the Vulgate Cycle (2005); her next book, provisionally entitled Transforming Tales, is on transformation and narrative in medieval French literature. Noah D. Guynn is Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Davis. Author of Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages (2007) and co-editor (with Zrinka Stahuljak) of Violence and the Writing of History in the Medieval Francophone World (2013), he is preparing a monograph entitled The Many Faces of Farce: Ethics, Politics, and Urban Culture in Medieval and Early Modern France. Catherine Léglu is Professor of Medieval French and Occitan Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of Multilingualism and Mother Tongue in Late Medieval French, Occitan and Catalan Narratives (2010) and Between Sequence and Sirventes: Aspects of Parody in Troubadour Lyric (2000). She is co-editor of The Erotics of Consolation in Medieval Literature (2008) and The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine (2005). Her current research is on late medieval translations of Latin didactic texts. Robert Mills was Senior Lecturer in English at King’s College London, before joining the History of Art Department at University College London in 2012. Author of Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (2005), co-editor of The Monstrous Middle Ages (2003) and Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality and Sight in Medieval Text and Image



list of contributors

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(2004), Mills has recently completed a book on medieval sodomy, vision and cultural transmission. Zrinka Stahuljak is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Bloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages (2005) and Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation (2012), co-author of Thinking through Chrétien de Troyes (2011), and co-editor of Minima Memoria: Essays in the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard (2007) and Violence and the Writing of History in the Medieval Francophone World (2013). Luke Sunderland is Lecturer in French at Durham University. Author of Old French Narrative Cycles: Heroism between Ethics and Morality (2010), he is working on a monograph about royal power and resistance in medieval literature and thought.

Acknowledgements

This volume has grown out of a number of more or less formal conversations with colleagues and friends, including a panel on medieval translatio at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in Long Beach, California, in April 2008 and a workshop on the ethics of medieval translation at King’s College London in July 2010. It has been a huge pleasure and privilege to work with the people who have contributed to these discussions and we would like warmly to thank everyone who has been involved. In addition to the contributors represented in the pages of this collection, special thanks go to Sarah Kay, Sharon Kinoshita, Cary Howie, Catherine Keen and Michael Johnson, all of whom helped the ideas for this volume to take shape. We should like to thank Caroline Palmer at Boydell & Brewer for her enthusiastic response to our original proposal and to the anonymous reader who made constructive suggestions as to possible changes. For material support, we are grateful to the English and French Departments at King’s College London, and the French Department at the University of Warwick, all of which helped us to get the London workshop that provided the impetus for this project off the ground.

Introduction Rethinking Medieval Translation

Emma Campbell and Robert Mills Why might medieval translation need rethinking? Why ethics, why politics? In one sense, after all, medievalists are arguably ahead of the game when it comes to exploring the political and ethical dimensions of translation. The Latin concept of translatio, which assumed from at least the ninth century an explicit cultural meaning through its association with the model of translatio studii et imperii, has long been linked with ideas of translation as an ideological as well as a more narrowly linguistic or textual phenomenon. French monarchs, following the death of Charlemagne, sought to assert claims to cultural and political superiority by proving their credentials as the inheritors of imperium (power or legitimacy) from Rome and of studium (knowledge or learning) from ancient Greece and Rome. Just as political power had transferred first from Greece to the Roman Empire, and then in turn to the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne, so now it was France which, according to this logic, inherited the supreme power of its imperial forebears; vernacular translations of classical texts likewise affirmed their ability to appropriate the power and cultural prestige of the ancients. Similarly, the translatio imperii topos was used to justify royal legitimacy in Norman England: the myth of Brutus, ‘first’ king of Britain and descendant of Rome’s Trojan founder Aeneas, secured for Anglo-Norman monarchs a line of descent that also extended back to ancient Greece and Rome. Paradoxically these genealogical impulses went hand in hand with an effort to displace those previous centres of power and knowledge: what purported to be an unbroken lineage was also characterized in practice by various modes of appropriation, substitution, rupture and reinvention. While

2 emma campbell and robert mills purportedly ensuring continuity and succession, in other words, translatio more often than not entailed contestation and suppression.1 In light of these tendencies, it is difficult to conceive of a theory of cultural transmission in the Middle Ages that is not, in some way, bound up with the senses of translatio associated with early articulations of empire and the ethical and political issues this inevitably raises. Medievalists are perhaps, for this reason, particularly attuned to matters that have since been debated in contemporary translation studies concerning the translator’s role as interpreter or author of the text; the ability of translation to reinforce or unsettle linguistic or political hegemony; and translation’s capacity for establishing cultural contact or participating in cultural appropriation or effacement. As will be discussed in the second section of this Introduction, there has already been productive interaction between medieval studies and translation studies in many of these key areas. One of the purposes of this volume is to further the dialogue between these fields and to suggest directions for future inquiry. Given the centrality of ethical and political issues both to the medieval notion of translatio and to recent discussions of translation in contemporary translation studies, this is one area where the interface between modern theory and research on medieval translation is – and might continue to be – enormously productive. This collection thus seeks to draw out and re-examine significant points of overlap in the ways these fields conceive of the politics and ethics of translation, as well as areas of productive tension and disagreement. The issues arising from the mutual implication of translation and empire have acquired a particular urgency in recent years with the emergence of postcolonial criticism as a distinct field of literary and cultural analysis. Jacques Derrida’s claim that all culture is at base colonial – that ‘toute culture s’institue par l’imposition unilatérale de quelque “politique” de la langue’ [every culture institutes itself through the unilateral imposition of some ‘politics’ of language] – directs attention to issues that were also being taken up by a number of other theorists, historians and critics in 1  For an overview of the concept of translatio, its deployment in the context of the translatio studii et imperii formula, and its uneasy relationship with genealogy, see Zrinka Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages: Translatio, Kinship, and Metaphor (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 142–89. Deployments of translatio as a metaphor in the Middle Ages nonetheless arguably contrast with the metaphorical applications of translation in contemporary global culture. For a comparative analysis of medieval and modern metaphors of translation, see Zrinka Stahuljak, ‘An Epistemology of Tension: Translation and Multiculturalism’, The Translator 10, no. 1 (2004): 33–57. Rita Copeland uses the translatio studii et imperii model as a framework for analysing vernacular translations of Latin texts, which are similarly implicated in a dynamic of rupture and displacement. See Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

introduction 3 the 1990s concerning identity, cultural mastery, linguistic agency and colonial power-play.2 Yet, as explored later in this Introduction, medievalists too have been interested in pursuing translation’s role as a site for the imposition of cultural dominance, whether in the context of the face-off between Latin and vernacular texts or, as in more recent scholarship, focusing on multilingual encounters in relation to the transmission of texts within and between vernacular languages. Furthermore it has been easier – at least in principle – for medievalists to avoid the evaluative tendencies that continue to condition some modern assumptions about translation. If, in contemporary publishing cultures, translations commonly get judged according to how ‘good’, ‘bad’ or – as Derrida puts it – ‘relevant’ they are, then this will not necessarily have the same meaning in manuscript cultures where evidence for assessing a translator’s performance is potentially less secure or stable.3 The evaluative approach assumes that translations can be traced back to an originary ‘source’, that translation is always a second-order phenomenon, and that its success as a transmitter of meaning resides in its ability to keep faith with the ‘original’ from which it derives. This hierarchy of original and copy, with its associated rhetoric of fidelity and error, equates language use explicitly with moral value: translations are assessed in terms of right and wrong. Additionally, it may sometimes be symptomatic of a problematically

2  Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 68; Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 39. Reflections on the politics of language in the 1990s, which take up or are inspired by the expanded senses of translation pursued by Derrida, include Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from ‘The Tempest’ to ‘Tarzan’ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991; repr. 1997); Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Ruth Evans, ‘Translating Past Cultures?’ in The Medieval Translator 4, ed. Roger Ellis and Ruth Evans (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994), 20–45, considers how the foregrounding of translation as a metaphor of cultural in-betweenness in postcolonial studies might provide a means reshaping medieval scholarship, even as studies such as Copeland’s were already placing the cultural dimensions of translation firmly on the agenda through discussion of the translatio studii et imperii model. 3  Sometimes, for example, we simply do not have access to the precise exemplars for a given translation or indeed to a ‘fair copy’ (to deploy a further layer of moralizing vocabulary) of the translated text itself, making judgements of a translation’s quality particularly challenging. On ideas of ‘relevance’ in translation, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’ in Quinzième Assises de la traduction littéraire (Arles 1998), ed. Claude Ernoult and Michel Volkovitch (Paris: Actes Sud, 1999), 21–48; Jacques Derrida, ‘What Is a “Relevant” Translation?’ trans. Lawrence Venuti, Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2001): 174–200.

4 emma campbell and robert mills gendered structure, whereby translation plays second, feminized fiddle to the originary, masculine authority of the text from which it derives.4 Influential critiques of the ideal of transparent, value-free translation in post-medieval contexts include Lawrence Venuti’s analysis of what he terms the translator’s ‘invisibility’ in commercial English-language publishing in Britain and America. As well as exploring the stigmatization of translation in specific situations, Venuti has sought more generally to expound an ethics of translation which shifts attention from ideals such as fluency and transferability (which he suggests continue to inflect translation theory conceived in an empirical or scientific mode) to issues of responsibility and responsiveness to the other.5 One of the major issues taken up in the present volume, which finds inspiration in the work of theorists such as Venuti and Derrida, concerns translation’s ability to negotiate cultural and linguistic difference. For Venuti, modern literary translation is more often than not a fundamentally ethnocentric practice, heavily invested in processes of domestication and assimilation. Against this assimilationist ethos he promotes what he terms ‘minoritizing translation’, the value of which resides in expressly alerting readers to the domestication process through which a text’s ‘foreignness’ is inevitably filtered; translators working within this alternative model are motivated by the ethical and political goal of building ‘a community with foreign cultures, to share an understanding with and of them and to collaborate on projects founded on that understanding’.6 This rhetoric of domestic and foreign, community and understanding, draws in turn on Antoine Berman’s suggestion that the properly ethical aim of translation is to ‘recevoir l’Autre en tant qu’Autre’ [receive the Foreign as Foreign]; while no translator can escape what Berman describes as the deforming forces of domestication, it is only by accentuating a text’s strangeness, its resistance to those homogenizing tendencies, that its status as a repository of difference can be respected.7 While such ideas have been seminal, they arguably apply to a relatively restricted range of cultural and political circumstances, notably the literary cultures that took

4  Lori Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004), 306–21. For an analysis which considers issues of gender as they inflect language use in a postcolonial framework, see also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’, in Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), 179–200. 5  Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2008); Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards An Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998); Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’, in Translation Studies Reader, ed. Venuti, 468–88. 6  Venuti, ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’, 469. 7  Antoine Berman, La traduction et la lettre, ou L’auberge du lointain (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 74; Antoine Berman, ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, in Translation Studies Reader, ed. Venuti, 276–89.

introduction 5 root in western Europe and north America after the end of the Middle Ages. As such, the conceptions of cultural hegemony and the ‘foreign’ taken up by Venuti and Berman may require qualification when applied to medieval examples, correlating as they do with the kinds of defined geography and political stability that have come to be associated, in modernity, with the notion of a nation state united around a single language.8 One of the aims of the present volume is to provide a more nuanced perspective on the limits as well as the possibilities of such approaches: translation and translators, situated as they always are in particular times, spaces, histories and political circumstances, may be working with alternative notions of cultural and linguistic difference from those that have arguably taken hold in modern, Westernized contexts such as literary publishing. Derrida’s own take on the question of difference conceives translation as a stage for enacting an ethical relation between languages and cultures. His concept of différance rests on the assumption that meaning is always differential/deferred: a site of proliferating possibilities, language exceeds the control of those who use it and is received in multiple and unpredictable ways. This insight has a number of implications for translation theory. First, the idea that a translation can be traced back to some originary source is immediately thrown into question. If the deployment of any word is shot through with différance, since to be meaningful it must enter into a logic of iterability (which is to say that it always carries within it the trace of other words and texts), the distinction between ‘original’ and ‘copy’ comes unstuck. Here Derrida’s radical notion of ‘la traduction absolue’ [absolute translation], a translation ‘sans pôle de référence, sans langue originaire, sans langue de départ’ [without a pole of reference, without an originary language, and without a source language], draws attention instead to translation as an ongoing process – rather than as a transaction between source and target languages – and in so doing moves away from the hierarchical structures (such as original/copy, author/translator, sense/word) on which discussions of translation have traditionally depended.9 Second, the idea of textual fidelity is challenged. The suggestion that meaning can be transferred between languages without being ‘harmed’ assumes that some sphere of signification ultimately lies beyond or before language; that language is underpinned by a transcendent reference point (which in medieval Christian cultures might include notions of divine truth or the word of God); and that transferability or translatability is an achievable ideal. For this concept of translation as semantic transfer, Derrida submits, 8  For evaluations of Venuti’s argument for a resistant translation practice that take issue with its potentially prescriptive and elitist dimensions (notably in the context of a bias towards literary translation), see essays in Maria Tymoczko, ed., Translation, Resistance, Activism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). 9 Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, 117; Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 61.

6 emma campbell and robert mills il faudra substituer une notion de transformation: transformation réglée d’une langue par une autre, d’un texte par un autre. Nous n’aurons et n’avons en fait jamais eu affaire à quelque ‘transport’ de signifiés purs que l’instrument – ou le ‘véhicule’ – signifiant laisserait vierge et inentamé, d’une langue à l’autre.10 [we would have to substitute a notion of transformation: a regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another. We will never have, and in fact never have had, to do with some ‘transport’ of pure signifieds from one language to another, or within one and the same language, that the signifying instrument would leave virgin and untouched.]11

Third, the acknowledgement that language is a site of difference – that all language use relies on the ability of a given utterance to mean something other than what it signifies in a given context – places a fundamental ethical demand on the work of the translator. On the one hand there comes the duty to translate the other, to bring it into the sphere of recognition (which may be conceived, from Derrida’s perspective, as a form of ‘hospitality’); yet the other’s alterity also remains fundamentally inassimilable, untranslatable in its singularity (which carries with it the risk of inhospitality). This obligation both to translate and not to translate, explored in depth by Derrida in his essay ‘Des tours de Babel’, implicates the translator in an ethical framework that aspires to resist the ethnocentric tendencies of translation even as it acknowledges their inevitability.12 As with Berman and Venuti, who oppose the domesticating tendencies of contemporary translation practice while not at the same time discounting the possibility of translation altogether, Derrida is thus concerned to foreground the simultaneous intelligibility and irreducibility of the other.13 10  Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 31. Original emphasis. 11  Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 19. 12  Jacques Derrida, ‘Des tours de Babel’, in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 203–35; Jacques Derrida, ‘Des tours de Babel’, trans. Joseph M. Graham, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 191–225. 13  For overviews of Derrida on language, translation, and the ethics and politics of difference, see Kathleen Davis, Deconstruction and Translation (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2001); Kathleen Davis, ‘Signature in Translation’, in Traductio: Essays on Punning and Translation, ed. Dirk Delabastita (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 1997), 23–43; Leslie Hill, The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jack Reynolds and Jonathan Roffe, eds, Understanding Derrida (New York: Continuum, 2004), 26–45, 103–112; Michael Thomas, The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translating Derrida on Translation: Relevance and Disciplinary Resistance’, Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2 (2003): 237–62.

introduction 7 The present volume takes up the question of difference as it concerns translation in a number of ways. In addition to engaging directly with the work of theorists such as Derrida, Berman and Venuti, as well as Walter Benjamin’s influential discussion of the original/translation opposition (which itself strongly shapes Derrida’s discussion of translatability in ‘Des tours de Babel’), individual contributors seek to demonstrate how contemporary reflections on the ethics and politics of translation may need to be refigured or reframed when applied to medieval examples. Religion presents particular issues in this context: Venuti’s analysis of the translator’s invisibility may have different implications when the divine agency behind translation is brought into focus; Benjamin’s reflections on the sacred dimensions of history usefully chime with medieval understandings of translation as a site of unresolved conflict between sacral power and human limitation, but rely on assumptions about the status and valuation of the ‘original’ that medieval translators were not necessarily always working with themselves; Derrida’s interrogation of the concept of ‘relevance’ in translation, which he sees at work in the interplay between religious conversion, economic substitution and mediation in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, potentially has a different significance when brought into dialogue with the expanded medieval sense of translatio as non-textual, non-linguistic transfer (as in the translation of holy objects such as relics). The somewhat more limited and controlled modes of semantic transfer that have come to be associated with translation in modernity – notably the idea that the source text holds authority and determines translation choices, and that some element in this authoritative ‘original’, imbued with sacred value, can be carried over to the place of reception – is, as Maria Tymoczko has demonstrated, a translation norm and metaphor that became prominent in western Europe only towards the end of the Middle Ages and one that has continued to be used as a means of imposing colonial, political and commercial authority up until the present day.14 Just as, in Tymoczko’s view, the models of translation derived from these predominantly Eurocentric (and implicitly Christocentric) perspectives should not be taken as the basis for international translation theories in a period of globalization, so too a reflection on the long history of the notion of translation as transfer, which interrogates how, in medieval Christian societies, translation and sacredness became progressively intertwined as a means of maintaining ecclesiastical authority, helpfully underscores the need for an ethics of translation that is self-reflexive about its past and about the modernist assumptions on which it has sometimes relied. Other issues taken up in this volume, which have likewise received attention in contemporary translation theory, include the theme of hospitality and 14  Maria Tymoczko, ‘Western Metaphorical Discourses Implicit in Translation Studies’, in Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors, ed. James St André (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2010), 109–43; Maria Tymoczko, Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2007).

8 emma campbell and robert mills inhospitality (how, for example, does translation accommodate the differences of other cultures?); the ability of translations to contest their sources (how might the dissemination of a given text or story present a challenge to its political or moral message?); the role of translator as interpreter (what position might translators have in conflict situations, for instance?); and the limits of translation as a category (what is the difference between translating a text and rewriting or adapting it, or altering its form?). In addition, rethinking medieval translation potentially requires an expansion of what is meant by ‘translation’ to include neglected aspects of textual and linguistic practice in the period, such as the transformation of verse forms into prose or the interplay between text and image. Inherent to an ethics of translation as defined by theorists such as Venuti is a notion of translation as appropriation; but attention to the varied and multiple ways in which stories are adapted, altered, redacted and expanded in different media and forms can also serve to bring into focus a more complex picture of dissemination and cultural transmission.15 The remainder of this Introduction provides an overview of existing medieval translation scholarship, particularly as it concerns these themes, as well as suggesting ways in which medieval and modern translation studies might be brought into a mutually beneficial dialogue with one another along these lines. This is followed by a summary of individual contributions that draws out some of the issues of ethics, politics and theory on which this volume is focused.

Medieval Studies and Translation Theory Translation is a well-established area of research in medieval studies that continues to attract a great deal of scholarly attention. Edited collections have played a vital role in exploring this territory and there is a substantial body of scholarship of this kind examining translation as a pragmatic or creative practice. The Medieval Translator volumes published from 1989 to the present set the tone for much subsequent scholarship (particularly, though not exclusively, in English) regarding such questions as the relationship between an original and a copy, issues of textual fidelity, the hierarchy between Latin and the vernacular and the use of different models of translation in particular texts or groups of texts.16 Extending the focus on translation practices, other 15  See, for example, Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006), which rejects the morally loaded concept of fidelity in adaptation studies, and implicitly also the notion of an ethics of translation aimed simply at critiquing its appropriative dimensions, in favour of treating adaptations as adaptations – a series of equivalent, palimpsestic expressions that are ‘second without being secondary’ (9). 16  Roger Ellis, with Jocelyn Price, Stephen Medcalf and Peter Meredith, eds, The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge:

introduction 9 collections have paid close attention to questions of fidelity and innovation by examining, for example, the notion of the fidus interpres or considering the question of fidelity in the broader context of cultural change.17 Work of this kind has sometimes considered theoretical questions – notably in connection with medieval Latin and vernacular ‘literary theory’ – but it has more often favoured the close examination of practice over more theoretical concerns.18 Since the 1990s, this more empirical approach has been supplemented by a number of studies which examine translation as a means of establishing or unsettling relations of cultural dominance and subservience. One of the most influential examples of this approach is Rita Copeland’s study of the ideological nexus of history, authority and power in which commentary and vernacular translation operated.19 Copeland examines the relationship between translation and interpretation in medieval Latin culture and its influence on vernacular writings in Middle English by authors such

D.  S. Brewer, 1989); Roger Ellis, ed., The Medieval Translator 2 (London: Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1991); Roger Ellis, ed., Translation in the Middle Ages (The Medieval Translator 3), special issue of New Comparison: A Journal of Comparative and General Literary Studies 12 (1991); Roger Ellis and Ruth Evans, eds, The Medieval Translator 4 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1994); Roger Ellis and René Tixier, eds, The Medieval Translator 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996); Roger Ellis, René Tixier and Bernd Weitemeire, eds, The Medieval Translator 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998). 17  Peter Anderson, ed., Pratiques de traduction au Moyen Âge: Actes du colloque de l’université de Copenhague 25 et 26 octobre 2002 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004); Kathy Cawsey and Jason Harris, eds, Transmission and Transformation in the Middle Ages: Texts and Contexts (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007). Though many such collections focus on biblical or literary translation, scientific and medical texts have also been the subject of some attention. See Jacqueline Hamesse and Marta Fattori, eds, Rencontres de cultures dans la philosophie médiévale: Traductions et traducteurs de l’Antiquité tardive au XIVe siècle. Actes du Colloque international de Cassino 15–17 juin 1989, organisé par la Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la philosophie médiévale et l’Università degli Studi di Cassino (Louvain-la-Neuve/Cassino: Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1990). In addition to the collections already mentioned, see Geneviève Contamine, Traduction et traducteurs au Moyen Âge: Actes du colloque international du CNRS organisé à Paris, Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes les 26–28 mai 1986 (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1989). Maurice Pergnier’s introduction to this volume (xiii–xxiii) was an early call for consideration of a greater diversity of translation practices beyond biblical and literary translation. 18  See, for example, Anderson, ed., Pratiques de traduction au Moyen Âge. See also Jeanette Beer, ed., Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1997); it should be noted that this volume is interested primarily in medieval theories of translation; discussions of translation in contemporary literary theory are not interrogated explicitly for the most part. 19 Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation. See also Alistair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Aldershot: Wildwood, 1988).

10 emma campbell and robert mills as Chaucer and Gower. By bringing into focus the importance of the translatio studii and translatio imperii topoi to medieval understandings of the relationship between past and present cultures, she shows how the transmission of literary texts in the Middle Ages is related to the transfer of power and authority between cultures. In so doing, she explores the peculiar cultural dynamics at the heart of such an enterprise: if, on one level, the model of translatio studii et imperii implies dependency on and endorsement of Latin culture on the part of vernacular writers, on another level, it has the power to displace the very authority it cites. Collections and anthologies have, following Copeland’s work, considered some of the possible limitations of the translatio studii et imperii model for approaching medieval vernacular translation in its entirety. This approach – which has emerged most strongly in scholarship on medieval Britain – is associated with the challenging of historical narratives of the ‘rise’ of European vernacular languages and with arguments for greater attentiveness to the specific cultural and linguistic contexts in which vernacular writers were operating. Thus, in addition to examining how the theory and practice of vernacular writing is tied to the question of its relation to Latin, work produced in Copeland’s wake considers how the issues of cultural dominance that she outlines might be approached in other ways, in connection with a broader understanding of vernacular translation and the contexts in which it operated. The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory 1280–1520 is an important intervention in this regard.20 As part of its presentation of Middle English discussions of literary practice, this anthology seeks to challenge the notion that status with regard to Latin was what was primarily at stake in the emergence of vernacular literature. Instead, it is argued, Middle English writers were concerned with issues other than authority and drew (often quite pragmatically) on a wider range of sources than the translatio studii model allows. Thus, for all the importance of Latin frames of reference in the prologues reproduced in the anthology, Latin theorizing is, it is claimed, often too far removed from the contexts in which vernacular literature is produced to provide a key to understanding such texts. What this critique implies is not an abandonment of Copeland’s model, but rather a qualification of its applicability to all writing in the vernacular. The evidence of Middle English writers suggests that such a model is most compellingly applied to self-conscious contributions to high literary culture which attempt to valorize vernacular language alongside Latin. More recent work on the study of translation has developed this line of enquiry by considering relations not only between Latin and vernacular languages but also between vernaculars. This is reflected at the level of indi20  Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans, eds, The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory 1280–1520 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999).

introduction 11 vidual contributions in some of the collections already mentioned; more recently, however, this approach has become associated with a broader analysis of vernacular culture that considers it in local and multilingual contexts as well as in national terms. The editors’ call for greater attention to the regional contexts and points of dissemination for translation in the most recent of the Medieval Translator volumes is indicative of a way of thinking that not only considers the multilingual contexts in which translation often took place but also looks beyond national cultures and their relationship to Latin.21 One of the most important recent collections to develop such an approach is Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c. 1100–1500, which critiques long-held assumptions in modern political historiography and scholarship regarding the relationship between French and English in Britain.22 This volume is significant for the range of texts it includes as well as its reassessment of narratives of linguistic dominance and decline. As Jocelyn Wogan-Browne points out in her editor’s introduction, the construction of nationalizing literary canons has tended to skew the picture of how languages interact in medieval texts; widening the net to include less studied material suggests that linguistic permeability, code-switching and other phenomena currently studied as part of a contemporary interest in multilingualism may be more culturally widespread than medievalists had previously thought.23 This re-examination of what has often been treated as a monoglot English culture from a perspective that pays closer attention to the multilingual contexts in which it developed has some important implications for thinking about medieval translation. For one, the collection suggests that, as a result of the multilingual networks in which they are written and received, medieval texts are never truly monolingual.24 The languages of apparently monoglot medieval texts are always in dialogue with other languages and this can take a variety of forms ranging from authorization to subversion. A second point concerns the nature of translation itself: not only is it a pervasive cultural practice and central part of medieval aesthetics, but translation is undertaken in a wide variety of more or less visible ways. Scholars working on other European cultural traditions have come to

21  Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead, eds, Lost in Translation? The Medieval Translator/Traduire au Moyen Âge 12 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009) 22  Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, with Carolyn Collette, Maryanne Kowaleski, Linne Mooney, Ad Putter and David Trotter, eds, Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c. 1100–c. 1500 (York: York Medieval Press, 2009). 23  Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘General Introduction: What’s in a Name? The “French” of “England”’, in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain, 1–13. 24  See also Michelle Warren, ‘Translation’ in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 51–67, who also explores how translation can be said to operate even in the absence of multiple languages.

12 emma campbell and robert mills similar conclusions.25 Alison Cornish’s study of vulgarizing translation in Dante’s Italy, for instance, challenges the notion that translation of this sort replaces the source text, arguing that, while commentary may sometimes substitute itself for a source, vernacular translations in Italy remain ancillary and mobile.26 Catherine Léglu’s exploration of the relationships between Occitan, Catalan and French in later medieval verse and prose texts from the Occitan tradition also re-examines the complex pathways that translation often took, while demonstrating the intricate relationships between multilingualism and the fantasy of the ‘mother tongue’ in such texts.27 Thus, in addition to reframing questions of linguistic and cultural contact as these affect vernacular literary culture, work such as this also suggests that medieval translation may be productively re-examined using more flexible, less prescriptive models from those that have traditionally dominated the field. Another way in which the study of medieval translation has evolved – and which addresses the issues just described in other ways – is in the direction of a postcolonial analysis. Though postcolonial scholarship within medieval studies has not always addressed linguistic issues, postcolonial approaches have proved a useful way of introducing and thinking through some of the questions generated by an alternative, expanded approach to the theory and practice of translation. Writing in the aforementioned Idea of the Vernacular volume, Ruth Evans suggests ways in which the translatio studii et imperii model that the anthology sought to problematize in other ways might productively be approached from a postcolonial angle.28 In addition to the study by Léglu just mentioned, Ardis Butterfield’s work has provided a more extensive investigation of the possible uses of postcolonial criticism for rethinking narratives of linguistic and cultural contact in medieval Britain during the Hundred Years War.29 In a way that is similarly informed by postcolonial models, Sharon Kinoshita’s work, though not primarily focused on translation, has addressed related questions of linguistic and cultural interaction as

25  Though not specifically considering translation, the collection of essays edited by Busby and Kleinhenz on multilingualism in the medieval francophone world explores relationships between languages in areas of the francophone world outside England. See Keith Busby and Chris Kleinhenz, eds, Medieval Multilingualism: The Francophone World and Its Neighbours (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). 26  Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 27  Catherine Léglu, Multilingualism and Mother Tongue in Medieval French, Occitan and Catalan Narratives (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). 28  Ruth Evans, ‘Historicizing Postcolonial Criticism: Cultural Difference and the Vernacular’, in The Idea of the Vernacular, 366–70. See also Evans, ‘Translating Past Cultures?’ 29  Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

introduction 13 part of her rethinking of Old French literary production in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.30 One edited collection that has explored the relationship between postcolonial theory and translation in a medieval European context is Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, which adopts translation as a metaphor for the ways in which the multilingual, multicultural dimensions of the Middle Ages might carry across to postcolonial analyses of cultural transmission.31 Adopting the notion of ‘translation-as-wonder’ – defined as the experience of decentring that occurs during moments of cultural encounter – individual essays in this collection focus on the idea of the Middle Ages itself as a site for the production of empathy, displacement and wonderment. Although not problematizing translation in the same way as Language and Culture in Medieval Britain, this collection nonetheless works with an expanded notion of what translation might involve and advocates an approach that allows for greater cross-fertilization in scholarship dealing with such phenomena in medieval and modern contexts. More generally, regardless of whether or not this involves explicit engagement with postcolonial models, medievalists have been refining and rethinking the categories of analysis with which translation might be thought as well as expanding the range of practices that the term potentially covers. This has often followed broadly similar lines to the discussion of translation within the social sciences in recent decades, which has extended the use of the term from primarily linguistic uses to other areas of cultural production, enabling it to function as an explanatory metaphor for practices through which the transformation of cultural forms takes place. A recent example of this in literary contexts is Alastair Minnis’s exploration of the ways in which authority was ‘translated’ in Middle English literature.32 Other studies have gone further in paying greater attention to the relationship between material culture and translation as it is thought in connection with textual cultures. In addition to some of the work already mentioned, which considers the materiality of medieval textual cultures as part of investigation of translation and multilingualism, there is a developing body of scholarship that investigates translation as a cultural phenomenon which incorporates but is not confined to texts. The 2009 volume of the Medieval Translator series ends with a section entitled ‘Beyond Translation’, in which a number of contributors expand traditional notions of translation in order to examine various 30  Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 31  Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, eds, Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 32  Alastair Minnis, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

14 emma campbell and robert mills forms of iconographic or material transmission and transposition.33 Finbarr B. Flood’s Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘HinduMuslim’ Encounter is a more extended attempt to think medieval translation with and through material culture.34 As suggested by this necessarily schematic overview, the scope and methodological shifts that have taken place in this field over the past few decades make this an exciting time to be working on medieval translation. Given the current state of play, this is also, we believe, a perfect moment to revisit the relationship between translation theory and translation practice from an ethical and political standpoint. The diversification of approaches to medieval translation and the reconceptualization of the categories through which it is defined encourage a rethinking of the ethical and political frameworks within which medieval translation has traditionally been discussed. This, indeed, is already implicit in the way the model of translatio studii et imperii has been critically revisited by scholars looking at various aspects of European vernacular culture. Copeland’s discussion of vernacular translation as a practice that both deferred to and displaced the authority of Latin continues to offer important insights into how vernacular translators conceived of their work and has been widely used by medievalists studying translation. However, as discussed above, the model also has some shortcomings insofar as it regards vernacular translation exclusively in relation to Latin culture rather than applying it to medieval translation practice in its entirety. Rethinking the cultural dominance of Latin and paying closer attention to the situatedness of medieval translation in the way that other studies have proposed suggest that the ethical and political dynamics of the models associated with this approach require similar kinds of qualification or refinement. One of the aims of the present book is to focus greater attention on precisely this issue. The decision to address explicitly theoretical questions alongside more historical issues is quite deliberate and distinguishes this volume from collections which have explored related areas. As mentioned earlier, collections such as those in the Medieval Translator series have tended to focus on practice rather than theory and do not usually explicitly address broader methodological issues. Postcolonial approaches to the study of the Middle Ages, while offering important theoretical insights into cultural contact, have only rarely focused on translation per se. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s edited book The Postcolonial Middle Ages was the first volume to take an explicitly postcolonial approach to medieval culture and looks productively at areas of intersection and potential dialogue between medieval and postcolonial studies.35 However, 33  Renevey and Whitehead, eds, Lost in Translation? 34  Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu– Muslim’ Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 35  Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000).

introduction 15 emphasis tends to be placed on Middle English texts at the expense of other linguistic situations, meaning that issues of translation are not consistently pushed to the fore. Kabir and Williams’ Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages widens the linguistic and temporal net to include material in Old English, Old French and fifteenth-century Spanish, but several of the essays still focus mainly on the literary cultures of late medieval England. Rethinking Medieval Translation complements such studies by suggesting how questions of difference, cultural dominance and political exploitation raised as part of a postcolonial critique of medieval cultures might usefully be re-posed and rethought as part of an investigation of the ethics and politics of translation. Though the primary emphasis of our collection remains for the most part on European languages, individual contributors discuss English, French and Latin writings as they enter into a dialogue with Arabic, Catalan, Greek, Italian and Occitan cultures. As our outline of the scholarship suggests, this is a huge field. This book is an attempt neither at a complete overview of translation in a particular period, nor at a study of translation as it relates to a particular language or region. Though other collections have productively taken this approach, the aim of this volume is instead to provoke new ways of thinking and theorizing translation that might critically inform further research of this sort. Alongside studies focusing on particular literary traditions or geographical areas such as those already mentioned, there is also room for comparative work that thinks through the methodological issues raised by translation and multilingualism in different cultural contexts – comparing the ‘French of England’, for example, with the situation in Franco-Italian literary culture, or considering individual authors whose writing career follows a truly multilingual trajectory (such as Ramon Llull). This work raises a number of important methodological questions. For instance, one issue that emerges strongly from the volume is the need to rethink the contexts in which medieval translation takes place and the categories – such as language, geography and text – on which it relies. Scholars also need to re-evaluate critically some of the hierarchies between languages with which medievalists are used to working, especially those between Latin and vernacular cultures. Finally, the way translation is situated through its relationship to place, travel and border zones of cultural contact is hugely important when it comes to thinking about the relations between languages and cultures; while not devaluing a more traditional focus on texts, such an approach draws attention to human dimensions of linguistic and cultural contact that deserve far greater attention. Though this collection has theoretical ambitions, it should be emphasized that it is not an attempt to come up with a universal theory or single approach to medieval translation; in this respect, it follows the lead of much of the work already mentioned, which insists on the close relationship between theory and practice when thinking about translation. The book’s aim is rather to begin a conversation about how medieval translation and the ethical and

16 emma campbell and robert mills political questions it raises might productively be explored from perspectives that incorporate but are not limited to postcolonial models. Each of the contributions to Rethinking Medieval Translation offers what we hope are some helpful vantage points from which to reflect on such approaches.

Overview of the Collection The first four essays explore different aspects of the ethics and politics of translatio studii. Marilynn Desmond’s essay concentrates on Leonzio Pilatus (d. 1365), whose encounters with Petrarch and Boccaccio – neither of whom were able to read Greek but who responded in contrasting ways to Pilatus’s attempts to translate Homeric epics from Greek into Latin – illustrate the complexity of issues of language, identity and difference as these related to the performance of translation. Pilatus’s story functions as a kind of allegorical response to the political and ethical questions raised in Rethinking Medieval Translation as a whole: the themes of hospitality/inhospitality and cultural difference (as discussed by theorists such as Berman, Derrida and Venuti) map onto the contrasting responses to translation formulated by Boccaccio and Petrarch, responses that were themselves inflected by medieval attitudes to antique culture. Miranda Griffin’s chapter pushes the focus on the translation of antique texts and languages in another direction, by concentrating on the dialogue between French and Latin as it is played out in the exchange between the Ovide moralisé and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In so doing, Griffin also demonstrates how more traditional approaches to thinking about text and source in this context might be brought into dialogue with Derrida’s ideas on language and translation in his ‘Des tours de Babel’ essay. Just as Derrida exploits figures of virgin birth, incarnation and wedding garments in his theories, the Ovide moralisé transforms the unstable pre-Christian body of the Metamorphoses into an avatar of the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth and holy matrimony. Yet whereas these impossible, sacred bodies underwrite the Christian faith which illuminates the Metamorphoses for the author of the Ovide moralisé, for Derrida they figure the impossibility and limit of translation and the transfiguration of figural language itself. Continuing the focus on medieval translations of classical culture, Catherine Léglu explores translation’s relationship to interpretation and ethics, taking an approach that complements Desmond’s and Griffin’s considerations of the ethical implications of translation as a form of interpretation. Léglu’s argument uses as a touchstone Mieke Bal’s notion of ‘ethical non-indifference’, which Bal defines as the refusal of readers or viewers to suppress their distaste for the ideological content of a work of art usually studied for its aesthetic value alone. Arguing that no version of the Lucretia tale, whether written or visual, is indifferent to the ethics that it teaches in both political and domestic

introduction 17 life, Léglu demonstrates how translations may point to the ethical non-indifference of some of the tale’s medieval readers. Noah Guynn’s contribution offers another perspective on translatio studii, this time focusing on the way translation is implicated in the formation of the ethical and political categories that we apply to premodern texts and cultures. Guynn’s focus is on the politics of carnival as this is reflected in early drama and the anachronism of applying a modern notion of catharsis in this context. This argument hinges on a careful reconsideration of the medieval transmission of Aristotle’s Poetics, the source of the notion of catharsis as moral cleansing or ‘purgation’. Arguing against the claim that farce uses comic catharsis to circumscribe social and political forms of dissent, Guynn demonstrates how, contrary to modern notions of catharsis as purification, the understanding of catharsis mediated by medieval translations of Aristotle associates it with the use of passions to inspire greater virtue in already virtuous men. This, in turn, has implications for how we understand the politics of carnival in the Middle Ages: rather than functioning as spaces for the quelling of social unrest through shared catharsis, medieval drama had the capacity to provoke meaningful political action and social change. Emma Campbell’s essay, like those by Griffin, Robert Mills and Jane Gilbert, explores translation’s relationship to the sacred. Campbell explores the various ways in which translatio in Rutebeuf ’s Miracle de Théophile is implicated in divine and diabolical relations, as well as relations between the text’s audience and the divine. As part of this exploration, the essay revisits an issue that has caused bafflement amongst critics: the transformation of Théophile’s charter into a letter from the devil. Drawing on Derrida’s discussion of the concept of ‘relevance’ in translation, Campbell proposes that the transformation of Théophile’s charter into an open letter from the devil in Rutebeuf ’s version of the Miracle is ultimately connected to the text’s valorization of a particular model of translatio – a model that is ultimately best served by French (rather than other possible alternatives, such as Latin). In the chapter that follows, Mills explores another area of dialogue between modern ways of thinking of the ethics of translation and medieval textual and cultural practices. Complementing the focus on the interconnectedness of interpretation and translation in other essays (especially Griffin and Léglu), Mills looks more explicitly at the translator – a figure whose ‘invisibility’ has been identified as a major ethical dilemma in recent translation theory. Venuti identifies ‘fluent’ translation techniques in modern, English-language translation as one of the means by which the translator’s labour becomes hidden from view, encouraging attitudes that he claims are imperialistic and xenophobic. Focusing on the motif of language as it gets transmitted in a number of medieval and post-medieval retellings of the story of Thomas Becket’s ‘heathen’ mother, Mills considers the medieval stakes in this scenario of invisible translation by asking what ideological values the translator’s in/visibility is asked to serve. Moving from thirteenth-century hagiographic retellings of

18 emma campbell and robert mills the legend in Middle English to visual renditions produced in later centuries, as well as surveying a number of post-medieval versions, Mills demonstrates both the relevance and limitations of Venuti’s arguments about translation when they are applied to medieval contexts. Zrinka Stahuljak’s essay, like Desmond’s, considers translation as part of the interactions between individuals as well as among languages, cultures and texts – interactions that have important political as well as ethical dimensions. Also complementing Mills’s discussion of the translator’s visibility, the chapter focuses on translation and interpretation as activities involving human agents. In translation studies, ‘fixers’ perform a range of duties as local informants, guides or negotiators that exceed interpretation and/or translation. Drawing upon a range of texts in which medieval interpreters come into view in conflict situations, Stahuljak demonstrates how productive the modern concept of the ‘fixer’ can be for reading medieval scenes of translation and interpretation, opening as it does a hitherto unstudied window onto medieval political, social and ethical encounters in the contact zone. The chapter thus both addresses an issue not traditionally included in discussions of medieval translation and also explores another important area of potential dialogue between modern translation studies and research on medieval literature and culture. Like Stahuljak, Gilbert considers an aspect of medieval practice that has been largely omitted from traditional discussions of translation as something that takes place between texts in different languages. Gilbert’s focus is fifteenth-century works that claim to ‘translate’ older French verse into prose: the prosifications by medieval dérimeurs (literally ‘de-rhymers’). These somewhat sidelined works – which have been read primarily as documents in the history of culture – are here brought into dialogue with one of the most widely known touchstones of contemporary translation theory: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1921). By comparing these different bodies of work, Gilbert demonstrates how Benjamin’s essay opens up ways of thinking about the fifteenth-century texts’ importance as translations and how the fifteenth-century material permits us to push certain points in Benjamin’s essay in other directions, notably with respect to the relations that Benjamin posits between theology and history. In both Benjamin’s essay and the dérimeurs’ presentations, an orientation towards the sacred dimension of ‘history’ is balanced by an insistence on translation’s location within human time. Anchored in transience, the translation is always liable to be superseded; it thus falls to translators to capture both timeliness and transience, and in doing so they make manifest the greater, sacred dimension of history. William Burgwinkle, like Stahuljak and Gilbert, investigates another aspect of medieval textual and linguistic practice that challenges medievalists to rethink what medieval ‘translation’ might include. Burgwinkle’s argument focuses on the multilingual writer Ramon Llull (d. 1313), who wrote texts simultaneously in Catalan, Occitan, Latin, Arabic, French and Italian. The

introduction 19 question raised by Llull’s work is whether this multilingualism constitutes an act of translation. Where does rewriting stop and translation begin? Is there (always) an original that is being translated from? Derrida’s questioning of the notion of an ‘original’ language finds strong support in Llull’s example, as Burgwinkle demonstrates. The chapter examines Llull’s attitudes towards human speech and translation before turning to the mediation of Llull’s life story itself, in an illuminated manuscript produced in collaboration with Llull called the Breviculum, which sheds light on the visual as well as verbal dimensions of translation, language and agency in this context. Butterfield’s chapter, like those by a number of other contributors (notably Burgwinkle, Desmond and Stahuljak), explores the relationship between languages as they were spoken, thought and learnt as well as written down in the Middle Ages. It also – like Luke Sunderland’s contribution – considers the implications of revising a linguistic picture associated with the historical development of national languages: in Butterfield’s case, the status of vernacular languages in late medieval England. Butterfield’s essay develops new research on the parallel vernacular role played in England by French. Through discussion of the work of Charles d’Orléans, Lydgate and Hoccleve it investigates these works as a form of bilingual translation which may be more or less ‘rough’ or ‘smooth’. In evaluating this material, Butterfield draws on modern discussions of fluency in translation studies and postcolonial studies, which is an issue that has been at the centre of many debates on the ethics of translation and postcolonial writing. Sunderland develops the focus on multilingualism seen in the previous two essays in relation to what is often seen as a quintessentially ‘French’ literary genre: the chanson de geste. Calling into question the notion that France is the ‘home’ of the chanson de geste, Sunderland’s chapter highlights the importance of dissemination, rewriting and translation in the genre’s history. Deploying as a case study the various recastings of Bueve d’Hantone (also known, in differing incarnations, as Bevis of Hampton and Bovo d’Antona), Sunderland shows how contemporary translation theory – specifically Berman’s notion of translation as hospitality, and Venuti’s analysis of translation through the logic of commodity – can shed light on the text’s complex circulation history in the Middle Ages. Whereas the plurality and difference of surviving chanson de geste manuscripts led philologists to invent an idea of the original (which always ended up being ‘French’), in the case of Bueve d’Hantone/Bovo d’Antona the margins can be seen to displace the centre; ideas of a ‘home’ for the genre are ultimately called into question, in a text that promotes ideals of travel and displacement rather than fixity and the maintenance of boundaries. Although the Bueve texts fail ultimately to fulfil the utopian ideal of translation promoted by Berman and Venuti, in that there is no absolute openness to the difference of another culture in any of the surviving versions, Sunderland shows how (as in Mills’s analysis of the Becket narrative) dissemination affords opportunities to glimpse this ethical model sideways on.

20 emma campbell and robert mills The collection concludes with a response by Simon Gaunt, which both enlarges upon the themes of the volume and explores the problems and opportunities raised by an issue that many of the essays deal with indirectly: that of untranslatability. Gaunt is concerned to shift the debate more explicitly towards this issue and towards the challenges that the untranslatable poses to teaching as well as research. Drawing on Derrida’s discussion of Babel, he examines the untranslatability of the proper noun using examples from Wace’s Roman de Brut and Marco Polo’s Le devisement du monde, arguing that the untranslatable may itself be regarded as an ethical category – and even an ethical necessity. The contributions to this volume thus all take a fresh look at the ethics and politics of translation from different theoretical, cultural and linguistic perspectives. What we offer here is not a comprehensive survey of medieval translation practices, or indeed a single theory of medieval translation. Rather, this volume presents a sample of the diversity of medieval translatio designed to provoke reflection and debate on issues relevant to the study of translation in the Middle Ages and beyond. The vibrancy of current research on translation within and outside the medieval period makes this a perfect moment to explore new avenues of enquiry and, in so doing, to rethink some of the frameworks underpinning more traditional approaches to medieval translation. This book is, we hope, just the beginning of one such rethinking.

1 On Not Knowing Greek Leonzio Pilatus’s Rendition of the Iliad and the Translatio of Mediterranean Identities* Marilynn Desmond For it is vain and foolish to talk of Knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh … All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek.1 Both Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) wished to know Greek and tried to know Greek. Of course, neither Boccaccio nor Petrarch – along with most of the learned elite of the medieval West – ever acquired the facility to read ancient Greek texts.2 By Petrarch’s own account, he was nonetheless forever drawn back to Greek, or at least to a few ancient Greek authors, primarily to Homer as well as Euripides and Plato. His interest in these texts led him to undertake private instruction in the Greek language from a Calabrian monk named Barlaam (d. 1348), who offered Greek *  I would like to thank Karen Elizabeth Gross, Olivia Holmes and Karla Mallette for reading earlier drafts of this essay. Tina Chronopoulos generously shared her philological expertise with me. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated 1  Virginia Woolf, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, in Woolf, The Common Reader: First Series (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925), 39. 2  On the history of literacy in Greek in the Latin West, see Walter Berschin, Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages: From Jerome to Nicholas of Cusa, trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988); Kenneth M. Setton, ‘The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renaissance’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 100, no. 1 (1956): 1–76.

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lessons in Avignon. For Boccaccio, the Greek language meant access to classical mythology and ancient history, to accounts of the Theban story or the narratives of the Trojan War – interests he had initially developed during his sojourn in Naples between 1326 and 1341 as a young merchant. Their quest for Greek eventually led Boccaccio and Petrarch to another Calabrian, Leonzio Pilatus (d. 1365), who consequently became the first post-classical translator of the Homeric epics in the Latin West.3 In translating the Homeric epics from Greek into Latin, Pilatus mediated between the ancient languages of the East and West. Pilatus’s identity as well as his role in the transmission of Greek texts dramatize the liminality of translatio in the medieval Mediterranean, that is, the potential of translatio to destabilize rather than fix identities. Both Barlaam and Pilatus were natives of Calabria, the area of southern Italy that remained Greek-speaking during the fourteenth century.4 As part of a frontier zone during the height of the Byzantine Empire, Calabria had fostered particularly fervent forms of Greek monasticism that later resisted incorporation into the Latin Church when the Normans gained control of the region in the late eleventh century.5 The Normans administratively addressed the religious difference of Calabria by appointing Roman Catholics to many of the bishoprics in the region, but they allowed most of the monasteries to preserve the Greek rite.6 When the Angevins gained dominion in 3  On Leonzio Pilatus, see Agostino Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato fra Petrarca e Boccaccio (Venice: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1964); James Bruce Ross, ‘On the Early History of Leontius’ Translation of Homer’, Classical Philology 22, no. 4 (1927): 341–55; Antonis Fyrigos, ‘Leonzio Pilato e il fondamento bizantino del preumanesimo italiano’, in Manuele Crisolora e il ritorno del greco in occidente: Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Napoli, 26–29 giugno 1997, ed. Riccardo Maisano and Antonio Rollo (Naples: Istituto universitario orientale, 2002), 19–30; Marianne Pade, ‘Leonzio Pilato e Boccaccio: Le fonti del De montibus e la cultura greco-latina di Leonzio’, Quaderni Petrarcheschi 12–13 (2002– 3): 257–75; Dieter Harlfinger and Marwan Rashed, ‘Leonzio Pilato fra aristotelismo bizantino e scolastica latina. Due nuovi testimoni postillati’, Quaderni Petrarcheschi 12–13 (2002–3): 277–93. 4  See Setton, ‘The Byzantine Background’; Roberto Weiss, ‘The Greek Culture of South Italy in the Later Middle Ages’, in Weiss, Medieval and Humanist Greek: Collected Essays (Padua: Antenore, 1977), 13–43; Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato, 479–98. 5  Catherine Hervé-Commereuc, ‘Les Normands en Calabre’, in Les Normands en Méditerranée, dans le sillage des Tancrède: Colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, 24–27 septembre 1992, ed. Pierre Bouet and François Neveux (Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 1994), 77–87; Ghislaine Noyé, ‘La Calabre et la frontière, VIe–Xe siècles’, in Castrum 4: Frontière et peuplement dans le monde méditerranéen au Moyen Âge, ed. Jean-Michel Poisson (Madrid: Casa de Valázquez; Rome: École française de Rome, 1992), 277–308; Vera von Falkenhausen, ‘Between Two Empires: Byzantine Italy in the Reign of Basil II’, in Byzantium in the Year 1000, ed. Paul Magdalino (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 135–59; Vera von Falkenhausen, ‘I greci in Calabria fra XIII e XIV secolo’, Quaderni Petrarcheschi 12–13 (2002–3): 21–50. 6  Jean Marie Martin, ‘L’attitude et le rôle des normands dans l’Italie méridionale byzan-



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southern Italy in the thirteenth century, they generally perpetuated Norman policy regarding Greek monasteries in Calabria.7 This intersection of history and location created several paradoxical affiliations for Calabrians in the fourteenth century: though culturally, religiously and linguistically Greek, Calabria was no longer part of the Byzantine Empire but had been incorporated into the Angevin Empire. The Angevin dynasty in southern Italy was a branch of the Valois dynasty that held the kingdom of France, and the Angevins cultivated a francophone court in Naples. A fourteenth-century Calabrian monk like Barlaam was simultaneously the feudal subject of Robert of Anjou, king of Naples, yet religiously subject to the Orthodox pontificate in Constantinople. Beyond its location on the Italian peninsula, Calabria had little reason to identify as ‘Italian’. In addition, Calabria was situated on the fault-line of the historical divide between the Greek-rite and Latin-rite liturgy, a cultural division that obscured the similarities between these two formations of Christianity. The Latin West and the Byzantine East shared a common Christian identity, as well as the textual legacy they both inherited from the ancient world. As Deno John Geanakoplos puts it, the Byzantine East and Latin West were ‘sibling’ cultures: ‘there always lurked in the background the feeling that, somehow, both societies belonged together as parts of a united Christendom’.8 Petrarch, however, saw the Greek East through the theological lens of schism and heresy so that the existence of the Byzantine Empire represented an unfortunate reminder that the Latin West had historically failed to unite Christendom. Barlaam moved easily between the Greek East and the Latin West. Though educated in an orthodox monastery in Calabria, he spent considerable time in Constantinople and Thessalonica before becoming embroiled in philosophical controversies that eventually drove him back to the West. By the time he was giving Petrarch Greek lessons in Avignon, Barlaam had renounced Greek Orthodox Christianity and enthusiastically embraced Roman Catholicism.9 As an ethnic Greek who had repudiated the Greek Church, Barlaam epitomized the potential supersession of the East by tine’, in Les Normands en Méditerranée, ed. Bouet and Neveux, 111–22; Peter Herde, ‘The Papacy and the Greek Church in Southern Italy between the Eleventh and the Thirteenth Century’, in The Society of Norman Italy, ed. Graham A. Loud and Alex Metcalfe (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 213–51; Falkenhausen, ‘I greci in Calabria’, 26–7. 7  See David Paul Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality of the Italo-Greeks (Thessalonica: Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies, 1991), who notes that ‘Italo-Greek monasticism lived in a climate of war and frequent hostility’ under the Angevins (140). 8  Deno John Geanakoplos, Interaction of the ‘Sibling’ Byzantine and Western Cultures in the Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance (330–1600) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 4–5. 9  See S. Impellizzeri, ‘Barlaam’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1964), 6:392–7; Tia M. Kolbaba, ‘Conversion from Greek

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the West: Barlaam’s embrace of the Latin rite ostensibly offered Petrarch the opportunity to bypass contemporary Byzantine culture in the acquisition of the ancient Greek language. With Petrarch’s support, Barlaam was appointed to a bishopric in Calabria. The trajectory of Barlaam’s career – with its origins in a Greek monastery and his final appointment to a Latin bishopric – encompasses the politics of religious identity in Calabria. Barlaam’s posting to Gerace in the southern region of Calabria cut short Petrarch’s instruction in Greek just before the plague cut short Barlaam’s life in 1348. Petrarch later praised Barlaam and blamed his own ignorance of Greek on Barlaam’s untimely death: ‘et nisi meis principiis invidisset Fortuna, et praeceptoris eximii haudquaquam opportuna mors, hodie forte plus aliquid quam elementarius Graius essem’ (Variae 25) [and if Fortune would not have envied my beginnings – as well as the completely inopportune death of my excellent master – perhaps today I should be something more than an elementary Greek].10 Upon Barlaam’s demise, Petrarch, along with Boccaccio, looked to Leonzio Pilatus for access to ancient Greek. Pilatus’s identity is more indeterminate than Barlaam’s.11 Though highly mobile, Pilatus did not embody the same quality of Western transcendence that Barlaam personified because Pilatus never renounced his allegiance to the Eastern Orthodox church. In a letter to Boccaccio under the topic ‘de mortalis instabilitate propositi’ (Seniles 3.6) [on the instability of mortal purpose], Petrarch complained that Pilatus continually shifts his allegiance between Greece and Italy.12 Indeed, both Boccaccio and Petrarch report that Pilatus represents himself as a Byzantine from Thessalonica rather than a Calabrian, an identity that elicited a sneer from Petrarch: ‘quasi nobilius sit grecum esse quam italum’ (Seniles 3.6) [as though

Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism in the Fourteenth Century’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 19 (1995): 120–34. 10  Francesco Petrarca, Epistolae de rebus familiaribus et variae, 3 vols, ed. Guiseppe Fracassetti (Florence: Le Monnier, 1859–63), 3:369. 11  Little is known of Pilatus’s life before his encounter with Petrarch and Boccaccio. See P. Falzone, ‘Leonzio Pilato’, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2005), 64:630–5; Agostino Pertusi, ‘Leonzio Pilato a Creta prima del 1358–1359: Scuole e cultura a Creta durante il secolo XIV’, Kretika chronika 15 (1961–62): 363–81; Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato, 1–42. For an exploration of the possibility that Pilatus’s origins were in Thessalonica rather than Calabria, see Antonio Rollo, ‘Leonzio lettore dell’Ecuba nella Firenze di Boccaccio’, Quaderni Petrarcheschi 12–13 (2002–3): 7–21. 12  Francesco Petrarca, Epistole, ed. Ugo Dotti (Turin: UTET, 1978), 664–70. Translations (with minor modification) of all the Seniles in this essay are from Francis Petrarch, Letters of Old Age: Rerum senilium libri I–XVIII, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin and Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Petrarch makes a similar comment in Seniles 5.3. See Francesco Petrarca, Res seniles, libri V–VIII, ed. Silvia Rizzo (Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 2009), 74.



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it were nobler to be Greek rather than Italian].13 By identifying himself with Thessalonica, a city second only to Constantinople in terms of learning in the fourteenth century, Pilatus affiliates himself with Byzantine intellectual culture in one of its most rarefied manifestations.14 Petrarch, however, reads this affiliation as a rejection of Pilatus’s Italian identity in preference to a Greek identity, as though the two were mutually exclusive. Petrarch’s juxtaposition of Greek and Italian also implies a false equivalence between the two terms and the two cultures they designate. The existence of the Byzantine Empire enabled an equation between language, ethnicity and empire: to be Greek implied a political affiliation, as well as a religious and linguistic identity. To be Italian in the fourteenth century, however, referred primarily to a geographic affinity, since, as John Larner notes, ‘Italy was nothing more than a sentiment or literary idea’.15 As Luke Sunderland highlights in this volume, the category of ‘Italian’ does not even encompass the vernacular textual cultures of the Italian peninsula. Petrarch’s assumption that a Calabrian should identify as Italian nonetheless expresses Petrarch’s hope that Italy could be united under the rule of the Angevin dynasty, specifically under Robert the Wise, whose royal performance Petrarch repeatedly extols in his letters and whom he once evokes as ‘king of Italy’ (Seniles 10.2). If the idea of a unified Italy was entirely aspirational, Petrarch’s notional opposition between Italian and Greek conceptually reified the category of ‘Italy’ by analogy to the Byzantine Empire. Pilatus’s identity as a Greek had, however, earned him adequate recognition as a potential translator of the Homeric epics when he first encountered Petrarch in Padua. Boccaccio eventually took Pilatus into his home in Florence, where Pilatus spent almost three years reading the Iliad and the Odyssey aloud to Boccaccio and producing a basic Latin equivalent, word by word, for each line of ancient Greek, along with a commentary.16 Unlike Petrarch, Boccaccio does not question Pilatus’s identity as a Thessalonician when he describes Pilatus and outlines the conditions of their arrangement: Post hos et Leontium Pylatum, Thessalonicensem virum et, ut ipse asserit, predicti Barlae auditorem, persepe deduco. Qui quidem aspectu horridus homo est, turpi facie, barba prolixa et capillicio nigro, et meditatione occupatus assidua, moribus incultus, nec satis urbanus homo, verum, uti experientia notum fecit licterarum Grecarum doctissimus, et quodam modo Grecarum hystoriarum atque fabularum arcivum inexhaustum, esto Latinarum non satis 13 Petrarca, Epistole, ed. Dotti, 664. 14  Apostolos E. Vacalopoulos, A History of Thessaloniki, trans. T. F. Carney (Thessalonica: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1963), 51–61. On Pilatus’s potential connections with Thessalonica, see Rollo, ‘Leonzio lettore dell’Ecuba’. 15  John Larner, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, 1216–1380 (London: Longman, 1980), 3. 16  On Pilatus’s commentary, see Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato, 261–94.

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adhuc instructus sit. Huius ego nullum vidi opus, sane quicquid ex eo recito, ab eo viva voce referente percepi; nam eum legentem Homerum et mecum singulari amicitia conversantem fere tribus annis audivi. (De genealogia deorum 15.6)17 [Leontius Pilatus, of Thessalonica, is another whom I often mention. By his own statement he was a pupil of the aforesaid Barlaam. He is a man of uncouth appearance, ugly features, long beard, and black hair, forever lost in thought, rough in manners and behavior. For all that he is a most learned Hellenist, as any inquirer discovers, and a fairly inexhaustible mine of Greek history and myth. In Latin he is not as yet so well versed. I have never seen any work from his hand; and all my quotations from him I have made at his oral dictation. For nearly three years I heard him read Homer, and conversed with him on terms of singular friendship.]18

In this portrait, Pilatus exhibits behaviours associated with the eremitical way of life cultivated in Calabrian monasteries. David Hester’s account of the detachment and simplicity fostered by Italo-Greek spirituality concludes with a description that fits Pilatus perfectly: ‘the end result of this unwashed, unkempt life is that monks would often appear quite wild’.19 Petrarch complains in his letters about Pilatus’s lack of manners and hygiene, as well as his moodiness – all attributes that could mark Pilatus as an orthodox monk. Whether or not he was a member of a monastic order, Pilatus epitomizes the ideal features of Italo-Greek monasticism, though to Petrarch these characteristics remain illegible as signs of Christian spirituality, and Petrarch instead dismisses Pilatus as hopelessly uncivilized and even unstable. For his part, Boccaccio is less judgemental than Petrarch towards Pilatus. Having spent his formative years in Naples, Boccaccio had experienced the cultural diversity of a port city that had extensive connections with the Greek-speaking districts in Calabria, as well as the Latin East and the Byzantine Empire.20 Vittore Branca suggests that Boccaccio may have initially encountered Pilatus in Naples.21 Though he comments on Pilatus’s deviation from Florentine norms for grooming and manners as well as his tendency to become lost in thought (‘meditatione occupatus assidua’), Boccaccio none17  Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, ed. Vincenzo Romano, 2 vols (Bari: Laterza, 1951), 2:762. 18  Translation from Charles G. Osgood, Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1930), 114–15. 19 Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality, 336. 20  See Vittore Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works, trans. Richard Monges (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 16–27; Émile G. Léonard, Boccace et Naples: Un poète à la recherche d’une place et d’un ami (Paris: Droz, 1944). 21 Branca, Boccaccio, 34.



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theless expresses respect and even affection for Pilatus. In describing his working relationship with Pilatus, Boccaccio acknowledges the foreignness of his manners as a form of ethnic difference; that difference, however, does not preclude their ‘singularis amicitia’, an extraordinary friendship consistent with the cross-cultural tenor of Boccaccio’s early Neapolitan experiences. In addition to living intimately with him, Boccaccio negotiated a chair in Greek for this ‘Grecarum doctissimus’ at the newly formed university in Florence.22 In contrast to Boccaccio’s portrait, the image of Leonzio Pilatus that emerges from Petrarch’s letters is a protean figure. Despite Pilatus’s long sojourn in Florence with Boccaccio and his steady preparation of a Latin version of the Iliad and Odyssey, Petrarch routinely describes Pilatus as an itinerant wanderer. Petrarch is particularly alarmed by Pilatus’s ability to pass as a foreigner in both the East and West: ‘idem tamen ut apud nos grecus sic apud illos puto italus, quo scilicet utrobique peregrina nobilitetur origine; hic leo, inquam, undecunque magna belua’ (Seniles 3.6) [While he may be a Greek among us, however, I believe he is an Italian among them, evidently renowned in both places for his foreign origin. Well, this Leo, wherever he is from, is a great beast].23 Pilatus’s mobility and his labile identity seem to offend Petrarch: ‘Non leo marmaricus dum fremit caulis lustrandis ardentior crebriorque quam hic noster provinciis peragrandis’ (Seniles 3.6) [A Libyan lion, suffering from fever, does not pace more restlessly and more continuously in his cage than our Leo crosses entire provinces].24 With this pun on Pilatus’s name, Petrarch compares Pilatus to a caged lion and classifies him as a beast in order to suggest that it is uncivilized – if not monstrous – to cultivate simultaneously both Italian and Greek identities. If such comments exemplify Petrarch’s well-attested xenophobia – and his particular dislike of Greeks25 – they also suggest his complete ignorance of Greek monastic culture, which emphasized the importance of remaining detached from any particular place while always and everywhere adopting the profile of a stranger.26 Pilatus’s exemplary performance as a wanderer disturbs Petrarch who sees only otherness in Pilatus’s extreme cultivation of a Christian ideal. Even in death Pilatus tests Petrarch’s categories for distinguishing between East and West. At one point, Petrarch predicts that Pilatus will be buried in Greece as punishment for leaving Italy: ‘Denique qui itala culta damnavit, senescat per me licebit in silvis hemoniis et grecis esca sit vermibus’ (Seniles 22  Pier Giorgio Ricci, ‘La prima cattedra di greco a Firenze’, Rinascimento 3 (1952): 159–65. 23 Petrarca, Epistole, ed. Dotti, 664, 666. 24 Petrarca, Epistole, ed. Dotti, 668. 25  On Petrarch’s attitudes towards non-Westerners, see Nancy Bisaha, ‘Petrarch’s Vision of the Muslim and Byzantine East’, Speculum 76, no. 2 (2001): 284–314; Roberto Weiss, ‘Petrarca e il mondo greco’, in Weiss, Medieval and Humanist Greek, 166–92. 26 Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality, 335–60.

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5.3) 27 [Let him who has condemned the fields of Italy grow old, with my permission, in the Thessalian forests, and be food for Greek worms]. Later, when Pilatus has been buried at sea off the coast of Italy, Petrarch quips that Pilatus actually ended up feeding Italian fish rather than Greek worms (Seniles 6.1). In a letter to Boccaccio in 1366/67 informing him of Pilatus’s accidental death, Petrarch rehearses with epic grandeur the report that Pilatus died on-board a ship returning to Venice from Constantinople. A lightning bolt reportedly struck Pilatus while he clung to the mast on the deck during an electrical storm. In memorializing Pilatus, Petrarch continues to dwell on his indeterminacy and his difference: ‘Infelix homo, qualiscunque quidem, nos amabat, etsi talis esset qui nec alios nec se ipsum amare didicisset’ (Seniles 6.1) 28 [The unhappy man, whatever he was, loved us, though he was the type that had learned to love neither others nor himself ]. Petrarch does not see Pilatus’s emotional reserve as a manifestation of ἀπάθεια [want of sensation], an attribute valued in Italo-Greek spirituality but evidence of his irredeemable foreignness.29 In suggesting that Pilatus loved only himself and Boccaccio (‘nos amabat’), Petrarch privileges Pilatus’s Italian interlocutors over any Greek affiliations. Pilatus’s death at sea in transit between Constantinople and Venice marks the final reversal in this quintessentially Mediterranean drama of translatio, a translatio from East to West and from classical to medieval, from Greek to Latin. These vectors, of course, are not identical nor are they even analogous, since the Byzantine world of the fourteenth century did not function as a reified repository for ancient Greek language or culture. Although the Homeric epics were core texts in the curriculum of the Byzantine schools,30 Byzantine historiography traced medieval Greek identity through Rome, because the Byzantine Empire was founded on the premise that the Roman Empire had been transferred to the East when the emperor Constantine established Constantinople as the new imperial capital. The legitimacy of the Byzantine Empire thus depended on the legitimacy of the ancient Roman Empire, thereby making the settlement of Rome by Trojan refugees a critical link in the historical trajectory that authorized the ‘Roman Empire’ of the East.31 Consequently, although the Homeric texts formed an important 27 Petrarca, Res seniles, libri V–VIII, ed. Rizzo, 74. 28 Petrarca, Res seniles, libri V–VIII, ed. Rizzo, 114. 29 Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality, 342. Even Petrarch’s description in Seniles 6.1 of Pilatus clinging to the mast of the ship during the storm that killed him fits the ‘vigilant expectation of death’ that Hester ascribes to Italo-Greek monastic spirituality (351). 30  Robert Browning, ‘Homer in Byzantium’, Viator 6 (1975): 15–33. 31  See Elizabeth M. Jeffreys, ‘The Attitudes of Byzantine Chroniclers towards Ancient History’, Byzantion 49 (1979): 199–238; Robert Browning, ‘The Continuity of Hellenism in the Byzantine World: Appearance or Reality?’ in Greece Old and New, ed. Tom Winnifrith and Penelope Murray (London: Macmillan, 1983), 111–28.



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component of Byzantine culture, they did not serve a foundational role analogous to the role performed by Virgil’s Aeneid in the Latin West. For the medieval West, the paradigm of translatio studii was predicated on the transference of culture from Greece to Rome and then – at least in Chrétien de Troyes’s original twelfth-century articulation of it – to France.32 For Petrarch, the notion of translatio studii situated Italy – rather than France – as the appropriate telos for ancient Greek culture. Petrarch consequently mocks Byzantine claims to imperium: Greci enim Constantinopolim alteram Romam vocant, quam non parem modo antique, sed maiorem corporibus ac divitiis effectam dicere ausi sunt; quod si in utroque verum esset, sicut in utroque … falsum est, certe viris armis ac virtutibus et gloria parem dicere, quamvis impudens greculus non audebit. (Seniles 3.6)33 [The Greeks call Constantinople another Rome. They have dared to call it not only equal to the ancient city, but greater in monuments and graced with riches. But if this were as true on both counts as it is false … surely no Greekling, however impudent, would dare to call them equal in men, arms, virtues and glory.]

Not only does he refuse to concede monumental greatness to the city of Constantinople, but Petrarch also expresses his disdain for the Greek people as a whole in his contemptuous use of the diminutive greculus to designate any Greek who dares to promote the East over the West. Classical Latin authors such as Cicero and Juvenal employ the term graeculus dismissively in disparaging the habits of the Greeks who lived in ancient Rome;34 Petrarch’s use of greculus in this passage aligns his own attitude towards the Greeks with the ancient Roman celebration of their ascendance in the Mediterranean. In his refusal to recognize the legitimacy of Byzantine claims to both the Greek and the Roman past, Petrarch constructs Greek and Roman identities as mutually exclusive. His inability to master the Greek language, however, undermines Petrarch’s sense of entitlement to the legacy of the ancient world no matter how much he might mimic ancient Roman prejudice against Greeks. 32  See Michelle A. Freeman, The Poetics of Translatio Studii and Conjointure: Chrétien de Troyes’s ‘Cligés’ (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1979). 33 Petrarca, Epistole, ed. Dotti, 668. 34 Cicero, De Oratore, 1.11.47, 1.22.102, ed. and trans. Edward William Sutton, 2 vols, 2nd edn, Loeb Classical Library 348, 349 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 1:36, 72; Juvenal, Satires, 3.78, in Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Susanna Morton Braund, Loeb Classical Library 91 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 172. On Petrarch’s adoption of Cicero’s attitudes towards the Greeks, see Weiss, ‘Petrarca e il mondo greco’, 170–2.

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Boccaccio does not share Petrarch’s attitudes towards contemporary Greeks and Byzantine culture. Boccaccio embraced Pilatus despite his difference, and Boccaccio describes how he himself acted as Latin scribe in recording Pilatus’s oral performance and explication of the Homeric texts as well as the ancient world they represent. In this collaboration, we catch a glimpse of translatio as an exercise in the ethics of hospitality so that translatio itself becomes the gesture of welcome in the face of otherness. Boccaccio consequently describes translation as a collaborative enterprise rather than the production of an artefact to be consumed by a later reader. Despite the domestic space in which this translatio takes shape, neither the source text nor the target language was in the mother tongue of either interlocutor. If Pilatus’s basic qualification as a scholar or translator of the Homeric epics was his Greek identity, the Homeric dialect of ancient Greek was relatively removed from the vernacular Greek of the fourteenth-century Mediterranean, and Pilatus’s ability to read the Homeric epics ultimately depended on the education he had received in monastic centres of learning.35 Since Latin functioned as an exclusively learned language in fourteenth-century Italy, its use as a target language in this collaborative act of translatio would produce a ‘utopian surplus’ in Lawrence Venuti’s terms – a linguistic remainder created when ‘translating releases a surplus of meanings which refer to domestic cultural traditions’.36 The Latin of Pilatus’s translation interpellates a reader acculturated to the interpretive communities inhabited by a learned elite, as well as the cultural values attached to Latin readership. In its original manuscript context with its bilingual format, Pilatus’s translation implies a reader who would use the Latin to read the Greek, an unattainable, utterly utopian goal, given the lack of Greek literacy in fourteenth-century Italy. Boccaccio and Petrarch accommodate the text that results from this collaborative effort at translatio in accordance with their approach to identity and difference. Petrarch’s desire for Greek literature, though essentially a desire for a few, particular, ancient Greek texts, is first and foremost a desire for communion with Homer-the-author. As a diligent student of the Aeneid, Petrarch saw the Homeric epics as the textual precursors to Virgil’s narrative of empire and destiny. For Petrarch, the presumed monumentality of these inaccessible texts could only derive from an urbane, self-conscious author such as himself, or such as he imagined classical Latin authors to be. Included in Petrarch’s vast correspondence are letters addressed to ancient Roman authors such as Virgil, Horace, Cicero and Seneca, authors whom he revered and whose works shaped his own authorial self-fashioning. Petrarch also composed a letter to Homer, although he could not read the Homeric epics; this letter (Familiares 24.12) is constructed as a response to a letter he 35  See Pertusi, ‘Leonzio Pilato a Creta’. 36  Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004), 499.



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received under the fictional signature of Homer.37 The epistolary structure enables Petrarch to dwell on the intensity of his desire for this personified Homer, a desire he expresses in unabashedly erotic language: ‘Et ut secretiore aditu te locandum scias, animae medio receptaculum tibi avidissime prorsus ac reverentissime praeparavi: ad summam amor ad te meus sole clarior ferventiorque est’38 [Know, too, that in order to consign you to a more secure place, I have prepared in the depths of my heart a retreat for you with great feeling and reverence. In sum, my love for you is brighter and hotter than the sun].39 Petrarch contrasts his own ardour for Homer-the-author to his assumption that modern Greeks have neglected Homer: Non parva ex parte Homericae vigiliae perierunt, non tam nobis, nemo enim perdidit quod non habuit, quam Graiis, qui ne qua nobis in re cederent, ignaviam quoque nostram in litteris supergressi, Homeri libros multos quasi totidem alterius suorum luminum radios amisere: indigni qui hac tanta coecitate fulgur illud habuisse glorientur.40 [A considerable portion of Homer’s sleepless toil has perished, not so much for us – for no one loses what he did not possess – as for the Greeks, who in trying not to yield to us in anything, surpassed us even in our sloth and in our neglect of letters. They have surely lost many of Homer’s works, which were for them as so many rays of light emanating from one of their two brightest stars; and so their blindness has made them unworthy of glorying in the possession of such a light.]41

In his assertion that many of Homer’s books had been lost, Petrarch assumes that the Homeric corpus originally contained more of the Troy matter than does the narrative preserved in the Iliad, which only covers four days of fighting in the tenth year of the Trojan War. The Troy matter as it circulated in the medieval West was derived largely from two, late antique Latin epitomes of Greek narratives: Dares’s De excidio Troiae and Dictys’s Ephemeridos Belli Troiani.42 Dares’s and Dictys’s texts transmit a vast 37  This letter was probably composed and sent by Pietro da Muglio. See Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 171–2. 38 Petrarca, De rebus familiaribus, ed. Fracassetti, 3:304. 39  Translation from Francesco Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri XVII–XVIV, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 349. 40 Petrarca, De rebus familiaribus, ed. Fracassetti, 3:296. 41 Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. Bernardo, 344. 42  Dares Phrygius, De excidio Troiae historia, ed. Ferdinand Meister (Leipzig: Teubner, 1873); Dictys Cretensis, Ephemeridos Belli Troiani libri, ed. Werner Eisenhut (Leipzig: Teubner, 1973).

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narrative tradition from the ancient Greek epic cycle that provides a more comprehensive account of the Trojan War than that recorded in the Homeric epics; this large narrative tradition is not thought to have originated with the Homeric epics.43 Medieval readers thus had access to a more comprehensive narrative of the Trojan War than is offered by the Iliad; consequently, the vast medieval textual traditions of Troy that derived from Dares and Dictys make the limited narrative span of the Iliad look truncated and incomplete. Largely unaware that the Troy matter as it was transmitted to medieval readers was not derived from Homer but from the much more extensive epic cycle, Petrarch attributes the presumed loss of the rest of ‘Homer’ – the complete plot of the Trojan War narrated only in the epic cycle – to the Byzantine failure to cultivate the role assigned to the Greeks in the trajectory of translatio studii. For Petrarch, the restoration of his conception of Homer to the Latin West through translation or the acquisition of Greek literacy would locate the significance of Greek culture securely in the past – before Rome, before Virgil and, most emphatically, before the emergence of the Byzantine Empire and its pretence to imperial stature. Boccaccio, by contrast, developed an interest in the Troy narrative writ large rather than cultivating an affinity for Homer-the-author.44 In Angevin Naples, the non-Homeric traditions of the Trojan War were available in Latin, French and Italian texts. From his formative years in Naples, Boccaccio had absorbed a Trojan paradigm of history and destiny shaped by the cultural value attributed to the Troy narratives in French – such as Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie or the anonymous Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César – that were copied or compiled in the francophone court of Robert of Anjou. Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, for instance, was translated into the Neapolitan dialect in the 1340s.45 During his stay in Naples, Boccaccio composed his own Troy-narrative, Il Filostrato (1335–40), a verse romance set in Troy which testifies to Boccaccio’s engagement of the Troy matter in its multilingual, medieval traditions without reference to the Homeric texts. In addition, Robert of Anjou commissioned numerous translations of Greek medical and scientific texts into Latin.46 These two components of the literary culture of Angevin 43  See Jonathan S. Burgess, The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 44  Boccaccio is more inclined to cultivate Virgil as auctor. See Karen Elizabeth Gross, ‘Virgilian Hauntings in Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium’, Medievalia et Humanistica new series 31 (2005): 15–40. 45  See Nicola de Blasi, ed., Libro de la Destructione de Troya: Volgarizzamento napoletano trecentesco da Guido delle Colonne (Rome: Bonacci, 1986). 46  Cornelia C. Coulter, ‘The Library of the Angevin Kings at Naples’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 75 (1944): 141–55; Roberto Weiss, ‘The Translators from the Greek of the Angevin Court of Naples’, in Weiss, Medieval and Humanist Greek, 108–33.



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Naples – the proliferation of vernacular and Latin texts on Troy not attached to any classical auctor and the ubiquity of verbatim translation from Greek into Latin – acculturated Boccaccio to appreciate the interlinear translation produced through his collaborative exchange with Leonzio Pilatus. Boccaccio eventually drew narrative authority from Pilatus’s lessons and his Latin translations: his work with Pilatus, he defensively asserts, enables him to cite the Homeric texts in their original Greek in his Latin prose treatise on Roman mythology, De genealogia deorum: Ipse ego fui, qui primus ex Latinis a Leontio in privato Yliadem audivi … Et, esto non satis plene perceperim, percepi tamen quantum potui, nec dubium, si permansisset homo ille vagus diutius penes nos, quin plenius percepissem. Sed quantulum cunque ex multis didicerim, non nullos tamen preceptoris demonstratione crebra integre intellexi, eosque prout oportunum visum est, huic operi miscui. Quid hoc mali est?47 [I, too, was the first to hear Leontius privately render the Iliad in Latin … And though I did not understand Homer any too well, I got such knowledge of him as I could; and if that wanderer had dwelt longer among us, I should certainly have learned much more. But little as I did gain of the vast whole, some passages I came to understand very well by frequent interpretation of my preceptor; these have I, on occasion, embodied in this work. Now what possible harm can come from this?]48

While Petrarch sought to commune with Homer-the-poet, an embodied author like himself, Boccaccio emphasizes his close working relationship with Pilatus as translator and instructor. Throughout De genealogia, Boccaccio cites Pilatus as an authority with phrases such as ‘ut ait Leontius’, ‘secundum Leontium’, ‘ut Leontius asserit’.49 Even in discussing the Trojan War, Boccaccio is more likely to cite Leontius than Homer. For Boccaccio, it is Pilatus – not Homer-the-poet – who authorizes his own Latin treatise on ancient culture and through whom he might situate himself as auctor. The poetic structure of Virgil’s Aeneid could not be more different from the Homeric epics. While Petrarch no doubt imagined the Homeric epics to be a Greek equivalent to the Aeneid, he also knew from Horace’s Ars poetica that Homer had a reputation for sleeping on the job: as Horace puts it, ‘indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus’ [I am indignant when the good Homer nods off ].50 Roman poets like Horace were struck by the endless repetitions and significant omissions from the plot as well as the contradictions that are 47 Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum, ed. Romano, 2:766. 48  Translation in Osgood, Boccaccio on Poetry, 120. 49 Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum, ed. Romano, 1:15, 2:658, 2:266. 50 Horace, Ars poetica, line 359, in Satires, Epistles, The Art of Poetry, ed. and trans. H.

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to be found within the structure of Homeric narrative. Horace’s judgement reflects the fact that, as orally composed texts, the Homeric epics did not fall within the horizon of expectation that informs textually based literary cultures. Orally transmitted texts depend on the deployment of oral formulae – whether as phrases, lines or longer passages – which are repeated, often verbatim, throughout the narrative.51 These formulae function as units of poetic composition as well as mnemonic devices for transmission and performance by the rhapsode. The epithets and patronymics found throughout Homeric verse are the smallest examples of epic formulae; the repetition of whole passages – which particularly irritated Horace – are the largest. Thus the Greek hexameters of the Iliad and Odyssey that Leonzio Pilatus undertook to translate differed from Latin poetry not only linguistically but also formally since Pilatus encountered a source text that structurally violated Augustan, let alone late medieval, poetics. As Boccaccio’s description of his working relationship with Pilatus suggests, the Latin translation produced from their collaboration was an interlinear Greek–Latin text, a translation similar to the Latin translations of Greek scientific texts produced for the library of Robert of Anjou; one surviving copy of the translation preserves an interlinear, Greek and Latin format.52 Pilatus’s translations are verbum ex verbo renditions of the Homeric epics at the most reductive level and in the most literal sense: Pilatus presents a Latin equivalent for each word in Greek, placed in exactly the sequence in which the words occur in each line of Greek hexameter, since each word appears directly above the Greek word.53 Given that the smallest semantic unit of the Homeric epics was the formula rather than the word, a translator could potentially come to appreciate these formulae and to reproduce them as recognizable units. Pilatus, however, approaches each line of Greek as a sequence of single words rather than formulae; the resulting transposition of each word as a single lexical unit does not result in a syntactical order that observes the conventional word order of Latin but reproduces the word order of Homeric hexameters, which are structured around the demands of oralformulaic verse. For instance, in book six of the Iliad, Helenus the seer tells his brother Hector to go back into Troy and find their mother, Hecuba, and Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library 194 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 480. 51  For an overview of how oral-formulaic traditions function in Homeric poetry, see Joachim Latacz, Homer, His Art and His World, trans. James P. Holoka (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 52  Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Lat. IX 2, cited in Tiziano Rossi, ed., Il codice parigino latino 7880.1. Iliade di Omero tradotta in latino da Leonzio Pilato con le postille di Francesco Petrarca (Milan: Libreria Malavasi, 2003), preface (unpaginated). 53  For an analysis of Pilatus’s translation, see Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato, 433–6; Robin Sowerby, ‘The Homeric Versio Latina’, Illinois Classical Studies 21 (1996): 162–5.



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to have her select a lovely robe, take it as an offering to the temple of Pallas Athena and lay it on the knees of the goddess. He further suggests the form Hecuba’s plea to Athena should take: καί οἱ ὑποσχέσθαι δυοκαίδεκα βοῦς ἐνὶ νηῷ ἤνις ἠκέστας ἱερευσέμεν, αἴ κ’ ἐλεήσῃ ἄστυ τε καὶ Τρώων ἀλόχους καὶ νήπια τέκνα. (6.93–5)54

[Let her promise to dedicate within the shrine twelve heifers, yearlings, never broken, if only she will have pity on the town of Troy, and the Trojan wives, and their innocent children.]55

Pilatus renders these lines: Et sibi promittat duo et decem boves in templo Iuvenes impunctos sacrificare. sique misereatur Civitatis. et troianorum mulierum. et parvorum filiorum.56

The Latin equivalent selected for each Greek word provides an approximate semantic equivalence without regard for register. The appositive phrase that specifies the gender and characteristics of the cattle to be sacrificed, ἤνις ἠκέστας [female yearlings untamed/unbroken], becomes iuvenes impunctos. The masculine form of the adjective impunctos no longer restricts the sacrifice to heifers. Impunctus – a rare form in Latin – denotes ‘without points’, or perhaps ‘unpunctured’. Impunctus might imply an animal not yet spoiled by being touched, that is, not yet marked by the rope, or it might by extension suggest an animal whose horns have yet to pierce through its skin. In rendering ἐλεαίρω, which takes the accusative, as misereor, which takes the genitive, Pilatus must change the cases of ἄλοχος and τέκνον. The phrase νήπια τέκνα [helpless children] becomes ‘parvorum filiorum’ [little sons/children]. While the pathos of the Homeric passage is lost and the cases of the noun cannot be preserved, the word-for-word equivalence would nonetheless guide the reader who uses the Latin to the general meaning of the hexameters of the Iliad. Helenus’s speech, which includes this passage, is repeated verbatim almost two hundred lines later. Pilatus’s translation of this formulaic passage is identical, except that, at line 275, he translates ἀλόχους more precisely this time as uxorum rather than mulierum. The fact that throughout his translation he does not reproduce Homeric formulae verbatim illustrates how much he is 54  The Iliad of Homer, Books I–XII, ed. M. M. Willcock (London: Macmillan, 1978), 85. 55  The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). 56  Rossi, ed., Il codice parigino latino, fol. 55r.

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reaching for an equivalent for each isolated word without regard for the syntax of each line, let alone context. Pilatus’s Latin is consequently more technical than poetic or Virgilian. While the resulting translation is not legible as Latin prose, it is consistent with the extensive medieval tradition of Latin ‘interlinear bilingual’ translations of Greek sacred texts, as Walter Berschin has shown.57 Such translations are not meant to be read in place of the original text but to assist the reader in construing the meanings of the source text. As a guide to reading the Greek text, Pilatus’s translation is effective because the grammatical and syntactical irregularities of the Latin would continually impede the reader’s progress through the Latin translation and send the reader to consult the Greek source text. The ideal textual community envisioned in the initial version of the text that emerges from Pilatus and Boccaccio’s collaboration is a learned readership enabled to construe Greek hexameters with the guidance of the Latin superscript. If the choice of Latin as target language represents a remainder in the translation, the fact that the Latin takes its syntactical cues from the Homeric Greek text suggests a utopian community of readers, readers who might use the Latin to read the Greek. The search for a Latin equivalent for each Greek word does not result in a medieval text that functions as the cultural equivalent of the Homeric text. The ethnic identities of the medieval Mediterranean, for instance, were not equivalent to the ethnicities of the ancient world. For that reason, Pilatus consistently deals with the proper names for persons and places by simply transliterating the word from Greek into Latin.58 The one exception to this practice illustrates how the translatio of the Homeric texts becomes implicated in the uses of history in support of particular ethnic categories. Starting in book one and continuing sporadically throughout the twenty-four books of the Iliad, Pilatus frequently renders the Greek words for Ἀχαιοἱ (Iliad 1.22) and Δαναοὶ (Iliad 1.42) as Greci. Although the term ‘Achaean’ in the Homeric texts may technically designate specific tribes, it usually refers to the Greeks before Troy; the term Danai is likewise used in the Iliad to designate the Greeks collectively. Since Pilatus elsewhere uses a more accurate designation of Archivi (from Latin Achia) for Ἀχαιοἱ, and the word Danai occurs throughout Virgil’s Aeneid, Pilatus’s decision to use the term Graecus interchangeably with Archivi highlights an important ethnic distinction in his translation. Graecus is not a Homeric word; in fifth-century Greek it refers to specific tribes. The Romans initially use Graecus to refer collectively to all the peoples of Greece; that usage then enters Hellenistic Greek from Latin. In medieval Latin, the term Graecus likewise designates a Byzantine or ethnic Greek. Given the precision that Pilatus’s translation usually exhibits, his frequent use of Greci in place of Archivi or Danai invites a comparison 57 Berschin, Greek Letters, 39. 58  This is evident in the catalogue of ships in book two of the Iliad, which is filled with place names that Pilatus transliterates.



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between the present and the past in offering a semantic equivalence that identifies contemporary Graeci from the Byzantine Empire with the Greeks of the ancient world who sacked Troy. Pilatus’s Latin rendition of the Iliad thus suggests that Byzantine culture should be seen in terms of the heroic past narrated in the Homeric epics. In 1367 Petrarch received from Boccaccio a manuscript containing Pilatus’s translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey; while the initial manuscript produced by Pilatus contained both the Greek text and an interlinear Latin translation, the manuscript sent to Petrarch contained only the Latin translation.59 Petrarch’s copy, made for him from Boccaccio’s manuscript by his secretary Giovanni Malpaghini, consequently contains only Pilatus’s Latin rendition of the Iliad. What had originated as an interlinear translation designed to facilitate a reader’s ability to construe the meaning of each line of Greek poetry becomes a single language text by the time it reaches Petrarch’s hands. Petrarch eventually annotated his copies of these texts with marginal comments and glosses, many of them copied from the marginal commentary that Pilatus had provided as part of his translation.60 On the first folio of his copy of the Iliad, Petrarch disparagingly characterizes Pilatus’s translation decisions by quoting Jerome’s often-cited maxim about translation: Pro excusatione leonis nostri qualis interpretis libet premittere verba Jeronimi ex prohemio libri de temporibus / Si cui inquit non videtur lingue gratiam interpretatione mutari homerum ad verbum exprimat in latinum. plus aliquid dicam. / eundem in sua lingua prose verbis interpretetur. videbit ordinem ridiculum. et poetam eloquentissimum vix loquentem.61 [It pleases our Leonzio as a translator to send forth for an excuse the words of Jerome from the preface to De temporibus: if anyone says that the grace of a language does not seem to be changed by translation, let him express Homer in the Latin language. I will say something further. Let him translate the same thing into prose in his own language. He will see the word order become ridiculous and the most eloquent poet scarcely able to speak.]

59  See Rossi, ed., Il codice parigino latino. 60  Marianne Pade, ‘The Fortuna of Leontius Pilatus’s Homer. With an Edition of Pier Candido Decembrio’s “Why Homer’s Greek Verses are Rendered in Latin Prose”‘, in Classica et Beneventana: Essays Presented to Virginia Brown on the Occasion of her 65th Birthday, ed. F. T. Coulson and A. A. Grotans (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 149–72; Vincenzo Fera, ‘Petrarca Lettore dell’ Iliade’, Quaderni Petrarcheschi 12–13 (2002–3): 141–54; Roberto Weiss, ‘Notes on Petrarch and Homer’, Rinascimento 4 (1952): 263–75; Weiss, ‘Petrarca e il mondo greco’; Pierre de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme, 2 vols, 2nd edn (1907; repr., Paris: Champion, 1965), 2:174–88; Albert Stanburrough Cook, ‘Odyssey, Seventh Book, as Known to Petrarch’, Philological Quarterly 4 (1925): 25–38. 61  Rossi, ed., Il codice parigino latino, fol. 1r.

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Petrarch makes a similar statement in his letter to Homer (Familiares 24.12), as well as in the first letter in which he discusses the fact that Pilatus has undertaken a translation of Homer (Variae 25).62 In criticizing Pilatus’s methodology as a translator, Petrarch betrays not only his ignorance of the structure of Homeric verse in the original Greek epic (which would have been beyond his frame of reference) but also his dismay that Pilatus does not provide him with a Virgilian-like epic. While Petrarch recognized Pilatus’s inability to render Homeric poetry into a Latin verse reminiscent of Virgil’s weighty and sonorous hexameters, he was nonetheless quite eager to possess a copy of Pilatus’s translation. Petrarch, of course, lacked the linguistic skill necessary to use Pilatus’s translation as a guide to reading the Greek source-text. Once he possessed a copy of the Homeric texts in Latin translation, Petrarch cites Homer from Pilatus’s version.63 In his tract entitled De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, composed just before his death, Petrarch quotes passages from the first two books of Pilatus’s rendition of the Iliad. Since this tract is a response to the charge that Petrarch is ignorant, his ability to include Homer among the auctores he cites contributes to his defence. He admits that he lacks knowledge of the Greek language, and he points specifically to Pilatus’s Latin translation: ‘quam iam ante posuerat Homerus; sic enim ait, quantum nobis in latinum soluta oratione translatum est: Non bonum multidominium: unus dominus sit, unus imperator’ [as Homer had already put it; thus indeed he says as it was translated into Latin prose for us: multidominium is not good: let there be one lord, one emperor].64 This passage quotes verbatim from Pilatus’s translation of Iliad 2.204, and Petrarch repeats Pilatus’s coinage of ‘multidominium’ to render πολυκοιρανίη, a hapax legomenon in the Homeric text that refers to the rule or sovereignty of many. At another point, however, Petrarch has to paraphrase and revise a longer passage in book two in order to render Pilatus’s text legible as Latin: ‘Et Thersiten pede claudum, distortum cruribus, humeris gibbosum, pectore concauum, caluastrum uertice, atque pruriginosum, et Agamemnoni Grecorum regi, et Achilli Grecorum fortissimo detrahentem publice Ylias narrat Homerica’ [And Thersites, lame in the foot, deformed in the legs, humpbacked with a sunken chest, bald and itchy at the crown of his head, and publicly disparaging Agamemnon, king of the Greeks, and Achilles,

62  In his letter to Homer (Familiares 24.12), written when he only had the first four books of the Iliad, Petrarch states that even translation into Latin prose could not completely diminish Homer’s eloquence. See Petrarca, De rebus familiaribus, ed. Fracassetti, 3:293–304. 63  See Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme, 2:167–90; Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato, 381–414. 64  Francesco Petrarca, Le traité ‘De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia’, publié d’après le manuscrit autographe de la Bibliothèque Vaticane, ed. L. M. Capelli (Paris: Champion, 1906), 43.



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the bravest of the Greeks; the Homeric Iliad narrates].65 Petrarch compresses and reorganizes the passage from Pilatus: In cruribus brevis et tortuosus. erat claudus altero pede et in humeris Gibbus. in pectore concavus. postmodum superius Raros capillos parvosque habens. in capite tigna tumescebat. Odiosus Achilli magis erat quam Ulixi. Huic iniuriabatur. tunc Agamennoni divo. (2.217–24)66

In both passages Petrarch displays his knowledge of the Iliad, dependent entirely on Pilatus’s Latin rendition; however, his recasting of the second passage illustrates the degree to which Pilatus’s translation resists inscription into the target language and continually refers back to the syntax and grammar of the Greek source text. Petrarch would appear to hope that once the act of translatio fixed the identity of Homer-as-poet, his own, intimate engagement with Homer would work to stabilize the ethnic integrity of Italy as the proper beneficiary of ancient Greece. The practice of translatio, however, meant that he had to consort with a contemporary Greek like Pilatus, whose easy circulation as an intermediary troubled all the categories of difference thought to separate East from West. In addition, in order to quote Homer in Latin, as he eventually does, he had to work with a text that he would have found highly unpoetic and often ungrammatical. Boccaccio, on the other hand, welcomes Pilatus into his home as well as into his community of scholars through the appointment he negotiates for Pilatus at the University of Florence. Whereas Petrarch is limited to quoting the Homeric texts in the Latin translation provided by Pilatus, Boccaccio’s intimacy with Pilatus gives him the authority to quote the Homeric texts in the original Greek. In forty-five separate quotations in De geneologia deorum, Boccaccio cites the Homeric texts by transcribing the original Greek script; these Greek passages are accompanied by a Latin translation placed in the margins in autograph manuscripts.67 Despite numerous errors, these excerpted passages of Greek in the context of Boccaccio’s Latin prose claim a citational authority that visibly and emphatically differentiates between Boccaccio’s authorial voice and the linguistic and scribal difference – and hence authority – of the Homeric text.68 The act of quoting one of the 65 Petrarca, De sui ipsius, ed. Capelli, 91–2. See Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato, 390–1. 66  Rossi, ed., Il codice parigino latino, fol. 13v. 67  See Cornelia C. Coulter, ‘Boccaccio’s Acquaintance with Homer’, Philological Quarterly 5 (1926): 44–53; Ernest H. Wilkins, ‘The Genealogy of the Editions of the “Genealogia Deorum”‘, Modern Philology 17, no. 8 (1919): 425–38; Ernest Hatch Wilkins, The University of Chicago Manuscript of the Genealogia Deorum Gentilium of Boccaccio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927), 7–14. 68  Wilkins notes the fact that the Greek passages do not match a modern edition of

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Greek auctores in the original simultaneously brings antiquity as well as the East into Boccaccio’s learned performance. It also reinscribes in this text of his late years the ethnic and cultural diversity of Boccaccio’s youthful experiences in Naples. Pilatus’s efforts at translatio attend to the lexical level of linguistic transference, as exemplified in the close verbum ex verbo practice followed throughout the translation. Neither lexical nor semantic equivalence produces cultural or linguistic equivalence. Not only does Pilatus’s Latin fail to measure up to Virgilian poetics, but translatio itself cannot produce symmetry between the Latin West and the Greek East. Although Pilatus spoke a vernacular form of medieval Greek directly related to the ancient language found in the Homeric texts, the Latin text he produces does not share a similar vernacular dialect. For Petrarch, who hoped to find a Latin equivalent for the Homeric texts, the fact that neither Latin nor any dialect of Italian represented a polity identified as Italy would limit the efficacy of Pilatus’s version of the Iliad: even the possession of the Homeric epics could not restore the Roman imper­ium to the Latin West. By according authority to the Greek language rather than relying on its supposed Latin equivalent, Boccaccio implicitly acknowledges the potential of ethnic difference to facilitate a translatio that enables an engagement with linguistic difference, which implies difference writ large. In the final analysis, Boccaccio probably did not know much more Greek than did Petrarch,69 but when he inscribes the Greek script into his Latin treatise, he attempts an unmediated engagement with the Greek language. Of course it is the highly mediated process of working with Leonzio Pilatus to produce an interlinear, Latin–Greek text that enables him to appear to have access to the Homeric epics as well as ancient mythology. Ultimately, this process depends on Boccaccio’s willingness to embrace the Greek language as well as a contemporary Greek, Leonzio Pilatus, despite the potential of both to destabilize categories of identity. Petrarch yearns for Homer-the-poet more than for the original Greek of the Homeric texts: the model of translatio studii Petrarch invokes depends on the act of translatio subsuming the original language and culture of the source text into the target language. If Petrarch wants Homer without the Greeks, Boccaccio seeks the authority of the Homeric texts as part of a cultural and linguistic exchange between East and West, Latin and Greek, antiquity and modernity.

the Homeric text, and that the Latin translations do not always correspond to the Greek; Coulter likewise suggests that the sort of errors found in Boccaccio’s quotations suggest that he had not acquired any real proficiency with the Greek language. See Wilkins, University of Chicago Manuscript, 10; Coulter, ‘Boccaccio’s Acquaintance with Homer’, 51–2. 69  Coulter, ‘Boccaccio’s Acquaintance with Homer’, 51–2; Wilkins, University of Chicago Manuscript.

2 Translation and Transformation in the Ovide moralisé

Miranda Griffin J’ai ajouté un manteau à l’autre, ça flotte encore, mais n’est-ce pas la destination de toute traduction?1 [I have added one coat to the other, it is still floating, but isn’t that the destination of all translation?] The Ovide moralisé is an extraordinary text which translates, amplifies and moralizes Ovid’s Metamorphoses.2 Whereas Latin is the language of learning in the early Middle Ages, the rise in demand for translations of Latin works into the vernacular to be held in libraries of the French-speaking aristocracy in the fourteenth century implicitly presents French as the idiom of Christian wisdom and virtue. By translating a pre-Christian text, the Ovide moralisé participates in this cultural interest in translation,3 but also explores more explicitly the ethical 1  Jacques Derrida, ‘Des tours de Babel’, in Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 227. Subsequent references are provided in parentheses. All translations in this essay are my own. 2  C. de Boer and others, eds, Ovide moralisé: Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle, in Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschapaen te Amsterdam, Afdeeling Letterkunde 15 (1915) (books 1–3); 21 (1920) (books 4–6); 30 (1931) (books 7–9); 37 (1936) (books 10–13); 43 (1938) (books 14–15 and appendices); Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols, 3rd edn rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 42, 43 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977–84). References to these works, giving book and line number, are provided in parentheses as OM and M respectively. 3  Jeanne de Bourgogne, who commissioned the Ovide moralisé, also commissioned Jean de Vignay’s translations of the Legenda Aurea and the Speculum Historiale. See Sarah

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stakes of translation by transforming Ovid’s metamorphoses into revelations of Christian truth. In this essay, I propose to read the dialogue between French and Latin, as it is played out in the exchange between the Ovide moralisé and the Metamorphoses, in the light of Jacques Derrida’s reflections on translation in his article ‘Des tours de Babel’, which is itself, in part, a reading of Maurice de Gandillac’s translation of Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ [The Task of the Translator].4 I shall explore the way in which these very different authors present translation as a process involving a privileged encounter with the sacred. In other essays in this book, Emma Campbell and William Burgwinkle explore the intimate relationship between translatio and the sacred, showing the way in which medieval practices and representations of translation both draw attention to the impossible relationship between language and truth, and attempt to embody truth in language. For both Derrida and the anonymous (but very determined) author of the Ovide moralisé, translation also takes place at the limit of linguistic possibility. The process of translation undertaken by the author of the Ovide moralisé is framed as revealing new Christian truths in the lines of the Metamorphoses: these truths are revealed both at the level of the allegorical reinterpretation of the pre-Christian text, and at the level of the translator’s lexical choice between words in French. As both Derrida and the Ovide moralisé author show, deploying words with multiple meanings in the target language enables the exploitation of intralingual processes of exchange and translation. The Ovide moralisé author uses the verb traire, which has a wide variety of interpretations, including ‘to pull’ and ‘to draw out’, but is often used throughout the Middle Ages to denote the practice of translating one language into another. Pour ce me plaist que je commans Traire de latin en romans Les fables de l’ancien temps, – S’en dirai ce que je entens – Selonc ce qu’Ovides les baille. (OM 1.15–19) [Therefore it pleases me that I should begin to translate from Latin into French fables from ancient times – and I shall say what I understand by them – according to the way in which Ovid presents them.] Kay, The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 43. 4  Walter Benjamin, ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, in Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhaüser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 4, part 1:9–21; Walter Benjamin, Œuvres, trans. Maurice de Gandillac (Paris: Desnoël, 1971). Elsewhere in this volume, Jane Gilbert discusses the importance of Benjamin’s essay for thinking about medieval practices of translation.

translation and transformation in the ovide moralisé 43 This is a problematically straightforward statement of intent: the author declares that he will stick faithfully to the tales ‘Selonc ce qu’Ovides les baille’, yet he also announces his project of adding the moralizations he has inherited from the Latin tradition or is adducing for the first time: ‘S’en dirai ce que je entens’. This rather throwaway description of the complementary process of moralization also belies the author’s meticulous methodology: each tale or section of Ovid’s tale is allocated at least one meaning and very often a series of interpretations is sketched, each leading from another. The ultimate interpretation of each tale from the Metamorphoses is frequently an allegory of one or more tenets of Christian doctrine: the most frequent of these to be found within the Ovide moralisé are the incarnation of Christ and his virgin birth. This is perhaps unsurprising, since the tales of the Metamorphoses precisely feature a host of impossible bodies: the message the Ovide moralisé author repeatedly drives home is that humans who become animals, plants, rocks or gods are pale imitations and pagan distortions of the central truth of the mystery of God becoming flesh.

L’être-à-traduire The author of the Ovide moralisé draws attention to the ethical duty of a Christian translator and moralizer as he comments on his translation of the very first sentence of the Metamorphoses: ‘In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora’ (M 1.1–2). As Sarah Kay points out, the decision as to which of the two nouns formas or corpora agrees with the adjective nova in this sentence is fundamental to the understanding of the Ovide moralisé’s ethical and poetic programme.5 The Loeb Classical Library edition of the Metamorphoses translates this sentence as ‘My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms’, but it could also be rendered – in the sense favoured by the author of the Ovide moralisé – as ‘forms changed into new bodies’. The author prefaces his translation of the proem to the Metamorphoses with a succinct disquisition on the importance of reading virtuously, a plea for divine help as the author embarks upon his mission, and an invitation to his readers to correct his mistakes. He then announces, ‘Or vueil comencier ma matire’ (OM 1.71) [I now wish to begin my subject-matter], and rhymes this line with his opening translation: Ovides dist, ‘Mes cuers vieult dire Les formes qui muees furent En nouviaux cors.’ (OM 1.72–4) [Ovid said, ‘My heart wishes to speak of forms which were transformed into new bodies.’] 5 Kay, Place of Thought, 47–50.

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By weaving Ovid’s words into his own rhyme scheme and metre,6 and by introducing his translation with the straightforward ‘Ovides dist’, the Ovide moralisé author appears to efface any difference between his own French text and his Latin source: the French words are simply those said by Ovid. However, as the author goes on to acknowledge, there is more controversy about this translation than its assured introductory comment suggests. In fact, this is just one version of what ‘Ovides dist’: the author acknowledges this as he gives an alternative, but in his eyes erroneous, translation:       Aucun qui durent L’autour espondre et declairier S’entremistrent de l’empirier, De l’auteur reprendre et desdire, Disant que li autours dut dire, ‘Les cors qui en formes noveles Furent muez’, mes teulz faveles Ne doivent audience avoir. (OM 1.74–81) [Those who were supposed to have illuminated the author and made him known set themselves to blaming, slandering and misrepresenting him; saying that he is supposed to have said, ‘bodies which were transformed into new forms’, but such stories should not be heeded.]

Other commentators, it is suggested, have failed in their duty to explicate Ovid.7 Their inferior translation makes no sense, because this is theologically and therefore physically impossible: since God made the world, ‘il n’iert encors / Ne ne pooit estre nul cors / Qui nove forme receüst’ (OM 1.85–7) [There was not and never could be any body which received new form]. In the beginning, the translator reminds us, there was only God and his divine thought: form to which he gave body.

6  On the Ovide moralisé author’s choice of verse for his work, see Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay, with the participation of Rebecca Dixon, Miranda Griffin, Sylvia Huot, Francesca Nicholson and Finn Sinclair, Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the ‘Rose’ to the ‘Rhétoriqueurs’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), chapter 3. 7  As the author implies earlier: ‘Plusieur ont essaié sans faille / A fere ce que je proupos, / Sans acomplir tout lor proupos’ (OM 1.20–2) [Certainly, several have tried to do what I propose to do, without achieving their entire project]. Ana Pairet observes that ‘la traduction du proemium Ovidien lui permet de régler ses comptes avec ses predésseurs et de démontrer la nouveauté de son projet, marqué par une plus grande fidélité à la lettre du texte’ [The translation of the Ovidian proem permits him to settle the score with his predecessors and to demonstrate the novelty of his own project, distinguished by a greater fidelity to the letter of the text]; Ana Pairet, Les Mutacions des fables: Figures de la métamorphose dans la littérature française du Moyen Âge (Paris: Champion, 2002), 120.

translation and transformation in the ovide moralisé 45 Yet, however superior the Ovide moralisé’s translation of the first sentence of the Metamorphoses may be, preceding it with the words ‘Ovides dist’ is problematic, since this is the understanding of Ovid’s words which is rendered possible only by reading it retrospectively, one might even say anachronistically, from a perspective of Christian virtue and knowledge. Source text and translation merge in the Ovide moralisé author’s framing of his particular allegorical understanding and expertise. As Rita Copeland puts it: ‘Thus a vernacular system of exegesis replaces its Latin precedent; and in a radical move of appropriation, a vernacular translation substitutes itself for the Latin original as the object of exegetical interest.’8 The inclusion by the Ovide moralisé author of an alternative, albeit undesirable, translation of Ovid’s opening declaration of intent nevertheless signals that more than one reading of the Latin text is possible. Our attention is drawn to the importance of correct interpretation – in the sense of both translation and understanding – in the moralizer’s project. The juxtaposition of his insistence on that which ‘Ovide dist’ and the rejected earlier translation reveals the interdependence of the processes of moralization and translation: in order to be able to translate properly, the author needs to understand Christian theology; and in order to be able to moralize properly, he must have a grasp of Latin pre-Christian poetry. Translation and moralization create, dictate and elevate one another. Writing about the tradition of Latin commentary on the Metamorphoses, Ralph Hexter comments, ‘how we want to interpret the poem or an episode will largely determine how we articulate it’.9 In the Ovide moralisé, translation functions as a means of articulation, since it expresses Ovid’s poetry in a different language, and also alternates with moralizations and occasional interpolations from other antique sources in order to divide the stories of the Metamorphoses up into discrete narratives.10 Ana Pairet neatly points out the way in which the Ovide moralisé author echoes the ambiguity of the double plural in the first two lines of the Metamorphoses in his own declaration of intent: 8  Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 114. 9  Ralph Hexter, ‘Medieval Articulations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from Lactantian Segmentation to Arnulfian Allegory’, in Ovid in Medieval Culture, ed. Marilynn Desmond, special issue of Mediaevalia 13 (1989, for 1987): 64. 10  The last book of the Ovide moralisé does not interlace translation and moralization, however: the first third of book fifteen is taken up with the translation of the whole of book fifteen of the Metamorphoses, and the moralization of this translated text does not start until line 2309. On the implications of this specific articulation, see Renate BlumenfeldKosinski, Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and Its Interpretation in Medieval French Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 112–14. On the ‘segmentation and stratification’ of the Metamorphoses by the Ovide moralisé, see James R. Simpson, Fantasy, Identity and Misrecognition in Medieval French Narrative (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000), 139.

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miranda griffin Mes les mutacions des fables, Qui sont bones et profitables, Se Dieus le m’otroie, esclorrai Au plus briement que je porrai, Pour plus plaire a ceulz qui l’orront, Et maint profiter i porront. (OM 1.53–8)

[But I shall, if God grants it to me, explain the transformation of the fables, which are good and profitable, as briefly as I can, so that those who will hear them will enjoy them more and will be able to derive great benefit from them.]

Are the ‘mutacions des fables’ which the author advocates the metamorphoses portrayed in Ovid’s poem, or the author’s own translations of them?11 Marylène Possamaï-Pérez reminds us that the medieval concept of translatio involves both translation and transformation, interwoven processes which, of course, lie at the heart of the Ovide moralisé:12 throughout the Ovide moralisé, translation and moralization inform one another, and play on the transformative effects of language, specifically the transformative effects of language in translation. Just as Ovid’s tales spring from one another in a complex and apparently chaotic concatenation, so the shape shifting and allegory of the Ovide moralisé fuse and feed into one another. From the Metamorphoses, the Ovide moralisé produces a revelation of Christian truth. The Ovide moralisé, then, retrospectively reads the Metamorphoses as summoning completion and Christianization. In book fifteen, the author reflects on the demands of scriptural exegesis and compares it to his own task: Bon sens et acordable à voir Puet l’en en ceste fable metre, Qui bien set exposer la letre. Ensi est la Sainte Escripture En plusiors leus trouble et obscure, Et samble fable purement. (OM 15.2546–51) [He who knows how to interpret writing can place into this fable good sense, which is pleasing to see. Similarly, holy scripture is obscure and difficult to understand in several places, and appears to be nothing but stories.] 11 Pairet, Les Mutacions, 108. Pairet points out in her introduction that, although Ovid’s poem was hugely influential throughout the Middle Ages, the word métamorphose was not used in French before the fifteenth century. 12  Marylène Possamaï-Pérez, L’Ovide moralisé: Essai d’interprétation (Paris: Champion, 2006), 20.

translation and transformation in the ovide moralisé 47 Holy scripture can appear to be just as fantastic and fictional as the Metamorphoses, observes the Ovide moralisé author: it is the reader’s virtue which is able to ‘metre’ good and appropriate meaning into the text being interpreted.13 The medieval author and the tradition in which he writes do not understand the Ovidian poem as deliberately concealing a Christian truth which will be unveiled by later readers.14 This practice of reading into an original an eternal truth which was not originally written into it has the effect of unsettling the role and identity of exactly what is ‘original’ in this transaction of translation and transformation: any hierarchy of pre-existing text and its translation is troubled. Derrida’s writing on translation also highlights the way in which the conceptions and processes of translation complicate the causal relationship between an original text and its translated duplicate. The sacred text which both demands yet defies translation is, he argues, the epitome of all translation: ‘Le sacré et l’être-à-traduire ne se laissent pas penser l’un sans l’autre’ (224) [we cannot think the sacred and the to-be-translated one without the other]. As ‘l’être à traduire’, posited as such by the Ovide moralisé, the Metamorphoses is a sacred text, the ‘letre’, which is to be correctly interpreted by those ‘Qui bien set exposer’. The source text, ‘l’être-à-traduire’, is described by Derrida as anticipating the event, the advent, of translation. He uses a deliberately messianic idiom of anticipation, annunciation and revelation in order to show the way in which the future translation of a text is always already embedded within it, with a kind of sacred timelessness. Ce code religieux est ici essentiel. Le texte sacré marque la limite, le modèle pur, même s’il est inaccessible, de la traductibilité pure, l’idéal à partir duquel on pourra penser, évaluer, mesurer la traduction essentielle, c’est à dire poétique. La traduction, comme sainte croissance des langues, annonce le terme messianique, certes, mais le signe de ce terme et de cette croissance n’y est ‘présent’ (gegenwärtig) que dans le ‘savoir de cette distance’, dans l’Entfernung, l’éloignement qui nous y rapporte. (233) [This religious code is essential here. The sacred text marks the limit, the pure model – even if it is inaccessible – of pure translatability, the ideal which is the starting point for our conception, evaluation and measurement of the essential, that is to say, poetic, translation. Translation, as the holy growth of languages, heralds the messianic end, certainly, but the sign of that end and of that growth is ‘present’ (gegenwärtig) only in the ‘knowledge of this distance’, in the Entfernung, the distancing which relates us to it.] 13  See Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 125–6. 14  As Simpson puts it, ‘the Ovide moralisé’s approach to adaptation is predicated on the idea that Ovid’s transgressive allure must not be mistaken for divine inspiration’; Simpson, Fantasy, Identity and Misrecognition, 173.

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As I shall show later in this essay, the notion of annunciation is also crucial to the Christian project of moralization constructed by the Ovide moralisé. Indeed, in ‘Des tours de Babel’, Derrida identifies a series of metaphors which he finds (or places) in Benjamin’s essay, metaphors which represent the a-chronological contact between source and translation, as well as the impossibility of perfect translation. In the next section of this essay, however, I shall explore the way in which an emblematic story of impossible translation, that of the tower of Babel, is articulated and interpreted by both Derrida and the author of the Ovide moralisé. Translating Babel Derrida represents translation as a task which is impossible and imperative precisely because of the divine nature of the language and text involved. The title of Derrida’s article itself plays on the limits of translation, since tours can be rendered into English as ‘towers’, ‘tours’ or ‘turns’: as he takes us on a tour of this mythical tower, Derrida shows how translation introduces its own turns into language. For Derrida, the tale of Babel functions as a parable for the origins of translation: the fictional, fantasized moment at which the word of God and the name of God intervened to uncouple language from any unitary connection with the world; the moment which is identified as heralding both the impossibility and the necessity of translation, as well as the creative play among and within languages which inevitably results from language’s essential otherness. As he puts it, ‘Cette histoire raconte, entre autres choses, l’origine de la confusion des langues, la multiplicité des idiomes, la tâche nécessaire et impossible de la traduction, sa nécessité comme impossibilité’ (208) [This story relates, amongst other things, the origin of the confusion of languages, the multiplicity of idioms, the necessary and impossible task of translation, and its necessity as impossibility]. The story of the tower of Babel, then, retrospectively constructs translation as a law which cannot be obeyed, a debt which cannot be paid, as human language becomes cast as fragmented and limited in the face of God and compared to the untranslatable name of God. This tale provides an unattainable paradigm for the perfection exacted by the task the translator is set. Babel recounts the narrative of a lost origin of perfect linguistic equivalence, holding out the mythical hope of linguistic plenitude to which translation aspires but which it can, necessarily, never attain. The Ovide moralisé author includes the story of Babel in his first book, which weaves together some sections of the book of Genesis and the first book of the Metamorphoses. The tower of Babel is deployed as a biblical allegory of the tale of the Titans who attacked Jupiter in book one of the Metamorphoses. By interpolating the Babel story into the Ovide moralisé, the author gives the sense that the multiplicity of language, and the inevitable gaps in comprehension that this produces, is part of the linguistic reality in

translation and transformation in the ovide moralisé 49 which he is composing, and presents difficulties he must overcome. At the same time, however, he claims, ‘La fable et la Divinité / S’acordent’ (OM 1.1154–5) [fable and divine scripture agree]. Just as the Ovide moralisé author simultaneously opened up and cancelled out doubt about the correct translation of the opening of the Metamorphoses, in the appropriation and retelling of the story of Babel, he at once reminds his readers of the pitfalls of translation in general and stamps his authority on the particular translation he has produced. The Titans, like the proud builders of the tower of Babel, wanted to reach heaven, but God (as an allegoresis of Jupiter) caused them to fall. The tower could not be completed because of the sudden outbreak of multilingualism: Mes Dieus, qui vit leur fol corage, Leur confondi si le langage Et varia diversement, Qu’un seul, qui leur ert seulement Comuns a touz par tout le monde Tant come il dure a la reonde, Mua en septuante et deus: Lors mut tel contreverse entr’eus Que l’un craventoit l’autre a terre, Quar, quant li uns demandoit perre, Li autres, qui pas ne savoit Son langage et un autre avoit, Li aportoit mortier ou sable. (OM 1.1161–73) [But God, who saw their foolish intention, confused and varied language in such diversity that the singular language, which was their only one, common to all throughout the world as long as it lasted, changed into seventy-two languages. Then such confusion arose between them that they knocked one another to the ground; for, when one asked for stone, the other, who didn’t know his language and spoke another, would bring him mortar or sand.]

Despite the seventy-two languages which emerge from this story, and the ensuing impossibility of the building project, the Ovide moralisé author is able to translate unequivocally the name of its setting. ‘Babilon,’ c’est ‘confusion’. Pour la multiplication Des langages que Dieux fist lores L’apele on Babiloine encores, Et li langages qui lors furent Controuvré par le monde durent. (OM 1.1179–84)

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[‘Babylon’ means ‘confusion’. Because of the multiplication of languages which God then enacted, it is still called Babylon, and the languages which were then manufactured endure throughout the world.]

The proper noun ‘Babel’, itself morphed into ‘Babilon’, is translated, without any confusion or interference created by the linguistic plurality which was ‘controuvé’ at this point in the story, as ‘confusion’. However, as Derrida points out, it is impossible to translate the name ‘Babel’, a proper noun, which ostensibly existed in a kind of utopian ur-language. Dans quelle langue la tour de Babel fut-elle construite et déconstruite? Dans une langue à l’intérieur de laquelle le nom propre de Babel pouvait aussi, par confusion, être traduit par ‘confusion’. Le nom propre Babel, en tant que nom propre, devrait rester intraduisible mais, par une sorte de confusion associative qu’une seule langue rendait possible, on peut croire le traduire, dans cette langue même, par un nom commun signifiant ce que nous traduisons par confusion. (204; original emphasis) [In what language was the tower of Babel constructed and deconstructed? In a language within which the proper noun of Babel could also, out of confusion, be translated by ‘confusion’. The proper noun Babel, as a proper noun, should remain untranslatable, but, via a kind of associative confusion made possible by one single language, it can be translated in this very language by a common noun signifying what we translate as ‘confusion’.]

Within this fantasized originary idiom, ‘Babel’ itself finds a translation: the word in this language which meant what in French and English is written as ‘confusion’. Yet Derrida’s reading of this tale reveals the approximations and slippages inherent in this particular act of translation. He also indicates the importance of translation within a single language, pointing out that even in one idiom words can be understood and interpreted in multiple ways.15 In the post-Babel world, where translation is both necessary and impossible, exchange and equivalence between languages becomes as precarious as the ruined tower which stands as a monument to multilingualism. In this world, the demand for translation becomes a marker for the inadequacy of language: the original text, ‘l’être-à-traduire’, demands completion. ‘Et si l’original appelle un complément, c’est qu’à l’origine, il n’était pas là sans faute, plein, complet, total, identique à soi. Dès l’origine de l’original, à traduire, il y a chute et 15  Perhaps Derrida’s most succinct and powerful expression of this notion is to be found in his apparently contradictory propositions at the beginning of Le monolinguisme de l’autre: ‘On ne parle jamais qu’une seule langue’ [We only ever speak one language] and ‘On ne parle jamais une seule langue’ [We never speak only one language]. See Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 21 (original emphasis).

translation and transformation in the ovide moralisé 51 exil’ (222) [And if the original calls for a complement, it is because originally it was not there without any flaw, full, complete, entire, identical to itself. From the origin of the original to be translated, there is fall and exile]. The Ovide moralisé signals its awareness of the chute and exil within its source text precisely by inserting the story of the fall and abandonment of the tower of Babel into the narrative of the Metamorphoses in order to moralize its translation. The translator attempts to expel any confusion from his own translation, and yet plays upon the essential precarity of post-Babel language. This play is evident in the way in which the Ovide moralisé author exploits ambiguity within French, his target language, as he frequently employs punning and paronomasia in the construction of his moralizations, using the resonances of homophones in order to bridge the gap between translation and allegory. One word which encapsulates a host of different meanings can be a rich metaphor for exploring the echoes of resemblance and difference which are part of the translation process.

Metaphors of Translation, Translations of Metaphors Articulating his own reading of Benjamin’s ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, Derrida exhorts his readers to scrutinize the figures for translation which are to be found (or are placed by Derrida) within Benjamin’s work. In fact, Derrida suggests that it would be more appropriate to call these figures ammétaphores, metaphors which figure the impossibility, the limit to translation and the transfiguration of figural language: ‘Étudions encore les métaphores ou les ammétaphores, les Übertragungen qui sont des traductions et des métaphores de la traduction, des traductions (Übersetzungen) de traduction ou des métaphores de métaphore’ (225) [Let us study again the metaphors or a-metaphors, the Übertragungen which are the translations and metaphors for translation, the translations (Übersetzungen) of translation, or metaphors of metaphor]. Benjamin compares the translation to a royal robe, which is draped over the body of the original text as a cloak hangs over the body of a king: ‘wie ein Königsmantel in weiten Falten’ [like a royal robe in wide folds].16 The translation should not cling too tightly, and should respect, rather than restrict, the shape of the revered original. As Derrida puts it, ‘L’habit sied mais ne serre pas assez strictement la personne royale’ (226) [the clothing fits but does not cling tightly enough to the royal person]. According to this (a-) metaphor, then, the act of translating a text exalts it, raising it to a status worthy of glorification. Rather than losing worth through being rendered into another language, the translated text becomes elevated and framed as deserving of respect. This language of cloaking and drapery, of course, resonates with the medieval description of pre-Christian literature as an integument, a veil that 16  Benjamin, ‘Die Aufgabe’, 15.

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conceals and yet hints at the truth that can be found by enlightened, Christian readers – such as the author of the Ovide moralisé.17 However, for the Ovide moralisé author, the veil or cloak does not just cover the body of truth; it is transformed into it via the process of moralization. In the story of Phaeton in book two, Phoebus sits on his throne: ‘purpurea velatus veste’ (M 2.23) [clad in a purple robe]. An ‘autre sentence’ [another meaning] to this story reads Phoebus’s royal robe as the flesh assumed by God in his human form as Christ: Vestus d’une porpre sanguine, C’est de la charnel vesteüre, Qui pour nostre humaine nature Fu tainte en sanguine colour, Quant pour nous traist mortel dolour. (OM 2.754–8) [Clothed in sanguine purple, signifying fleshly clothing, which is coloured with a sanguine tint for our human nature, when he took for our sake mortal suffering.]

This moralization may have influenced one which occurs later in the Ovide moralisé, in book thirteen. After they have consulted the oracle of Phoebus, just before they leave Delos, Aeneas and his companions are given gifts, amongst which are a robe given to Aeneas’s son, Ascanius. Although Ovid does not specify the colour of the robe (M 13.680), the Ovide moralisé’s explication of this gift dwells once more on its resemblance to human flesh and blood. Le mantiaux de porpre sanguine Qui à l’enfant de franche orine Fu presentez, note droiture: Le mantiau de charnel nature Que li filz Dieu prist et reçut En la Vierge, qui le conçut. Cil fu tains en porpre sanguine, C’est en sanc, dont la char divine Fu en crois tainte et painturee Com porpre en vermeil coloree. (OM 13.3151–60) [The cloak of sanguine purple, which was presented to the child of noble birth, denotes right: the cloak of fleshly nature which the son of God took and received within the Virgin who conceived him. He was coloured with

17  See Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, 7; Possamaï-Pérez, Essai, 145.

translation and transformation in the ovide moralisé 53 sanguine purple, which is blood, with which the divine flesh was coloured and painted on the cross, just as purple is tinted with red.]

In the allegoresis of the royal robes worn by Phoebus and Ascanius, the body of Christ is described in terms of clothing: ‘charnel vesteüre’ (OM 2.755); ‘mantiau de charnel nature’ (OM 13.3154). In one way, the relationship between integument and that which it covers works perfectly in these moralizations, since the fable speaks of a robe and the ‘sentence’ reveals it to be a body. And yet in this relationship between fable and the truth it conceals, that which covers the body stands for the body, so that the body is represented as clothing and clothing turns out to be flesh: the translator has supplemented Ovid’s words to emphasize the corporeal nature of the cloak and the textile nature of the divine body. The sovereignty of the original text, suggested by Derrida and Benjamin’s invocation of royalty, is not arrayed in swathes of respectful French or ‘hermine’,18 but is swaddled in flesh. This might be seen as touching on the heretical tendency of docetism, which proposed that Christ’s body and physical suffering were but a semblance of humanity, a covering for his true divinity, rather than the orthodox doctrine that Christ was at once both wholly man and wholly God.19 The robes do not hang about the royal body ‘in weiten Falten’ but cohere to the body, becoming not its clothing but its exterior. Derrida adds his own layer of extrapolation to Benjamin’s suggestive (a-) metaphor of a translation as royal clothing, pointing out the way in which the clothing of translation reveals the body beneath, as well as concealing it: Un vêtement n’est pas naturel, c’est un tissu et même, autre métaphore de la métaphore, un texte, et ce texte d’artifice apparaît justement du côté du contrat symbolique. Or si le texte original est demande de traduction, le fruit, à moins que ce ne soit le noyau, exige ici de devenir le roi, ou l’empereur qui portera les habits neufs: sous ses larges plis, in weiten Falten, on le devinera nu. (226) [A garment is not natural, it is a textile, and even – another metaphor for metaphor – a text, and this artificial text appears precisely on the side of the symbolic contract. Yet if the original text is the demand for translation, the fruit, if not the core, insists here on becoming the king, or the emperor who will wear new clothes: beneath his wide folds, in weiten Falten, his nudity will be perceived.]

The emperor is naked beneath his new clothes: Derrida’s reference resonates with the hackneyed accusation that the use of modern theory to read 18  Derrida, ‘Des tours de Babel’, 226. 19  See Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 20.

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medieval texts is meretricious and misleading. As we have seen, it is a thoroughly medieval reading practice to detect in earlier texts ideas which are revealed by later ones; and to emphasize the perspective of the translator, reader or spectator, who can perceive both the royal robes and the nudity they cover or reveal. The Ovide moralisé’s interpretation of the figure of the cloak shows the way in which the mutually informing projects of translation and allegorical moralization permit a double vision of body and covering. Readers, at least well-informed, virtuous ones, are afforded simultaneous glimpses of, on the one hand, the text which has summoned translation and interpretation, and, on the other, the refashioning which has articulated it in a way which renders apparent its sacred identity. As part of his declaration of intent in the opening of the first book of the Ovide moralisé, the translator-moralizer declares, ‘La veritez seroit aperte, / Qui souz les fables gist couverte’ (OM 1.45–6) [the truth, which lies concealed beneath the fables, should be clearly visible]. However, as Pairet points out, the way in which the Ovide moralisé articulates the Metamorphoses adds layers of interpretation and illumination just as much as it strips them away.20 Adding the extra layer of Derrida’s theorization of translation enables us to perceive that layers of meaning are accreted and peeled away at the same time, as what is laid bare to the readers’ eyes is the process by which this has been achieved, and the virtuous learning and expertise necessary to achieve this task. The naked royal body is perceived at the same time, through and beneath the robes which assign royal status to the body they clothe and reveal. Derrida’s theory and the Ovide moralisé’s moralization reveal the translated text to be both veil and skin. In the next section of this essay, I shall explore this idea in relation to the story of Arethusa from the fifth book of the Ovide moralisé, a story which fuses notions of covering and uncovering, veiling and nakedness, in the dialogue between translation and moralization.

The Naked Truth Book five of the Metamorphoses is structured by the activities of Pallas, who, at the beginning of the book, is protecting and championing her half-brother Perseus. Once he has achieved victory over his enemies, Pallas journeys to find the Muses’ fountain which sprang from Pegasus’s hoof-print. She sets off, ‘cava cirumdata nube’ (M 5.251) [wrapped in a hollow cloud], which the 20 Pairet, Les Mutacions, 116: ‘Loin de chercher à dévoiler le sens qui gît sous la fable, comme il l’annonce dans le prologue, l’auteur de l’Ovide moralisé ne cesse de lui superposer de nouvelles couches d’interprétation’ [Far from seeking to unveil the meaning lying beneath the fable, as he declares in the prologue, the author of the Ovide moralisé incessantly superimposes new layers of interpretation onto it]. See also Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, 105.

translation and transformation in the ovide moralisé 55 Ovide moralisé translates as ‘Couverte d’une creuse nue’ (OM 5.1673) [covered in a hollow cloud], setting in motion a series of echoes and puns on the word ‘nue’ which will punctuate the rest of the book. At the Muses’ fountain, Pallas is told of Calliope’s song of Ceres’s search for her kidnapped daughter Proserpine. The nymph Arethusa, transformed into a sacred spring, helps Ceres in her quest; later, Ceres asks Arethusa to tell her tale of metamorphosis. Arethusa recounts how she stopped to bathe after hunting on a hot day. Quant vi la bone atempreüre, Ne me suis pas a tant tenue, Ains me despouillai toute nue, Si mis mes dras en un souçoi, Et nue en l’iaue me lançoi Pour chacier le chaut que j’avoie. (OM 5.3549–54) [When I saw that the water was an appealing temperature, I didn’t hold myself back, but undressed until I was completely naked. I left my clothes in a cleft and threw myself naked into the water to cool down.]

The lingering portrayal of her nudity prefigures the lustful gaze of the rivergod Alpheus, who, Arethusa tells Ceres, spied and pursued her. As she fled, ‘Toute nue et sans vestement’ (OM 5.3567) [completely nude and without clothing],21 Arethusa prayed to Diana, who hid her by enveloping her in a cloud: Dyane, de pitié meüe, Couvri moi d’une espesse nue Si que cil ne me pot veoir. (OM 5.3608–10) [Diana, moved by pity, covered me in a thick cloud so that he could not see me.]

Ultimately, Arethusa and Alpheus melted away: pursuer and prey both became bodies of water. Moralizing this tale, the Ovide moralisé author exploits the pun in nue, which he has used in his translation as an adjective in the feminine to signify Arethusa’s nudity, and as a noun to signify her subsequent concealment by the cloud. The nymph’s bathing is interpreted as the purifying ablution of confession, which enables the Christian to ‘desnuer sa consciance / Et tout ses 21  This corresponds to ‘fugio sine vestibus’ (M 5.601) [I fled unclothed]. It is worth noting that Ovid does not use the adjective nuda at this point, and that the Ovide moralisé’s ‘Toute nue’ is an addition in the French.

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vices reveler’ (OM 5.3691–2) [lay bare his conscience and reveal all his vices], and in which the soul is presented to the omniscient divine gaze as ‘Nete et nue, sans couverture / De tout pechié, de toute ordure’ (OM 5.3710–11) [Pure and naked, without covering of any sin or corruption]. Just as Diana hid Arethusa’s nudity in a cloud, God’s forgiveness covers the shame of sin in ‘la nue d’oblivion’ (OM 5.3736) [the cloud of oblivion]. In both translation and moralization, then, nue is covered by nue: this word becomes a site of translation and transition, of covering and nakedness; and the Ovide moralisé author creates meaning as he revels in the polyvalence within one word, as well as the exchange between two languages. Having recovered her daughter, with the help of Arethusa, Ceres flies to Athens. In the Metamorphoses, she travels in her chariot, drawn by dragons: ‘geminos dea fertilis angues / curribus admovit frenisque coercuit ora’ (M 5.642–3) [the goddess of fertility yoked two dragons to her chariot, curbing their mouths with the bit]. However, in the Ovide moralisé, Ceres, like Pallas earlier in this book, is carried in a cloud: Si com vait recordant la fable A Ceres sa fille trouvee, Par Arethuse recouvree. Ore est lie et plaine de joie. Par l’air acquieut sa droite voie, Si est en Athaines venue, Couverte d’une clere nue. (OM 5.3747–53) [ Just as the fable relates, Ceres has found her daughter, recovered with Arethusa’s help. Now she is happy and joyful. She flies straight to Athens covered by a clear cloud.]

Just as the translator-moralizer claimed to be relaying to his readers that which ‘Ovides baille’ or ‘Ovides dist’ in the first book, here he once more stresses his fidelity to the Metamorphoses in the collocation, ‘Si com vait recordant la fable’. Despite this ostensible transparency of translation, the Ovide moralisé author has in fact adapted the fable to suit his purpose. The translator-moralizer would seem to have changed the goddess’s vehicle in order to continue with his allegorical punning in French. Ceres’s transparent transport is interpreted as figuring Christ’s ascension following the harrowing of hell. S’en monta couvers d’une nue, Sans querre nulle estrange aïue Fors que de sa double sustance, Qu’il joint en une seule essance Et coupla par vertu devine. (OM 5.3852–6)

translation and transformation in the ovide moralisé 57 [He rose from there covered in a cloud without seeking any other help but that of his own dual substance, which he joined and coupled within one essence by divine virtue.]

The cloud which covers Christ resonates with the nakedness of the human flesh he is leaving behind. His body, like the corpus of the Ovide moralisé, is double (Latin and French; pagan and Christian; human and divine), and also united ‘par vertu devine’. Once again, the multiple meanings conveyed by the word nue – the cloud of nakedness, the covering which nevertheless reveals him as flesh – enable Christ’s ‘double sustance’ to be synthesized into (and rhymed with) ‘une seule essance’. The translator-moralizer’s decision to change Ceres’s mode of transportation from chariot to cloud in book five is especially noteworthy, since the word for chariot in fourteenth-century French, le char, is itself ripe for the kind of moralizing based on interpretative ambiguity which the Ovide moralisé author likes to exploit. I have already discussed the way in which the robes belonging to Phoebus and Ascanius are moralized as ‘charnel’ and ‘la char’. And to return to the story of Phaeton and Phoebus in book two, the author here opens out the multiple meanings of char to address his driving motif of the Incarnation. A rime équivoque is used to draw attention to the homophone char: as a masculine noun, it signifies a chariot; in the feminine, flesh: Vault humblement homs devenir, Et prendre nostre mortel char. C’est cil qui gouverne le char Du soleil, qui tout enlumine. (OM 2.768–71) [He wished humbly to become a man and take our mortal flesh. It is he who rules the chariot of the sun, which illuminates everything.]

Human flesh, la char, is not just a robe which is donned or a cloud which covers, but it becomes figured via the processes of translation and moralization as le char, a vehicle: a medium of transport, another way of figuring metaphor and translatio. Conclusion: Caenis, Caenus and Invulnerable Translation In the moralization of the story of the sun’s chariot, the word char flickers between masculine and feminine. This movement between genders is mirrored by several metamorphoses within Ovid’s poem,22 and these sex changes are moralized in a number of different ways by the Ovide moralisé. 22  For a rich reading of the mutation of gender and meaning in the Metamorphoses,

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The transfiguration of Hermaphroditus in book four, for example, is understood as an allegory for the importance of strictly procreational (rather than recreational) sex in the conception of properly formed children (OM 4.2224–49).23 The story of Caenus, who becomes Caenis, in book twelve is interpreted as the fusion and movement between genders inherent in the mystery of the Virgin Birth. In book twelve, Nestor tells the story of Caenus, who was born a woman named Caenis but, after being raped by Neptune, requested that her rapist transform her into a man so that she would never suffer the same violation. To bolster Caenus’s newfound resistance, Neptune also gave him the gift of invulnerability to weapons. At the wedding party of Pirithoüs and Hippodame, relates Nestor, the centaur Eurytus took a fancy to the bride. When the inevitable fighting broke out, Caenus killed many of centaurs, who were disgusted at being beaten by someone who was ‘Un demi malle, un femelin’ (OM 12.2811) [an effeminate half-man]. Unable to wound him with their weapons, the centaurs piled up rocks on Caenus, but he flew out as a bird. Explaining the ‘mistere de ceste fable’ (OM 12.2882) [the mystery of this fable], the moralization of this tale recounts that Christ was joined in matrimony to humanity, but sinners wanted to destroy this marriage. And so God came to earth, first as a woman, ‘la tres excellent meschine’ (OM 12.2978) [the most excellent maiden], and then transformed into a man: C’est cele qui premierement Fu femeline purement Ains que forme eüst d’ome prise, Mes la merveillable joustise Dou poissant dieu qui tone en nue, C’est dou Pere, qui l’ot eüe En grant amour, en grant chierté, L’ot muee en home morté. (OM 12.2981–8) [It is she who was first purely feminine before she had taken the form of a man, but the awesome justice of powerful God who thunders in the clouds, which is to say the father, who loved and cherished her deeply, transformed her into a mortal man.]

Yet this mortal man, we are told, had invulnerable human flesh: Mes tant li fist Diex d’avantage, Que nulz, pour riens qui avenist, see Warren Ginsberg, ‘Ovid and the Problem of Gender’, in Ovid in Medieval Culture, ed. Desmond, 9–28. 23  See Simpson, Fantasy, Identity and Misrecognition, 145–6.

translation and transformation in the ovide moralisé 59 Se de son plesir ne venist, Ne la peüst en char blecier (OM 12.2994–7) [But God also brought it about that no one, whatever happened, if it did not please him, could harm his flesh.]

The resurrection of Christ is described to illustrate this point. In this extraordinarily flexible yet controlled reading, then, Caenis’s rapist, Neptune, is interpreted as God the father and saviour, who joined with the Virgin Mary and enabled her sacred inviolate body to bring forth the sacred invulnerable body of Christ. Mystic marriage and virgin birth are also figures deployed by Derrida, who reformulates the analogy he borrows from Benjamin, comparing translation to the enrobing of a royal person, such that the sacred ritual of coronation metamorphoses into the contract of marriage: ‘Une traduction épouse l’original quand les deux fragments ajointés, aussi différents que possible, se complètent pour former une langue plus grande, au cours d’une survie qui les change tous les deux’ (224) [A translation weds the original when the two conjoined fragments, as different as they can be, complete one another in order to form a larger language, in the course of an afterlife which changes them both]. Marriage, then, becomes the figure for the contract of translation, whereby the translated text takes on the legal status of the original, and both the original and the target language are legitimized. In a move of which the author of the Ovide moralisé would no doubt approve, Derrida portrays the goal of this marriage to be the production of offspring, in ‘ce que j’ai appelé le contrat de traduction: hymen ou contrat de mariage avec promesse d’inventer un enfant dont la semence donnera lieu à l’histoire et croissance’ (224) [what I have called the contract of translation: hymen or marriage contract with the promise to produce a child whose seed will give rise to history and growth]. However, in this mystical union, the promised child of translation is anticipated in Messianic mode, and Derrida likens the production of a translated work to a virgin birth, describing the source text as ‘intact et vierge malgré le labeur de la traduction’ (224) [intact and virgin despite the labour of translation]. He suggests that the translation is an intervention, but one which leaves the original inviolate. The idea of the virgin birth retrospectively rewrites the virgin mother as intact and unimpeachable, just as the labour of translation responds to a call for plenitude and completion in the source text. For Derrida and the author of the Ovide moralisé, then, translation is a visceral process of anticipation and annunciation; translatio is a means of perceiving divine form through the mutation between bodies. The words of Ovid are made into divine flesh by the translator-moralizer as the Ovide moralisé transforms the unstable pre-Christian body of the Metamorphoses into an avatar of the Incarnation and the Virgin Birth. The moralization of Caenis/Caenus exploits the movement between masculine and feminine in

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Ovid’s tale, Christian theology and French lexis, as the mutating yet invulnerable body figures the flesh of both the Virgin and Christ. Whereas la char [flesh] was figured by and rhymed with le char [chariot] in book two, in book twelve flesh changes gender through the embodiment of the divine in the Incarnation and Virgin Birth. The heterosexual union of marriage is written into the body of Caenis/Caenus, whose sex change is read as a conflation and coincidence of bodies: not only does it figure the marriage which provides the backdrop to Caenus’s final metamorphosis, it also embodies the union of God and humanity, and that of mother and son. Similarly, Caenus’s invulnerability is implicitly shared by the Virgin and Christ: this tale that ‘Ovides dist’ is pregnant with meaning. Christ’s body is mortal, and simultaneously the promise of eternal life. These figures of sacred, paradoxical bodies underwrite the Christian faith which illuminates the Metamorphoses for the author of the Ovide moralisé. Derrida’s theory of translation enables us to perceive the fine line that the Ovide moralisé author is treading as he undertakes his vast project. It is a project which involves him both revealing an eternal Christian truth which he sees as always-already there, yet also superimposing his virtuous linguistic and theological expertise onto a work of pagan literature. The body of text and textual bodies he evokes are thus at once arrayed in sanctifying robes of translation and stripped to the bare skin of truth. Fable and meaning, translation and transformation, metamorphose into one another before our eyes.

3 Translating Lucretia Word, Image and ‘Ethical Non-Indifference’ in Simon de Hesdin’s Translation of Valerius Maximus’s Facta et dicta memorabilia Catherine Léglu Written translatio was the transposition of the sense of a work into a new language and context. One of the intriguing developments of the fourteenthand fifteenth-century vogue for translations of Latin histories into Middle French prose was the combination of translated words with images that also ‘translated’ the text. Some of these texts included their Latin source, and some did not. Where a translated history sits alongside a visual interpretation of the same passage (an histoire), there must be not one but two translating campaigns to be read, viewed and interpreted. The vogue for Roman histories during this period inspired lavishly decorated copies of such works as Pierre Bersuire’s translation of Livy’s Roman History, entitled Ab urbe condita (1354–56), and Sébastien Mamerot’s rendering of Benvenuto da Imola’s Romuleon (1466). Their illustrations were closely tied to the text, to the point of offering what Frédéric Duval has termed ‘une traduction iconographique’ that recast the text as a source of teaching and moral instruction.1 Anne D. Hedeman’s studies of what may be termed a combined written and visual translation of Latin classical texts also stress the more evident ‘modernizing’ effect that medieval illustrators have on the translated classical sources; in any case, amplification was a device that was used by some translators to clarify and to contextualize their material, and an illustration may be seen as a further vehicle for this approach. Indeed, as Hedeman has noted in the case of the work of Laurent de Premierfait, the illustrative programme was often planned from the start.2 1  Frédéric Duval, La traduction du ‘Romuleon’ par Sébastien Mamerot: Étude sur la diffusion de l’histoire romaine en langue vernaculaire à la fin du Moyen Âge (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 265–99 (see esp. 266, 275 and, on the popularity of Roman history, 241–51). 2  Anne D. Hedeman, Translating the Past: Laurent de Premierfait and Boccaccio’s ‘De casibus’ (Los Angeles: The John Paul Getty Museum, 2008), 11–22, 23–53, 61–9.

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New meanings are encoded when Roman senators are dressed as knights or men of the court, and it is not sufficient to dismiss such illustrations as evidence of an eccentric pre-Renaissance disregard for historical accuracy. Nor are these mere prettifications of a text. Writers were increasingly sensitive to the importance of combining word and image in didactic writing because they clarified and organized the material more effectively: ‘A double map of pictures and writing is needed; one cannot suffice without the other.’3 The mendicant orders in particular made subtle use of illustrations, as has been pointed out by Bert Roest, on the understanding that the contemplation of ‘visible things’ and the great events of the past contributed to training the mind towards anagogical interpretation: ‘These scholars saw the study of history both as a preparatory instrument for Biblical exegesis, and as a means to supplement the historia sacra with a religious understanding of post-Biblical times.’4 Transmitting such material effectively also entailed what Roest terms ‘the rejuvenation of authentic materials’.5 It has been claimed that the translation of martyrdom narratives into images for private meditation was reserved for the historia sacra alone,6 but there is ample evidence that violent images had a didactic function in non-sacred histories too, as Brigitte Buettner has stated: Unlike the ubiquitous presence of religious images in the medieval West, secular representations of historical narratives gave a concrete material existence to figures that were previously experienced within the evanescent context of oral transmission. The representation of historical personages, then, created objects of cognition rather than mere recognition, and forced beholders to recompose their intermittent view of the past, to construct their memoria rerum gestarum according to compelling new visual evidence.7

This chapter explores how word and image worked together to translate another didactic Roman history, that of Valerius Maximus, for late medi-

3  ‘Requiritur autem mapa duplex, picture et scripture. Nec unum sine altero putes sufficere’; Paolino da Venezia, De mapa mundi, Rome, Vat. lat. 1960, fol. 13v, cited by Natalie Bouloux, Culture et savoirs géographiques en Italie au XIVe siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 63. 4  Bert Roest, ‘Compilation as Theme and Praxis in Franciscan Universal Chronicles’, in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, University of Groningen 1–4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leuven: Brill, 1997), 224. 5  Roest, ‘Compilation as Theme’, 216. 6  Bert Roest, ‘A Meditative Spectacle: Christ’s Bodily Passion in the Satirica Ystoria’, in The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, ed. A. A. MacDonald, Bernhard Ridderbos and R. M. Schlusemann (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998), 31–54. 7  Brigitte Buettner, ‘Profane Illuminations, Secular Illusions: Manuscripts in Late Medieval Courtly Society’, Art Bulletin 74, no. 1 (1992): 80.



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eval French and Burgundian aristocratic readers. It focuses on an image of a woman’s suffering that was never absorbed into historia sacra, that of the Roman Lucretia. The textual reception of Lucretia in the later medieval period is well known, but the images of her rape and suicide have been studied overwhelmingly in terms of the early modern period. This chapter therefore examines the translations of the classical Latin texts, especially Livy, into Middle French. It then moves onto a discussion of how a representative selection of late medieval Lucretia illustrations both contrast with and prepare the early modern Lucretia portrait. How the words and image work together within their broader context, the manuscript, is the subject of the last section.

The Faits et dits mémorables Valerius Maximus’s Facta et dicta memorabilia was a popular didactic work in the later Middle Ages.8 Although the earliest manuscripts of the French Valerius Maximus do not contain the illustrative programme that characterizes the bulk of its later copies, it is clear that it was perceived as a combination of text and image: Et sur ce dist Vallerius: ‘Les yeulx des homes abayssent, quant ilz ne voient point devant eulx les examples des choses passees qui renouvellent de present // esgart les condicions des anchiennes aventures; car ils voient en la polignité des pointures ainsi que les choses toutes vives et espirans; car il est necessaire que pointure esmeuve ung peu plus efficamment les couraiges que les lettres ne font.’ Laquelle chose s’acorde assez a la commune parole qui dist que plus esmeuvent examples que paroles et paroles que lettres; si comme il desclaire plus largement en son.viiie. livre, et la le voye qui voldra.9 [And Valerius Maximus says at this point: ‘Men lower their eyes when they do not see the examples of past things, renewing in the present-day gaze the

8  The text is variously entitled Les fais et dis des Romains et de autres gens, or Fais et dis memorables. See Frédéric Duval and Françoise Vielliard, Miroir des classiques, at http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/miroir/valeremaxime/traduction/para=Hesdin_Gonesse. html (accessed 9 January 2012); A. Vitale Brovarone, ‘Notes sur la traduction de Valère Maxime par Simon de Hesdin’, in ‘Pour acquerir honneur et pris’: Mélanges de Moyen Français offerts à Giuseppe Di Stefano, ed. Maria Colombo Timelli and Claudio Galderisi (Montréal: CERES, 2004), 183–91; Giuseppe Di Stefano, ‘Tradizione esegetica e traduzioni di Valerio Massimo nel primo umanesimo francese’, Studi francesi 21 (1963): 403–17; Giuseppe Di Stefano, ‘Ricerche su Nicolas de Gonesse traduttore di Valerio Massimo’, Studi francesi 26 (1965): 201–21. 9  Antoine de La Sale, La Sale, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean Desonay, 2 vols (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1941), 2:154.

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circumstances of old events; for they see in the brightness of paintings as well as in things that are alive and breathing, for it is necessary for images to move emotions more effectively than letters.’ This chimes quite well with the popular saying that examples move more than spoken words and spoken words more than the written letter, just as he says more at length in his eighth book, and there whoever wishes to see, can see it.]

King Charles V of France requested the translation from Simon de Hesdin (books one to seven, 1374–83), and Nicolas de Gonesse (who inserted into it the first recorded translation of a work by Plutarch) was employed by Jean, duke of Berry, to translate books seven to nine in 1401. The complete version of what was known as the Faits et dits mémorables quickly became a staple of the late medieval aristocratic library.10 Christine de Pizan’s Livre du corps de policie, composed for the dauphin, is a digest of the Faits et dits mémorables.11 Meanwhile, the Latin text (with and without commentaries) enjoyed considerable success both in manuscript and printed form. The Facta et dicta memorabilia is a compilation of nearly one thousand exempla culled from Roman history, published during the reign of Tiberius (c. 30 ad).12 Each of its nine books contains roughly nine chapters; each section is defined by moral and ethical themes such as justice or marital love, and each exemplum is designed to illustrate a moral point. According to Clive Skidmore and Rebecca Langlands, the collection aims to provoke reflection and discussion in its readers. Langlands traces the compilation’s social and religious definition of sexual morality as pudicitia, ‘the foundation of men and women alike’ (6.1.praef.).13 Valerius Maximus grouped his tales as Roman (exempla) and foreign (exempla externa). Simon de Hesdin translated the Latin text (as ‘Acteur’), and added glosses and running commentaries to the main text (rubricated ‘Translateur’), which are drawn mostly from a moralizing commentary by Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro. He also added some 10  Barbara Drake Boehm, ‘Valerius Maximus in a Fourteenth-Century French Translation: An Illuminated Leaf ’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 18 (1983): 53–63; Robert H. Lucas, ‘Mediaeval French Translations of the Latin Classics to 1500’, Speculum 45, no. 2 (1970): 225–53, esp. 247–8; Serge Lusignan, Parler vulgairement: Les intellectuels et la langue française aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles (Paris: Vrin; Montréal: Presses de l’université de Montréal, 1986). 11  Christine de Pizan, Le livre du corps de policie, ed. and trans. Angus J. Kennedy (Paris: Champion, 1998), xiii–xiv, xxv, xvii–xxxiv. 12  Valerius Maximus, Memorable Sayings and Doings, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library 492, 493 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1:1–7. References to the Latin Facta et dicta memorabilia are to this edition, provided in parentheses. 13  Clive Skidmore, Practical Ethics for Roman Gentlemen: The Work of Valerius Maximus (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1996), 31–52; Rebecca Langlands, Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 123–7, 138–69.



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externa based on classical and medieval sources, rubricating them ‘Addicions du translateur’.14 The Faits et dits mémorables was described by Lucas as ‘only a paraphrase, and that at times scarcely distinguishable from the translators’ commentary’. The quotation discussed at the outset shows the overt dialogue between the acteur and his translateur with ‘Valerius’ quoted, glossed and complemented by a commonplace expression.15 According to Simon de Hesdin, Valerius Maximus contended that exempla old and new were as rhetorically effective, and as relevant to their readers, as painted images. To use this statement as a reason for producing an illustrated book could arguably be described as misinterpretation, and indeed, mistranslation, on the part of a culture that sought to ‘renew’ old events for the gaze of the ‘present day’, and that mistook the Roman orator’s advice for the proverbial notion that ‘plus esmeuvent examples que paroles et paroles que lettres’. It is worth considering the difficulty of translating even that sentence: ‘Examples’ (should this be rendered exempla?) are more effective in ‘moving’ people than spoken words, and spoken words are more effective than the written word. In Middle French, the verb esmouvoir refers far more frequently to a physical movement than its modern counterpart (émouvoir), which denotes an attempt to elicit an emotional reaction.16 Paroles appear to be contrasted with lettres: spoken words are set above written authority in a way than invokes the power of rhetoric, yet above even the power of words is set the example. Is this example an image or an exemplary action? (A public execution might be construed an example, as might the displayed relics of a martyr.) The illuminated copies of the Faits et dits (many of them Burgundian) provide a lengthy anecdote as well as images that must be viewed as forerunners to Lucretia portraits in northern Europe.17 Mieke Bal, in her major study of early modern paintings of Lucretia, comments that stories and images such as these are scored through with something she terms ‘ethical non-indifference’.18 ‘Ethical non-indifference’ in Bal’s definition occurs when

14  Boehm, ‘Valerius Maximus’, 55; Marjorie Berlincourt, ‘The Relationship of Some Fourteenth-Century Commentaries on Valerius Maximus’, Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972): 361–86. 15  Lucas, ‘Mediaeval French Translations’, 225. 16  Annelies Bloem, ‘À propos de la matere esmeue dans les Problèmes d’Évrart de Conty: Étude distributionnelle et variationnelle des verbes mouvoir et esmouvoir en moyen français’, Folia Linguistica Historica 28 (2007): 55–76. 17  For a study of a parallel Italian tradition, see Ruth Wilkins Sullivan, ‘Three Ferrarese Panels on the Theme of “Death Rather than Dishonour” and the Neapolitan Connection’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 57 (1994): 610–25. 18  Mieke Bal, ‘Visual Rhetoric: The Semiotics of Rape’, in Bal, Reading ‘Rembrandt’: Beyond the Word–Image Opposition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 60–93; Mieke Bal, ‘Religious Canon and Literary Identity’, in The Mieke Bal Reader, ed. Mieke Bal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 420–5.

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a work betrays its own unease with the ideological content of the canonical narrative that it is recounting, either in word or image. She also argues that, when reading such a text, the viewer’s or reader’s reframing of it should be accompanied by awareness of the equivalent intertextual activity of the authors or artists.19 I would suggest that the way the tale of Lucretia is translated into both French prose and images is accompanied by evidence of different modes of ‘non-indifference’. Although Bal has not written about the verbal translation of the text, much of her critical work has been applied to the ways that canonical narratives are interpreted and reframed between languages, genres and media.20

Lucretia in Words The rape of Lucretia is a narrative that functions as both political allegory and a lesson in feminine conduct.21 According to the version composed by Livy in his Ab urbe condita (1.57–60), Rome is ruled by the tyrannical Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus.22 His son Sextus Tarquinius becomes involved in a contest among his men to prove whose wife is the chastest. Tarquin Collatinus (a kinsman) secretly shows them Lucretia spinning in her house at Collatia. Sextus Tarquininus returns later and persuades her to have sex with him by threatening to kill a slave and place his dead body in her marital bed if she will not comply. The following day, Lucretia summons her father and her husband, and asks them to bring two friends with them. One of these friends is another kinsman of the Tarquins, Lucius Junius Brutus. Instead of killing her, as Roman law would require, they absolve her of blame and swear revenge. She proclaims her own innocence then kills herself, stating: ‘nec ulla deinde inpudica Lucretiae exemplo vivet’ (1.58.10–11) [no unchaste woman shall live if she follows Lucretia’s example].23 Her death is seized upon by Brutus as an opportunity to shed his protective mask as a fool and to lead a revolt against Tarquinius. He plucks the dagger from Lucretia’s body and hands it to her witnesses. Lucretia’s body is exposed in the forum at Collatia, then carried to Rome. The Romans expel the king and his son, and found the 19  Mieke Bal, ‘Reading Art?’ in Mieke Bal Reader, ed. Bal, 289–312. 20  Mieke Bal, ‘Calling to Witness: Lucretia’, in Looking In: The Art of Viewing, ed. Norman Bryson and Mieke Bal (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001), 93–116; Mieke Bal, ‘The Rape of Narrative and the Narrative of Rape’, in Mieke Bal Reader, ed. Bal, 339–64. 21  Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 3–20; Melissa Matthes, The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics: Readings in Livy, Machiavelli and Rousseau (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 22 Livy, History of Rome (‘Ab urbe condita’), trans. B. O. Foster, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library 114 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), 197–209. 23 Livy, History of Rome, 202–3.



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republic. The version in Ovid’s Fasti, based on Livy, focuses more on Lucretia, playing down both her oratory and the political consequences of her death.24 Bal summarizes the tale as a foundation myth: ‘She killed herself, calling for revenge, because she was raped; her death initiated the revolution that led to the Roman Republic.’25 Lucretia’s role is to act as a catalyst for a historical event, and her personal suffering is displaced by Brutus’s revolt. This is underlined by both Stephanie Jed and Melissa Matthes with reference to Florentine versions of the tale.26 Both Jed and Bal point out that the legend of Lucretia functioned on two levels, Bal stressing ‘the continuous similarity or contiguity between its vehicle – say, here, the myth of Lucretia – and its tenor – political tyranny’.27 What is ‘ethical non-indifference’ when it comes to telling and showing Lucretia? The standard image in early modern paintings – a lone woman stabbing herself with a dagger – conflates the suicide with the rape both through the erotic metaphor of piercing, and through mise-en-scène: she is often depicted naked, as if her suicide were carried out immediately after the event (Figure 3.1).28 For Bal, the image is tantamount to rhetorical sleight of hand: the victim’s experience of rape cannot be represented visually, so the suicide replaces and displaces it, because ‘the act of killing herself shifts attention from the rapist to the victim’.29 According to Bal, Lucretia is blamed for her assault.30 Such images run against the viewer’s prior knowledge of the texts, for Lucretia summons her witnesses and, as Matthes suggests, ‘determines how her body and her life will be read’.31 Bal notes that Rembrandt’s Lucretia of 1664 captures the connotations of the lone portrait tradition: The chaste Lucretia, thus, has become public property by her rape; she has thus been opened to the public. The visual representation of the woman at the moment of her self-killing partakes of this ‘publication’. Lucretia is put on display for the eyes of the indiscreet onlooker.32

24 Ovid, Fasti 2.685–852, trans. James G. Frazer, 2nd edn, rev. J. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 253 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 107–19. See Carole E. Newlands, Playing with Time: Ovid and the ‘Fasti’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 146–74. 25  Bal, ‘Visual Rhetoric’, 64. 26  Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Beginnings of Humanism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986); Matthes, Rape of Lucretia, 5–7. 27  Bal, ‘Visual Rhetoric’, 60. 28 Donaldson, Rapes of Lucretia, 14–18; Rona Goffen, ‘Lotto’s Lucretia’, Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 3 (1999): 742–81. 29  Bal, ‘Visual Rhetoric’, 68. 30  Bal, ‘Visual Rhetoric’, 70, 72. 31 Matthes, Rape of Lucretia, 7. 32  Bal, ‘Calling to Witness’, 102.

Figure 3.1. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), The Death of Lucretia (c. 1524). Oil on panel. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.



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An icon of pudicitia is depicted as the inpudica she seeks to forestall; she is alone, immodest and often meets the viewer’s eye. Valerius Maximus opens his sixth book of Facta et dicta memorabilia, entitled ‘De pudicitia’, with the exemplum:33 Dux Romanae pudicitiae Lucretia, cuius virilis animus maligno errore Fortunae muliebre corpus sortitus est, a [Sex.] Tarquinio, regis Superbi filio, per vim stuprum pati coacta, cum gravissimis verbis iniuriam suam in concilio necessariorum deplorasset, ferro se, quod veste tectum attulerat, interemit, causamque tam animoso interitu imperium consulare pro region permutandi populo Romano praebuit. Atque haec illatam iniuriam non tulit. (6.1.1)

D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s translation interprets the passage as follows: Lucretia, model of Roman chastity, whose manly spirit by Fortune’s malignant error was allotted a woman’s body, was forcibly raped by Sex. Tarquinius, son of King Superbus. In a family council, after bitterly bemoaning her injury, she killed herself with a sword she had brought concealed in her clothing and by so courageous a death gave the Roman people reason to change the authority of kings for that of Consuls. Lucretia did not brook the injury done to her.34

Bailey renders pudicitia as ‘chastity’, although it is usually translated as ‘modesty’, an inadequate English rendering for a concept that preserves its combination of physical and psychological veiling in the modern French pudeur.35 The translation by Robert Combès is different: ‘Celle qui a guidé Rome vers la pudeur, Lucrèce, avait une âme virile que le sort s’est plu à tromper en lui attribuant le corps d’une femme.’36 Lucretia’s gender is not the work of malign Fortune, but of chance. Lucretia actively guides the Romans rather than allowing herself to be taken as a model. Combès retains the word order, so her actions precede her name. Meanwhile Langlands makes a case for the text’s stress on Lucretia’s virilis animus [manly soul] by noting that the anecdote describes her as ‘dux Romanae pudicitiae’, not the ‘model’ (Bailey) or simply ‘she’ (Combès), but the leader (in the masculine) of Roman pudicitia. Langlands notes that ‘far from suggesting that pudicitia is about the ideal Roman woman, this chapter emphasizes its association with magisterial, authoritative Roman men from 33 Langlands, Sexual Morality, 78–122, 123–91. 34  Valerius Maximus, Memorable Sayings, ed. and trans. Bailey, 2:3. 35 Langlands, Sexual Morality, 160–3. On verecundia [shame], see Guillemette Bolens, ‘La vergogne dans la légende de Lucrèce de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance’, Rives méditerranéennes 31 (2008): 17–39, consulted at http://rives.revues.org/2763 (accessed 23 February 2011). 36  Valère Maxime, Faits et dits mémorables, trans. Robert Combès, 2 vols (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997), 2:141.

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every walk of life’.37 By extension, Valerius’s aim would have been to provoke a reflection on the foundations of imperial power.38 The suicide is also recast as self-inflicted punishment, and a reassertion of authority through ‘the classic Romanness of her suicide that comes from her use of the sword’.39 Valerius Maximus’s Lucretia is a Roman hero. Ovid, likewise, praises her as ‘animi matrona virilis’ (Fasti 2.847) [a matron of manly spirit].40 Simon de Hesdin translates virilis animus as ‘viril corage’: a manly desire or will.41 Simon de Hesdin’s treatment of the Lucretia tale fulfils the pledges he makes in his proem. There he makes an explicit distinction between educated readers of Latin and the expectations and needs of the vernacular readership. In keeping with a Ciceronian trend among learned French translators since Jean de Meun and Nicole Oresme, he offers not to translate literally (‘de mot a mot’), but rather from the sense, which is usually rendered as sentence:42 translater de sentence a sentence et de faire de fort latin cler et entendable rommant si que chescun le peut entendre et ou la sentence sera obscure pour la ignorance de lystoire ou pour autre quelconque cause de la declairer a mon pouvoir. (part 1, fol. 1v) [To ‘translate’ from sentence to sentence and to turn strong/difficult Latin into clear, comprehensible Romance, so that everyone can understand it; and wherever the sentence (the sense) is obscure, either because of ignorance of the story, or for any other reason, to clarify it as far as I am able to do so.]

In line with his predecessors, he warns the reader that wherever he has introduced a comment or a gloss: ‘Ce sont mes propres paroles ou les paroles daulcun aultre lequel ie alegueray par nom soit philosophe poete ou histo37 Langlands, Sexual Morality, 144, 185. 38 Langlands, Sexual Morality, 153. 39 Langlands, Sexual Morality, 173–4. 40 Ovid, Fasti, trans. Frazer, 118. 41  Valere le Grant, or Les faitz et dis des romains et des aultres gens, trans. Simon de Hesdin and Nicholas de Gonesse (Lyon: Matthew Husz, 1485), part 2, fol. 34v. Quotations are transcribed from the British Library incunabulum. Subsequent references are to this copy, provided in parentheses. See Duval and Vieillard, ‘Miroir des classiques’, on Valerius Maximus manuscripts. 42  Peter F. Dembowski, ‘Scientific Translation and Translator’s Glossing in Four Medieval French Translators’, in Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeanette Beer (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1997), 113–34; Serge Lusignan, ‘Written French and Latin at the Court of France at the End of the Middle Ages’, in Translation Theory and Practice, ed. Beer, 185–98; Claude Buridant, ‘La traduction du latin au français dans les encyclopédies médiévales à partir de l’exemple de la traduction des Otia imperialia de Gervais de Tilbury par Jean de Vignay et Jean d’Antioche’, in Translation Theory and Practice, ed. Beer, 135–59, esp. 137 n.6.



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riographe ou autre de quelconque estat’ (part 1, fol. 1v) [these are my own words, or the words of another writer who I shall name, either a philosopher, a poet or a historiographer, or another of any station]. Another solution to the problem, as he perceives it, of the ignorant lay reader is brevity: he will not work ‘par maniere de lecture’ [in the manner of a lecture], by providing scholastic divisions or distinctiones because ‘les gens laiz … veullent briefves et cleres sentences’ (part 1, fol. 2r) [lay people want short and clear sentences]. He informs the reader that the full story is from his own translation of Livy, but he tells it in brief, without ample commentary. He does not suppress Valerius Maximus’s political reading of the story. It is viewed as the catalyst for a change of government, and more specifically for the expulsion of an unjust king and his lineage from Rome. Simon de Hesdin inserts what he claims is his own translation of Livy, ‘Et pour ce que listoire est belle et quon ne le scet pas communement’ (part 2, fol. 33v) [because the story is a fine one and it is not well known]. He transplants it into an identifiable social milieu: Lucretia lives and dies in her husband’s castle at Colatine; her husband Colatin is a nobleman who depends on the patronage of Tarquin l’Orgueilleux. Sextus Tarquinius cannot compel Lucretia to give in out of fear, so he threatens to kill and place a serf (not a slave) into Lucretia’s bed. Lucretia summons her husband and father, with any available male witnesses, from Rome and sits ‘triste et esplouree’ [sad and weeping] in her chamber. When Colatin asks her if she is well, she replies: nennil … que peut il estre sauf la femme qui a perdu sa chasteté? Les traces d’ung estrange homme sont dans ton lit. Colatin, le corps est seulement violé, le corage n’y a coulpe, et la mort en sera tesmoing, mais baillez moy vostre main qu’il sera pugni de ce mesfait. (part 2, fol. 34r) [No, what can there be [here] except the woman who has lost her chastity? The marks of a stranger are in your bed. Colatin, only the body has been violated, desire is not to blame, and death shall bear witness to that, but give me your hand [in pledge] that he will be punished for this misdeed.]

Here, Lucretia’s viril corage has proved impervious to the assault on her chastity: ‘le corage n’y a coulpe’: desire (hers? his?) is not to blame.43 Lucretia continues: ‘e pour ce se ie me absolz du peché ne me delivre ie pas du tourment ne iamais apres femme non chaste ne viverai par l’exemple de Lucrece’ (part 2, fol. 34r) [and even if I should absolve myself of the sin, I will not free myself of torment, nor shall any unchaste woman live according to the exemplum of Lucretia], whereupon she stabs herself with the ‘coustel’ (from culter,

43  Compare Barbara J. Baines, ‘Effacing Rape in Early Modern Representation’, ELH 65, no. 1 (1998): 96.

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dagger) she has concealed in her clothing. There is no comment or change, although she uses a dagger in Livy and a sword in Valerius. Simon de Hesdin does not pass judgement on Lucretia’s action, but (writing as ‘Translateur’) he cites Augustine’s critical commentary in City of God that she was impelled by fame rather than chastity.44 However, the Translateur does not hesitate to suppress a later section of the same book six. He refuses to translate a series of exempla on the punishment of sodomy on the grounds that the material is displeasing both to God and to ‘homme de raison’ [men of reason], but rather than leave this section out altogether, he provides it in Latin and invites those readers who are ‘sages et bien litterés’ (part 2, fol. 36r) [wise and literate] to read freely.

Lucretia in Images The illuminated manuscripts of the Faits et dits support the exemplum with an image that celebrates Lucretia’s gesture by stressing both her chasteté (not her pudeur) and her equal status to the Roman noblemen who surround her. One manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 286, fol. 283r) preserves instructions for the illuminator: ‘une femme qui se frappe d’une espee au travers du corps et y a devant elle troys hommes qui demainent triste chere’ [a woman who is striking herself through the body with a sword, and in front of her there are three men who look sorrowful]. Such a scene appears in a late thirteenth-century copy of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César from southern Italy (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 1386, fol. 62v): four men stand next to a fully dressed woman who is lying dead with a stab wound to her neck.45 The scheme differs from the early modern tradition in that Lucretia is depicted among male witnesses and fully dressed. This is possibly because Ira [Wrath] was depicted as a suicidal woman with loose hair and torn clothes.46 The illuminations thus contradict legal requirements concerning rape accusation, as well as texts such as Chaucer’s Legend

44 Augustine, De civitate dei 1.19, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 217 vols (Paris: Migne, 1844–55), 41:32–4. See Donaldson, Rapes of Lucretia, 25–33. 45  The Lucretia image also appears in manuscripts of Pierre Bersuire’s translation of Livy’s Ab urbe condita (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 30, fol. 30v); Jean Mansel’s Fleur des histoires (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 53, fol. 18v); Laurent de Premierfait’s translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 127, fol. 76r); and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 12595, fol. 64v). 46  Catherine Léglu, ‘A New Medea in Late Medieval French Narratives’, in Unbinding Medea: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Classical Myth from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Anne Simon and Heike Bartel (Oxford: MHRA/Maney, 2010), 68–79.



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of Good Women, which describes Lucretia bareheaded and dishevelled as if in mourning: al dischevele, with hire heres cleere, In habit swich as women used tho Unto the buryinge of hire frendes go.47

Chaucer’s Lucretia (borrowing from Ovid’s Fasti 2.833–4) avoids exposing any part of her body, not even her feet, as she falls down dead.48 Buettner argues that nudity was occasionally perceived as erotic, so a clothed Lucretia prevents any ambivalence for the viewer. This is especially true of the Faits et dits manuscripts, as many depict nude and semi-clad figures, and a small image of Lucretia naked in her bed is sometimes included in the same image.49 In one illumination (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 287), a fully garbed Lucretia stabs herself modestly in the neck with a dagger (Figure 3.2). A French version of Boccaccio’s De casibus (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 229) differs by depicting a bareheaded Lucretia in a torn dress that exposes her left leg (Figure 3.3). This dramatic image underlines the importance of the violation of Lucretia’s decorous public identity, as does her contorted posture, but her leg also mirrors the male figure opposite her, who is displaying both legs through decorative slashes in his clothing. This Lucretia cries rape in the correct attire, yet she mirrors masculine dress and thus retains her virilis animus.50 Simon de Hesdin’s translation postdates Jean Ferron’s Jeu des eschaz moralisé (1347), a translation of Jacobus de Cessolis’ Latin work (c. 1300).51 Ferron’s version was also copied into the Mesnagier de Paris (c. 1393).52 Given the success of Cessolis’s Latin text and of its translation, it is likely that this version was a source for illuminators.53 The story is in the chapter on the queen’s duty to act as a public example of virtuous living especially through 47  Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women 5, lines 1829–31, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 619. 48 Chaucer, Legend of Good Women 5, lines 1858–60. See Diane Wolfthal, ‘“A Hue and a Cry”: Medieval Rape Imagery and Its Transformation’, Art Bulletin 75, no. 1 (1993): 39–64; Florence Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 261–83; Corinne J. Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 164–6, 265–310. 49  See here Figures 3.4 and 3.5 and Buettner, ‘Profane Illuminations’, 86–8. 50  For the Premierfait translation of Boccaccio’s Lucretia and its images, see Hedeman, Translating the Past, 100–1, 201–2. 51  Le jeu des eschaz moralisé: Traduction de Jean Ferron (1347), ed. Alain Collet (Paris: Champion, 1999). References are to this edition, provided in parentheses. 52  Le Mesnagier de Paris 1.4, ed. Georgina E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier, trans. Karin Ueltschi (Paris: Livre de poche, 1994; repr. 2010), 142–50. 53  Le jeu des eschaz, ed. Collet, 84.

Figure 3.2. Suicide of Lucretia. Manuscript of Simon de Hesdin and Nicolas de Gonesse, Faits et dits mémorables (c.  1450–75). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 287, fol. 110v.



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Figure 3.3. Suicide of Lucretia. Laurent de Premierfait’s translation of Boccaccio, De casibus (Lyon, c. 1435–40). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 229, fol. 91r.

her chastity.54 In Ferron’s version, Collatinus’s gaze mediates the evidence of Lucretia’s distress: Adonc Colatin son mary vit qu’elle estoit toute palle et descoulouree, et sa face blanche et toute esplouree; car la grasse des larmes estoit apparent en son viaire des yeulx jusques aux baulievres, et avoit les yeux gros et enflez, 54  Le jeu des eschaz 2.2, ed. Collet, 137–41.

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Figure 3.4. Sextus Tarquinius and Lucretia; suicide of Lucretia. Manuscript of Simon de Hesdin and Nicolas de Gonesse, Faits et dits mémorables (early fifteenth century). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 282, fol. 242r. les paupieres mortes et espesses et dedens vermieulx par le descourement des larmes, et regardoit et parloit effroyeusement.55 [Then Collatinus, her husband, saw that she was pale and without colour, with a white, tear-stained face, for the tracks of her tears showed on her face, from her eyes to beneath her lips, and her eyes were big and swollen, the eyelids tired and thick, red-rimmed by the flow of her tears, and she both looked and sounded fearful.] 55  Mesnagier de Paris 1.4.19, ed. Brereton and Ferrier, lines 301–7.



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He interprets her distressed features as evidence that she is innocent. In this version, her words to him are brutal: ‘Et pour ce que nulle ribaude ne regne a l’exemple de Lucresse, qui vouldra prendre exemple au pechié et au forfait, si prengne aussi exemple a l’amende’ [And so that no loose woman should behave according to Lucretia’s example, may whoever wishes to take the sin and the crime as an example also take its punishment as an example].56 Ferron’s Lucretia defines and delimits her value as exemplum after being described as an image. An early fifteenth-century illumination of the Faits et dits (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 282) shows Tarquinius raising a dagger over Lucretia’s chest, and then, as if in a continuous movement, her stabbing herself in the chest as she leans over to speak to the three witnesses (Figure 3.4). The two scenes are pressed together in a constricted, undefined space (despite their narrow dividing frame and the different backgrounds), creating the illusion that Tarquinius is exchanging glances with two of the men who will avenge his crime. Tarquinius is mirrored by the central male witness. This man has the same posture (leaning towards the right of the frame), hairstyle, height and blue tunic as Lucretia’s aggressor, but he (unlike the other two) averts his eyes.57 In Livy’s narrative, Lucretia has only come to the attention of her rapist because her husband competed with his companions in boasting about having the chastest wife. Here, Lucretia is trapped between the vertical lines of the frames and a network of male looks. The intimacy of the image focuses on her personal, domestic situation and her limited agency within it. In another version (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 41), Lucretia is assaulted in her marital bed by Tarquinius, and she uses his sword to commit suicide before her witnesses (Figure 3.5). Below, the king and his heir are expelled by a procession led by the same witnesses, who blend into a group of consuls taking oaths that found the republic of Rome. The bottom section depicts the consul Publicola. In the leafy frame, mermaids, armed centaurs and wild men holding the arms and insignia of Pierre II, duke of Bourbon (1438–1503) draw attention to the troubled, uncivilized realm of France that is seeking inspiration in Roman history.58 This folio places Lucretia’s suicide literally within the bigger picture. Each of the three 56  Mesnagier de Paris 1.4.19, ed. Brereton and Ferrier, lines 316–19; Le jeu des eschaz 2.2, ed. Collet, 140. 57  Describing a similar composition in Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale 261, fol. 205v, Michael Camille interprets the witness who stands with his arms folded as a second image of the ‘strangely nonchalant rapist’. It is true that there is sometimes a close and no doubt deliberate resemblance between Tarquinius and the witnesses. See Michael Camille, Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 117, fig. 70. 58  Images of the expulsion of the Tarquins appear in Pierre Bersuire’s translation of Livy (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 33, fol. 15v) and Jean de Vignay’s translation

Figure 3.5. Suicide of Lucretia; expulsion of the Tarquins; Publicola. Manuscript of Simon de Hesdin and Nicolas de Gonesse, Faits et dits mémorables (Paris, c. 1450–75). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 41, fol. 198r.

Figure 3.6. Suicide of Lucretia. Manuscript of Simon de Hesdin and Nicolas de Gonesse, Faits et dits mémorables (Bruges, 1479). London, British Library, Royal 18.E.IV, fol. 71r.

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sections features significant figures clad in red and ermine: Collatinus and Lucretia at the top, Collatinus and two consuls in the middle, and Publicola and another consul at the bottom. Through visual rhetoric, Lucretia has become one of the founders of the new republic. Finally, a scene in a manuscript produced for Edward IV of England (British Library Royal 18.E.IV), illustrated by the Master of the White Inscriptions, straddles the domestic and the political spheres (Figure 3.6). Lucretia impales herself on a sword with the assistance of a woman, while three other women express shocked reactions through a window, as do the armed men who are gathered indoors. Here, the heraldic frame provides an intriguing gloss on the text, because it places directly below Lucretia the motto ‘Dieu et mon droit’. The motto appears throughout the manuscript, but on this folio it takes on a particular meaning for the onlooker who might choose to apply the concept of royal duty to the exemplum. An angel bearing the banner of the Yorkist king and his two young sons, along with Lucretia’s greyhound (inside the frame), look on impassively. In the far left corner (in the sightline of the male witnesses, the dog and the angel, but of none of the women), we see Tarquinius assaulting Lucretia in her bed. The cause of Lucretia’s suicide is theoretically visible to the male witnesses, but the women are divided into spectators outside the room, and supportive helpers within. In this image, the angel outside the frame finds an echo in a soldier who stands at the centre of the image. He bisects the group of witnesses into women (to his right) and men. This scene seems to locate Lucretia within a spectacular event that both involves and divides her society (angels, soldiers, women, noblemen, pets), inscribing her as a Roman suicide (the upright sword), and endorsing her act with the insignia of the house of York.59

Lucretia in Compilations The Lucretia figure in the images is not alone; nor is her story isolated. The Faits et dits present her tale as one among many, such as that of Tarpeia, who opened the gates of the Capitoline hill to the Sabine warriors in the hope of receiving their ornaments, only to be murdered by them (Facta et dicta memorabilia 9.6.1). Similarly, both Ferron and the Mesnagier juxtapose the Lucretia tale with the exemplum of Raymonda, the duchess of Lombardy, who takes a fancy to a knight in the Hungarian army that is besieging her of Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Historiale (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 50, fol. 174v). 59 Duval, La traduction du ‘Romuleon’, 255–6; Margaret Kekewich, ‘Edward IV, William Caxton, and Literary Patronage in Yorkist England’, Modern Language Review 66, no. 3 (1971): 481–7. A similar composition can be seen in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 289, fol. 285r (also from Bruges, c. 1475).



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city.60 She allows the army to enter and sack the city. Raymonda’s daughters avoid rape by hurriedly killing two pigeons and tucking the meat under their breasts. The men who approach them hurry away in disgust.61 Their mother is handed over to the Hungarian army, who rape her, then impale her on a stake from her vagina to her throat, and place an inscription on her clothing: ‘Tel mary doit avoir telle lecheresse qui par sa luxure a trahy sa cite et ses gens baillez as mains de leurs ennemis’ [Such a husband should the lustful woman have who has, by her lust, betrayed her city and handed over her people into the hands of their enemies].62 Raymonda is the antithesis to Lucretia, and may be viewed as the impudica or ribaude that is addressed by her dying words: gleefully unchaste, imperilling both her city and her daughters, and turned into an exemplum by her death. Juxtaposing Raymonda and Lucretia calls attention to Bal’s statement concerning the public display of Lucretia: ‘The visual representation of the woman at the moment of her self-killing partakes of this “publication”. Lucretia is put on display for the eyes of the indiscreet onlooker.’63 The ‘indiscreet onlooker’ is not the intended viewer of the medieval illuminations, because they introduce male and occasionally female witnesses. Nor is it the people of Collatia and Rome who flock to see her body displayed in the forum; this scene does not appear in the images, although it is alluded to in the display (with a written gloss) of Raymonda. In these versions, ‘publication’ is the point of Lucretia’s act. However, some translator-compilers did not wish to partake of that publication. Antoine de La Sale’s La Sale (1451) is a compilation of exempla and glosses from a personal copy of the Faits et dits.64 The work is a book that, in the preface, he says he produced for the three young sons of Louis de Luxembourg, count of Saint-Pol. In the third chapter of the book on Pitié, La Sale states that the Romans founded a republic in reaction to the crimes of the Tarquins, and refers his readers to the chapter on miracles. He adds: ‘Toutesfois dit Titus Livius que les Rommains oncques ne furent cause de boutter les roys hors de Romme; mais le fist Sextus Tarquinius, car prist Lucresse de force’ [However, Titus Livy says that the Romans never had a reason for throwing their kings out of Rome, but Sextus Tarquinius gave 60  Le jeu des eschaz 2.2, ed. Collet, 142; Mesnagier de Paris 1.4, ed. Brereton and Ferrier, 142–50. 61  See also Catherine Léglu, Multilingualism and Mother Tongue in Medieval French, Occitan, and Catalan Narratives (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 141–58. 62  Mesnagier de Paris 1.4.12, ed. Brereton and Ferrier, lines 209–11; Le jeu des eschaz 2.2, ed. Collet, 142. 63  Bal, ‘Calling to Witness’, 102. 64  Michel Lecourt, ‘Une Source d’Antoine de La Sale: Simon de Hesdin’, Romania 76 (1955): 39–83, 183–211.

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them one, because he took Lucretia by force].65 Later, in the first chapter of the book on Justice, La Sale recounts Brutus’s execution of his rebellious sons and points his reader again to Valerius Maximus’s chapter ‘des Miracles’ and book two of Livy,66 but when he finally moves onto his extracts from De miraculis, there is no Lucretia tale. La Sale is keen to note the deposition of kings, but displaces the rape and suicide. He displays ‘non-indifference’ to the significance of the tale, but in so doing, he suppresses it. If he has not told the story, it may be because he assumes that the example itself should be effective beyond either spoken or written words (it is in this text that we read, ‘plus esmeuvent examples que paroles et paroles que lettres’),67 but here, translation and ‘ethical nonindifference’ come full circle, because in La Sale, Lucretia’s story is celebrated but not told.

Conclusion Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood have commented: ‘we have ethical grounds to be suspicious of the idea of translation, especially as it relates to communities, and their tendency to reduce otherness to sameness’.68 In the context of medieval translation, critics are still divided between those who contend, in line with Louis G. Kelly, that ‘medieval translators of all stripes ruthlessly assimilated ancient social realities and institutions to the world they knew’, and the more cautious view expressed by Douglas Kelly that a certain degree of freedom, even one that allowed antiquarian speculation, can be traced.69 Medieval translators were often interventionist, and although translation ‘theory’ did not move much beyond the Ciceronian opposition between literal and interpretative transposition, there is evidence of some reflection on the process.70 Reassessing the role of translation from the invisible ‘servant’ of 65  La Sale, La Sale, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Desonay, 2:103. 66  La Sale, La Sale, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Desonay, 2:115. 67  La Sale, La Sale, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Desonay, 2:154. 68  Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, ‘The Ethics of Translation’, in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 90. 69  Louis G. Kelly, ‘Medieval Psalm Translation and Literality’, in Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeanette Beer (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1997), 165; Douglas Kelly, ‘The Fidus interpres: Aid or Impediment to Medieval Translation or Translatio?’ in Translation Theory and Practice, ed. Beer, 47–58. 70  Brenda Hosington, ‘From “Theory” to Practice: The Middle English Translation of the Romans de Parthenay, or of Lusignen’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 35, no. 4 (1999): 408–20; Lynne Long, ‘Medieval Literature through the Lens of Translation Theory: Bridging the Interpretive Gap’, Translation Studies 3, no. 1 (2010): 61–77. See also Hedeman, Translating the Past, 11–22.



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a text to its ambivalent, analytical transcultural vehicle calls attention to the role of medievalists as both diffusers and critics of a culture that is vulnerable to appropriation of all kinds.71 Late medieval translations of Latin histories are particularly relevant to this problem because they are accompanied by explicit, but not ‘historicizing’, attempts to make the text immediately accessible and comprehensible to their readers. Translations such as these are apt to be critical and far from servile in their efforts to tame and (in Lawrence Venuti’s terminology) ‘domesticate’ a different culture. Hults has noted that ‘no Renaissance depiction of Lucretia was without a public and, from the feminist point of view, a political aspect’.72 Yet the late medieval Lucretia portraits and narratives also have a public, political slant. Their treatments of the story might be considered as effacements of violence against women in favour of ideology, but they also foreground rape as an act that has consequences that affect both a woman and her society, and that calls for witness and retributive justice. Furthermore, several of the scholars cited in this chapter have stressed that, for a medieval reader, these illustrations were designed to make the written words of the ancient past connect with lived reality. Lucretia’s rape was therefore not erased but both modernized and made ‘real’ for the viewer.73 These transpositions of Roman histories into images and texts were destined for a wide audience that ranged from young princes to non-noble wives. Simon de Hesdin fulfils his commitment to providing the sense (sentence) rather than the literal version of the text, but he does so by signalling where he has either supplemented or not translated his source. The images furnish a second level of commentary, one that shows that there was little indifference to a tale that had long been debated among medieval French writers in terms of the ethics of female honour and suicide.74 It had now acquired new political and domestic dimensions that would endure. These translations function as a means of exploring, rather than cancelling, the cultural as well as the linguistic gap between the classical, pagan text and the late medieval reader.

71  Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2008). 72  Linda C. Hults, ‘Dürer’s Lucretia: Speaking the Silence of Women’, Signs 16, no. 2 (1991): 205–37, especially 208, 216 n. 27; Goffen, ‘Lotto’s Lucretia’. 73 Hedeman, Translating the Past, 34–5, 38; Buettner, ‘Profane Illuminations’, 80, quoted above, p.  62. See also Marie-Hélène Tesnière, ‘Un remaniement du Tite-Live de Pierre Bersuire’, Romania 107 (1986): 231–81. 74  Douglas Kelly, Internal Difference and Meanings in the ‘Roman de la rose’ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 82–3.

4 Translating Catharsis Aristotle and Averroës, the Scholastics and the Basochiens* Noah D. Guynn This essay investigates translation, aesthetics and performance in the long Middle Ages,1 with particular emphasis on the transmission of Aristotle and the politics of festive drama: plays staged in public spaces for heterogeneous audiences during religious holidays. My main interest is κάθαρσις (katharsis), an abstruse term from the Poetics and Politics that gets translated and deployed in diverse, often incompatible ways by premodern and modern scholars and that has been used, both implicitly and explicitly, to account for the dynamics of performance and ritual in medieval festive settings. Though the Politics was widely available in Latin translation from 1260 on, its references to catharsis pertain mostly to musical aesthetics, and medieval intellectuals do not seem to have drawn from it a theory of theatrical reception. As for the Poetics, it was known almost exclusively through Averroës’s Middle Commentary (1175), which Hermannus Alemannus translated into Latin in 1256.2 Having no understanding of Greek tragedy as theatre, Averroës, in keeping with previous Arabic readings of Aristotle, reorients the Poetics away from aesthetics towards logic.3 That tradition renders *  A version of this essay was presented at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research. I am grateful for the encouragement and feedback I received there, especially from Jody Enders. I am grateful as well to Uwe Vagelolpohl for patiently explaining the complexities of the Arab reception of Aristotle to me. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 1  I use this phrase to emphasize the survival of medieval dramatic genres into the sixteenth century and, in the case of farce, well beyond. 2  Few readers were aware of William of Moerbeke’s full, literal translation of the Poetics. 3  As Uwe Vagelpohl notes in ‘The Rhetoric and Poetics in the Muslim World’, in



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mimesis as the use of imaginative representations to move audiences unable to grasp more conclusive forms of reasoning to embrace the good. Though Averroës and Hermannus attest to the salutary effects of poetry in ways that distantly anticipate Stephen Halliwell’s association of catharsis with Aristotelian habituation and virtue (learning to feel ‘emotions in the right way and towards the right objects’),4 their translations of the Greek term bear little resemblance to the two modern readings of catharsis that have had the greatest impact on the study of medieval drama: on one hand, an emotional release triggered by temporary identification with staged events; on the other, moral correction and social stabilization prompted by satirical depictions of deviance and revolt. Though these glosses on Aristotle are in many ways distinct from one another, scholars of festive drama and culture have often blurred them together. Under the witting and unwitting influence of structural functionalist anthropology, they have argued that performances in which hierarchies are unsettled, norms flouted and grievances aired ultimately worked to subdue unruly instincts and remind subalterns of the moral necessity of the existing social order. Usually referred to as the ‘safety valve’ theory and notably associated with Carnival and carnivalesque genres like farce and sottie, this reading holds that festive misrule was in fact condoned, if not actually designed, by ruling elites in order to promote the ‘cathartic’ release of resentment and aggression, to offer satirical counter-examples of morally unacceptable behaviour and to render the masses docile and compliant. The first section of this essay considers how these assumptions have arisen, how valid they are and whether they are compatible with medieval aesthetic theories and theatre praxes. Guided by anthropological accounts of domination and resistance in liminal contexts and by recent critical and historical studies of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French drama, I hypothesize that farce and sottie did not awaken resentments in order to dampen them but rather mediated social tensions without resolving them. In the process, they opened a space for political dialogue, including overt and covert expressions of resistance and dissent. To test this hypothesis, I turn in the essay’s second section to the theatre of the medieval Basoches (guilds of law clerks, apprentices and other bureaucratic subalterns); to a celebrated playwright descended from Basochien stock, Pierre Gringore; and to a play Gringore composed for Paris’s Carnival festivities in 1512 (NS): Le jeu du Prince des Sotz et de Mere Sotte, a four-

Aristotle and the Arabic Tradition, ed. Ahmed Alwishah and Josh M. Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), the logical interpretation of the Poetics was pervasive in the Arabic scholarly tradition. 4  Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 196.

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part work consisting of a cry, sottie, moralité and farce.5 Though Gringore has been described as a royalist ideologue and propagandist for Louis XII’s Italian Wars, recent scholarship has reclaimed him as a constitutionalist who used literary texts and public performances to negotiate the terms of popular compliance with the monarchy’s domestic and foreign policies.6 I hope to further this reassessment of Gringore and especially of Raoullet Ployart, the farce that closes the Jeu. Specifically, I challenge the claim that Gringore uses Raoullet to purge anger and anxiety aroused by the monarchy’s warmongering and to promote passive acceptance of royal prerogative. In my view, the farce plays a crucial role in Gringore’s attempts to make Louis answerable to the Third Estate and its expectations of justice and fairness. Rather than encouraging subalterns to laugh their feelings away and submit quietly to royal dominion, it translates political struggles into an unresolved comic scenario that obliquely reveals the instability, antagonism and balance of power at the heart of France’s nascent absolutism. I engage with the politics of translation in three ways here. First, I argue that when modern scholars render catharsis as purgation and surmise that carnivalesque rituals served as a safety valve for purging popular resentment, they greatly exaggerate the passivity and tractability of medieval revellers and the power of playacting to short-circuit real struggles. The classic functionalist notion that festive misrule enacts resistance in order to pre-empt it is a misperception that more recent political anthropology, with its suspicion of the efficacy of ideological fictions and regimes of power, can help to correct. Second, I propose that the ubiquitous claim that festive drama entails a socially stabilizing emotional purge and an implicit moral indictment of social revolt is not borne out by the evidence, including Scholastic translations of Aristotle and aesthetic theory as well as published play scripts and archival records related to theatre productions. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that medieval performances were not subject to aesthetic canons, Aristotelian or otherwise; that medieval plays often lacked dramatic synthesis, emotional release and social cohesion; and that the public stage was a privileged and hotly contested medium for political confrontation and exchange. Finally, I propose a cultural translation of my own, using the apparent lack of affective purge and social integration in Gringore’s Jeu to put forward a provisional theory of the politics of festive drama. Is it possible that, far from offering a safety valve for social resentments (in the manner of a largely notional ‘Aristotelian drama’), farce and sottie instead urged spectators to perceive their power and act on it, whether openly or furtively?

5  See Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, Les clercs de la Basoche et le théâtre comique (Paris, 1420– 1550) (Paris: Champion, 2007), esp. 199–203 (on Gringore). 6  See, for instance, Nicole Hochner, ‘Pierre Gringore: Une satire à la solde du pouvoir?’ Fifteenth-Century Studies 26 (2001): 102–20.



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Catharsis: Philosophy, Anthropology, Drama Before examining the politics of medieval festive drama, we must first consider the role catharsis plays in Hellenic sources and how medieval and modern intellectuals incorporate the term into models of aesthetic reception and social praxis. As is well known, katharsis derives from kathairein, ‘to cleanse’, and encompasses a range of medical, religious, metaphorical and aesthetic meanings.7 In Greek medicine, it refers to the restoration of somatic health through procedures for removing pathologies and excess humours or through the body’s own processes of discharge and secretion. Since physical and spiritual health were complexly intertwined in antiquity, the word also carries religious meaning and refers to the effects of lustral rites, which were used to remove defilement or to purify the devout in preparation for witnessing mystery. As Plato demonstrates in Phaedo and the Sophist, katharsis could also be used metaphorically to refer to the salutary effects of philosophy, which liberates the soul from the corrupting effects of the body and purifies it through elenchus.8 The most pivotal uses of the term are, however, to be found in Aristotle’s treatment of musical and dramatic aesthetics in the Politics and Poetics. In the Politics, he argues that just as certain kinds of melodies ‘excite the soul to mystic frenzy’, so, too, they can produce a catharsis that causes souls to feel ‘lightened and delighted’. This cure has implications for the aesthetics and politics of performance: whereas ‘melodies of character’ are meant for the exclusive consumption of the ‘free and educated’, the ‘passionate or inspiring melodies’ of theatre music offer an ‘innocent pleasure’ to all spectators, including the ‘vulgar crowd’, which is afforded the ‘relaxation’ of catharsis prior to returning to their drudgery.9 Given this link between music and theatre, one might expect Aristotle to say more about catharsis in the Poetics, and indeed he does: tragedy, we are told, depicts ‘incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions’.10 This is, unfortunately, all he has to say on the matter here, leaving scholars to debate his meaning endlessly and to wonder how best to translate the word katharsis itself: ‘purgation’ (salutary evacuation) or ‘purification’ (refinement through addition)?11 7  The references to Greek sources below derive from Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 185–7. 8 See Phaedo 67c and Sophist 230b–e in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 58, 250–1. 9  Politics 1341b–1342a, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:2128–9. 10  Poetics 1449b, in Complete Works, 2:2320. 11  As Halliwell notes, the purgation/purification distinction is not always a clear one, and translators and commentators sometimes use the terms interchangeably or define them loosely. See Aristotle’s Poetics, 198–99, esp. 199n42.

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As I have indicated, the study of medieval festive culture and drama has been profoundly, if often obliquely, influenced by two different interpretations of the catharsis clause. Halliwell dubs the first of these the ‘emotional release or outlet’ theory, whereby theatrical performance offers ‘a harmlessly pleasurable means of expending pent-up or excessive emotions’. Notably espoused by the nineteenth-century philologist Jakob Bernays, it draws on the medical analogy in Aristotle ‘to give to katharsis the exclusive sense of therapeutic or quasi-therapeutic relief, and to rule out any question of an ethical dimension to the experience’.12 Dismissing what he perceives as the moralism of earlier Aristotelians like Lessing, Bernays proposes instead a clinical account of catharsis as purge: an outlet for repressed or immoderate feelings. Halliwell refers to the second of the two glosses as the ‘moralistic or didactic view’, and indeed it draws on Roman rhetoric and satire theory (especially the notions of pleasure and persuasion, profit and delight elaborated by Cicero and Horace) to yield a notion of catharsis as pleasurable moral instruction.13 Espoused by Segni and Maggi in Italy, Corneille, Rapin and Dacier in France, and Dryden and Johnson in England, this reading of the Poetics specifies that ‘tragedy teaches the audience by example – or counter-example – to curb its own emotions and the faults which they may cause’.14 By this reading, catharsis amounts to rhetorical inducement, ethical refinement and social purification. Though the ‘didactic’ and ‘outlet’ glosses differ markedly from one another (notably with regard to the ethics of performance), they have nonetheless coalesced into a modern, political reading of festive misrule: the functionalist argument that ‘rituals of rebellion’ serve to maintain the status quo through negative example and emotional discharge. The core thesis here is that the iterative formal structure of seasonal ceremonies, initiation rites and the like guarantee social order by creating a topsy-turvy world in which subordinate groups are temporarily – but only temporarily – allowed to dominate and deflate their social superiors. Tracing an emotional arc from incitement to release and finally to resolution, these rituals awaken and exaggerate the resentments of subaltern groups in order subsequently to dispel those resentments and restore normative order. In the process, they signify that dissent can be safely expressed only through licensed rituals and is otherwise an immoral, antisocial act. Though this theory originated in anthropology and ethnography, it borrows liberally from an aesthetic, explicitly Aristotelian vocabulary. Thus Max Gluckman argues that African rituals of rebellion (in which, for instance, women control men and subjects govern kings) constitute an ‘acting of conflict’ that exaggerates social tensions in order to achieve the 12 Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 353. 13  See O. B. Hardison Jr and Leon Golden, Horace for Students of Literature: The ‘Ars Poetica’ and Its Tradition (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 72–4. 14 Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 350–1.



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‘catharsis [described] by Aristotle’: a ‘purging of emotion’ that results in the ‘blessing’ of ‘social unity’.15 Influenced, whether consciously or not, by this functionalist model of deviation and incorporation, rebellion and release, medieval theatre scholars have often described festive genres like farce and sottie as rituals of rebellion.16 They have likewise argued strenuously against Mikhail Bakhtin’s claim that Carnival and carnivalesque drama are products of a revolutionary counter-culture: a ‘second life of the people’ that stands in opposition to ‘the existing world order’.17 The standard functionalist retort is that Carnival’s acting out of social tensions is little more than a strategy for containing dissent and for persuading audiences to comply with established moral and social codes. Alan Knight offers a version of this argument (minus any direct reference to Bakhtin) when he asserts that farce depicts an amoral fictional world ‘governed by sensual desires and unconstrained by the requirements of reason’ in order to demonstrate ‘what the real world would be like without the guiding rudder of reason’.18 Farce and sottie are both ameliorative, teleological genres in that they satirized deviant behaviour in order to correct it, implicitly directing ‘medieval spectators to think and act in ways that would lead them ultimately to salvation’.19 Bruce Hayes concurs with Knight and fuses the latter’s didactic conception of satire with a profoundly Aristotelian notion of virtue as mediocritas. In his view, farce’s formulaic plots betray the genre’s essential ‘conservatism’: since characters guilty of immoderation are alone subject to comic reversals, audiences must have deduced from this that they should embrace an ethos of ‘chacun à sa place’ [each man in his place] and should scorn ‘anything that could be construed as new or innovative’.20 Heather Arden proposes a similar argument about the sottie, claiming that 15  Max Gluckman, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 126. 16  In his polemical study The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), Philippe Buc argues that functionalism continues to exert a profound and in many ways unacknowledged influence on scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. 17  Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 9. Bakhtin’s claims are indeed problematic, in that he describes the carnivalized marketplace as an isolated, dissident space in which official values played no role. As James C. Scott argues in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), ‘to think of anti-hegemonic discourse as occupying merely the social space left empty by domination would be to miss the struggle by which such sites are won, cleared, built, and defended’ (123). 18  Alan E. Knight, Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 59. 19 Knight, Aspects of Genre, 23. 20  E. Bruce Hayes, Rabelais’s Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and Its Function in Rabelais (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 25, 15, citing Jean-Claude Aubailly, Le théâtre médiéval profane et comique (Paris: Larousse, 1975), 186.

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it allowed spectators to exact ‘a symbolic revenge that was psychically satisfying’ but lacked ‘practical social effect’. In her view, the ‘satiric theatre of the late Middle Ages … did not promote change at all – neither positive social change nor undesirable social unrest. The satiric theatre was rather a conservative force, attempting to laugh away all nouveauté, or change.’21 Summing up a perspective that has, until quite recently, been something of a critical consensus, Charles Mazouer asserts that, though the ‘free laughter of farce’ makes room for the expression of dissent, ‘subversion’ is ultimately confined to ‘the make-believe world of theatrical fiction’ and ‘reclaimed by order’ through the effects of a ‘comic catharsis’.22 Now, there are good reasons for doubting the validity of catharsis as a tool for analysing the social and political effects of medieval festive drama, at least in the way that Mazouer deploys the Greek term.23 To begin with, Aristotle’s views on drama were little known in the medieval West and, to the extent that they were known, were perceived through the lens of the Latin Middle Commentary, which offers nothing resembling the ‘outlet’ and ‘didactic’ readings of the catharsis clause.24 As William Boggess notes, Averroës and Hermannus use three interlocking concepts – moderation (temperativas) and virtue and cleanness (de honestate et munditia) – to capture Aristotle’s reference to catharsis in the Poetics.25 Adapting aesthetic theory to epideictic rhetoric, they translate ‘tragedy’ as ‘eulogy’ and define it as ‘a representation that affects souls moderately by engendering compassion and fear in them by evoking purity and immaculateness in the imagination of the virtuous’ (Averroës)26 or as ‘a representation … that produces in souls certain passions that moderate these [passions or souls] to feel pity or fear or other similar passions, which the representation arouses and stimulates by what it makes virtuous men imagine about honour and immaculateness’ (Hermannus).27 Neither thinker 21  Heather Arden, Fools’ Plays: A Study of Satire in the ‘Sottie’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 95, 74. 22  Charles Mazouer, Le théâtre français du Moyen Âge (Paris: SEDES, 1998), 358. 23  Jody Enders presents a highly nuanced account of catharsis in The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), arguing that it may not only have purged violent instincts but also have inflamed them, yoking them to ideologically productive forms of pleasure. 24  The best study remains Henry Ansgar Kelly, ‘Aristotle-Averroes-Alemannus on Tragedy: The Influence of the Poetics on the Latin Middle Ages’, Viator 10 (1979): 161–209. 25  William F. Boggess, ‘Hermannus Alemannus and Catharsis in the Mediaeval Latin Poetics’, Classical World 62, no. 6 (1969): 212–14. 26  Averroës’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 73, translation modified. My thanks to Uwe Vagelpohl for providing me with a corrected translation of this passage. 27  Averrois expositio Poeticae interprete Hermanno Alemanno, in Aristoteles Latinus 33, ed. Laurentius Minio-Paluello, 2nd edn (Brussels: Desclée de Brouwer, 1968), 47. My thanks to Emily Albu for assistance with this translation.



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describes tragedy as inflaming excessive passions in order to purge them,28 nor do they address the issue of using satire to control social behaviours or promote obedience. If they saw this as the purview of comedy, they certainly fail to mention it. Instead they focus attention on tragedy as lyric representations that engender moderate or moderating passions – passions that in turn yield greater virtue among those who are already virtuous but are untrained in esoteric forms of logical inquiry. To some extent, catharsis survives in Scholastic music theory under the influence of William of Moerbeke’s translation of the Politics. As Catherine Jeffreys observes, the passages on music in book eight were quickly perceived as authoritative by masters of arts and theology, though they were largely adapted to conform to pre-existing theories.29 Aquinas invokes Aristotle and Boethius to argue that musical ‘consonances’ can ‘transform the disposition of man’ and rouse his spirit ‘toward God’.30 Robert Kilwardby likewise emphasizes music’s capacity to alter ‘the behaviour (mores) of men, now exciting calm souls, now settling the roused’.31 And Peter of Auvergne describes certain musical modes as ‘purgatives’, confirming Plato’s assertion (cited by Boethius) that ‘civilized and prudently arranged music’ can render ‘a domain harmless’.32 There is, however, little to suggest that these thinkers believed vulgar melodies could be used to discourage bad behaviour or to impose submission on rowdy subalterns. Nor is there any evidence that they saw a link in the Politics between music and drama or between emotional incitement and a salutary purge. Bartholomew of Bruges, who produced a Brevis expositio on the Latin Middle Commentary (1307) and knew the Politics well, reveals a vague understanding of theatrical mimesis and a secure understanding of the importance of emotional responses to poetic representations.33 Yet neither he nor any other Scholastic author links poetry and performance to emotional unburdening and social integration. To be sure, Isidore of Seville offers an influential account of satire as a didactic and ameliorative mode capable of

28  A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott make this point in Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100–1375 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 285. 29  Catherine Jeffreys, ‘Some Early References to Aristotle’s Politics in Parisian Writings about Music’, in Identity and Locality in Early European Music, 1028–1740, ed. Jason Stoessel (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 83–105. 30  Thomas Aquinas, In Psalmos Davidis 32.2, cited in Jeffreys, ‘Some Early References’, 88. 31  Robert Kilwardby, De ortu scientiarum 18.129, cited in Jeffreys, ‘Some Early References’, 90. 32  Peter of Auvergne, Quodlibet 6.17, cited in Jeffreys, ‘Some Early References’, 94. Peter cites Boethius, De institutione musica 1.1.81. The word ‘purgative’ is not from Moerbeke, who translates katharsis as ‘purificatio’. 33  Donnalee Dox, The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 116–24.

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‘reprimanding sinful habits’ through the depiction of ‘naked sin’.34 Moreover, as Ben Parsons notes, the Scholastics drew ‘a particularly strong link between satire and festivity’, with, for instance, allusions to seasonal rituals and peasant games as satirae.35 By the same token, there are strong suggestions in William of Conches, Conrad of Hirsau, John of Garland and Isidore himself that satire was thought of not as ‘inflexibly or automatically remedial’ but as potentially ludic, antagonistic and subversive of social and moral values.36 Certainly, the Scholastics would have understood the potential for satire to fuel social antagonisms from direct experience of the rituals and performances that were commonplace in their world. They can hardly have been unaware of the theatre of the Basochiens, who lived, worked and performed in close proximity to them and were often accused of indecency and slander, and sometimes also of incitement and sedition. As historian Marie BouhaïkGironès has shown, the typical Basochien had benefited from some level of university education but was forced to abandon his studies before receiving an advanced degree, either for lack of funds or for having failed his exams.37 Though well trained in forensic rhetoric, he would have been marginally employed, poorly remunerated and acutely aware of, and frustrated by, his marginal status. Social resentments seem to have motivated the Basochiens to produce a remarkable amount of political theatre in the period between 1420 and 1550 – plays that were subject to stringent censorship by parliamentary and civic authorities and not infrequently led to disciplinary actions.38 Basochien theatre often uses conventional satirical themes to gesture towards latent political content. For instance, many plays deploy the ‘woman on top’ topos, in which a wife’s victory over her husband suggests a broader interest in the subaltern’s revenge.39 Others use conventional estates satire to attack the corruption of ruling elites and to celebrate the ingenuity of subalterns who manage to belittle or sabotage their betters.40 Far from seeking to ease social pressures and maintain stability through an emotional purge or moral purification, these plays exploit the disorder of festive occasions to celebrate covert and overt strategies for unsettling hierarchies. Recent work in cultural and theatre history has shown that such performances were often quite successful in contesting political domination. As Sara Beam attests, urban officials and clerical leaders expressed considerable 34  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum 8.7.7, cited in Ben Parsons, ‘“A Riotous Spray of Words”: Rethinking the Medieval Theory of Satire’, Exemplaria 21, no. 2 (2009): 108. 35  Parsons, ‘Riotous Spray’, 122. 36  Parsons, ‘Riotous Spray’, 115, 124. 37 Bouhaïk-Gironès, Clercs, 80–3. 38 Bouhaïk-Gironès, Clercs, 135–52. 39 Bouhaïk-Gironès, Clercs, 234–5. 40 Bouhaïk-Gironès, Clercs, 240, 249.



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anxiety about the boisterous, aggressive behaviour of playgoers and about the moral, religious and political messages disseminated through performances.41 Local officials sometimes organized or administered performances themselves, using theatre to achieve a variety of tactical goals: to express their own opposition to monarchic policies, to exert control over dramatic content or to prevent festive occasions from devolving into violent upheaval. However, surviving trial records prove that those efforts were not always successful;42 indeed, it would appear that licensed performances could just as easily incite conflict as quell it. Jody Enders cites three fifteenth-century cases in which insults, allusions and jokes, especially those targeting ecclesiastical and royal authority, swiftly got out of hand and led to prosecutions and incarcerations.43 The threat of legal action does not seem to have discouraged actors from political humour but instead made them more adept at exploiting innuendos and gestural codes in order to covertly lambast individuals and institutions. Indeed, they seem to have been particularly skilled at exploiting discrepancies between text and performance in order to circumvent censors and provide themselves with plausible deniability in case of detection.44 Formulaic genres like farce were especially useful in this regard, since political content could be easily concealed within clichéd, seemingly anodyne forms of conjugal and estates satire. To quote Jelle Koopmans, medieval dramatic genres were ‘empty container[s]’: cultural practices that were realized ‘when concrete circumstances furnished a pretext’ and that were fully adaptable to ‘local circumstances’. Though he warns against generalizing disparate texts into a single ‘national’ theatre or a stable set of aesthetic canons, he urges us to consider the extent to which festive drama was endowed with ‘an experimental character and a sometimes striking tendency toward politicization’.45 Translating evidence of experimentation and politicization, censorship and self-censorship into anthropological terms, we might say that the ‘public transcript’ of festive performance (in most cases, little more than the published text, which would have been heavily expurgated by the time it reached print) reveals only the smallest portion of a play’s social effects. As 41  Sara Beam, Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). 42 Beam, Laughing Matters, 11–16; Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, ‘Le procès des farceurs de Dijon (1447)’, European Medieval Drama 7 (2003): 117–34; Katell Lavéant, ‘Le théâtre du Nord et la Réforme: Un procès d’acteurs dans la région de Lille en 1563’, European Medieval Drama 11 (2007): 59–77. 43 Enders, Medieval Theater of Cruelty, 152. 44  See Bouhaïk-Gironès, ‘Procès’, 129–30. 45  Jelle Koopmans, ‘Les universités contre le roi: Caen 1492 et Toulouse 1507’, in Das Theater des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit als Ort und Medium sozialer und symbolischer Kommunikation, ed. Christel Meier, Heinz Meyer and Claudia Spanily (Münster: Rhema, 2004), 236, 229.

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James C. Scott argues, even when historical records suggest Carnival revellers’ willingness to cooperate with institutional power, we must not assume that subalterns blithely accepted the social cues that were used to remind them of their subordination. On the contrary, ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies reveal a wealth of evidence of ‘the imaginative capacity of subordinate groups to reverse or negate dominant ideologies’ – an ‘infrapolitics’ or ‘hidden transcript’ that is ‘part and parcel of the religiopolitical equipment of historically disadvantaged groups’.46 Challenging the functionalist notion of ‘catharsis through displacement’, Scott insists that a ‘ritual modeling of revolt’ does not ‘necessarily diminish the likelihood of actual revolt’ but may instead serve as a kind of ‘dress rehearsal or a provocation for actual defiance’.47 Real acts of aggression in response to social inequality are inevitable but only occasionally visible. They can take multiple forms, including ‘down-to-earth, low-profile stratagems designed to minimize appropriation’ as well as violent uprisings like the amply documented and exceptionally bloody Carnival revolt in Romans in 1580.48 Though such rebellions were sporadic in the period between the end of the Hundred Years War and the French Wars of Religion, this apparent tranquillity need not be interpreted as a sign that subalterns were somehow inured to, or complicit with, their own subjugation. Rather, as Scott would argue, their resistance was more likely to have been inconspicuous or highly mediated. This revisionist theory of Carnival can help us to see how functionalist notions of cathartic release and social consolidation work to obscure the political tensions and ambivalences that inhabit medieval festive drama. Thus, if farces and sotties cynically remind spectators of the permanence of social inequality, they also attest to the inevitability of social struggle. If they allow spectators to participate imaginatively in staged resistance, they also remind them that in real life, resistance will provoke a coercive response unless it is cunning and furtive. And finally, if they are performed in the context of officially sanctioned festivals, they can also readily adapt the most orthodox theology to a politics of dissent: Isaiah foresees that a child will rule (Isaiah 11:6); Jesus proclaims that the last will be first and the first last (Matthew 19:30, 20:16; Mark 10:31; Luke 13:30); and Mary avers that the Lord has unseated the mighty, and exalted the humble (Luke 1:52). Parodic enactments of these sacred themes could be used to promote a fatalistic acceptance of inequality in the here and now but could equally be taken as religiopolitical prophecies of a counterfactual reality, a utopian imagining that discreetly promotes fantasies of resistance and unobtrusive acts of rebellion. The full measure of Carnival ambivalence can be glimpsed in the fact that the latter reading is 46 Scott, Domination, 91. 47 Scott, Domination, 187, 178. 48 Scott, Domination, 188; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feeney (New York: George Braziller, 1979).



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effective precisely because the former conceals it from view – or at the very least offers performers a credible alibi in case of detection. Having argued that functionalist criticism has flattened the politics of festive drama, I will now look for signs of political contestation and antagonism in one of the few surviving plays that can be directly tied to medieval Carnival: the Jeu du Prince des Sotz. Taking as a point of departure Koopmans’s claim that medieval dramatic genres are experimental, context-bound and often polemical cultural practices, my reading of Gringore’s play will attend closely to its hidden transcript of political undertones and innuendos. If we look closely for evidence of covert resistance in the Jeu and avoid making the assumption that Carnival upheaval necessarily resolves in cathartic release and social reintegration, we may discover that the play’s resistance is not so covert after all but is to a large extent hiding in plain sight. Indeed, Gringore emphasizes unresolved affect and bitter disagreement at precisely the moment when a functionalist reading of the play would lead us to expect emotional discharge and ideological synthesis – in the closing scene of Raoullet Ployart. Pierre Gringore and Carnival 1512 The social heterogeneity of the audience that gathered in Les Halles on Shrove Tuesday 1512 and the political nature of the play they were there to see are made clear by the cry that opens the production.49 An actor calls to all the fools in the world (bourgeoisie, nobility and peasantry; young and old, male and female, clean and dirty, foolish and wise), asking them to assemble so that festivities can begin. Their sovereign, the Prince des Sotz, will soon appear to celebrate the holiday with them: ‘Le mardy gras jouera le Prince aux Halles’ (18) [On Mardi Gras, the Prince will play in Les Halles]. It becomes immediately apparent at the opening of the sottie, however, that the fools are there for more than pageant and revelry: with mounting anger and anxiety, they fulminate against their enemies, which the Parisian audience would readily have understood as the Holy League, a coalition of European states under papal leadership that was aggressively combating France’s expansionist campaigns in Italy. Le Premier Sot declares that the time for games is over, as threats alone will not fend off their foes, who grow stronger by the day. The fools therefore forge an ‘aliance’ (105) and ‘conseil’ (137) centring on the Prince des Sotz (who doubles for Louis XII) and call for military action against their enemies. As they await the prince’s arrival, they heap praise upon him and scorn upon the pontiff, who has betrayed his sacred duties by seizing ‘temporalité’ (47) [temporal authority]. 49  Pierre Gringore, Le jeu du Prince des Sotz et de Mere Sotte, ed. Alan Hindley (Paris: Champion, 2000). Subsequent references are to this edition by line number, provided in parentheses.

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The play’s anticlericalism is briefly attenuated by the arrival of the prince in the company of his ‘cher filz tresaymé’ (201) [dearly beloved son] Gayecte, a bishop. Gayecte soon indicates his own opposition to papal tyranny, however, and proclaims that the prince has a God-given right to punish ‘meffaitz execrables’ (207) [execrable misdeeds]. Gallican satire is amplified when the prince hears reports from his abbots: Plate Bource, a drunkard, has seized a fellow abbot’s benefice out of greed; Frevaulx, a glutton, has devoured his abbey’s income, leaving his monks to starve; and Sainct Liger, a shirker, is absent and presumed to be hunting, an activity he prefers to singing matins. The fools’ subsequent references to clerical concubinage and dull-wittedness complete the picture: ‘L’Eglise a de maulvais pilliers!’ (263) [The Church has weak/ wicked pillars]. The prince does not himself impugn the Church but instead expresses concern for the welfare of Frevaux’s indigent monks. His forbearance is clearly meant to ease the scruples of devout spectators, suggesting that Louis has been slow to anger in the face of clerical outrages. The sottie eventually articulates a critique of Gallican warmongering, though we must wait until nearly halfway through the play to hear it. At this point, Sotte Commune breaks a long silence (she has not yet spoken), crying out in frustration, ‘Par Dieu je ne m’en tairay pas!’ (266) [By God, I won’t shut up about it]. Lamenting the economic instability caused by international conflicts, she boldly proclaims her objections to war, which has impoverished those who were already destitute. Not content to play the meek subordinate, she demands to know why she should care whether ‘ung fol ou ung saige’ [a fool or a wise man] sits on ‘la chaire de sainct Pierre’ [the throne of Saint Peter] or whether ‘l’Eglise erre’ [the Church errs], provided that there is ‘paix … en ceste terre’ [peace in this land] and that she can be ‘asseur en mon village’ [safe in my village] (272–7). She warns that the people’s economic welfare should be more important than the prince’s territorial disputes, and that a policy of belligerence could lead to ‘scismes orribles, pervers’ (330) [horrible, perverse schisms]. Her bitterness is compounded by the responses she receives. The prince seems not to recognize or hear her, and repeatedly asks, ‘Qui parle?’ [Who is speaking?], only to be told, repeatedly, ‘La Sotte Commune’ (270, 279, 288, 297). As Cynthia Brown argues, the joke targets Louis’s impaired hearing and advancing age, but perhaps also his ‘deafness to his subjects’ opinions’.50 The response of the other fools (who represent the Second Estate) to Sotte Commune’s grumbling is even more insulting: they harshly reproach her for complaining and counter that the prince has ensured justice for commoners and has even lowered taxes. Le Tiers Sot urges the company to ignore Sotte Commune, which indeed they do until an apparent reconciliation occurs at the end of the sottie. This reconciliation is made possible by the arrival on the scene of an egre50  Cynthia Brown, ‘Political Rule and Popular Opinion: Double Talk and Folly in Pierre Gringore’s Jeu du Prince des Sotz’, Le Moyen Français 11 (1982): 97, 105.



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gious common enemy: Mere Sotte, who is disguised as Mere Sainte Eglise and offers a grotesque caricature of Pope Julius II. Addressing the audience, she declares her affinity with Abiron and Dathan (accursed leaders of a schismatic revolt against Moses) and her desire to seize power by making everyone beg for ‘pardon et mercy à ma guise’ (342) [pardon and mercy according to my will]. With the assistance of her acolytes Sotte Fiance and Sotte Occasion (patrons of the credulous and imprudent respectively) and using cardinals’ hats as bribes, she has lured ‘princes’ and ‘prelatz’ (370) into sedition. She easily convinces the Seigneur de la Lune, Plate Bource and Frevaulx to rebel against Le Prince de Sotz, and perversely exhorts Plate Bource to use crosiers and crosses to strike her enemies down. She then leads her troops into battle, constructing a stage picture that is clearly meant to turn devout spectators against Il Papa Guerriero, the scornful epithet by which Julius was commonly known. The battle evidently disgusts Sotte Commune, who makes an abrupt volte-face, casting blame for her troubles on ecclesiastical avarice rather than royal indifference: ‘Les marchans et gens de mestier / N’ont plus rien: tout va à l’Eglise’ (552–3) [Merchants and workers have nothing left: everything goes to the Church]. When the prince asks Sotte Commune if his enemy is ‘l’Eglise proprement’ (610) [truly the Church], she is unsure how to respond. Eventually, however, she discovers the truth and brings the play to a close by exposing the pontiff as an imposter: ‘Ce n’est pas Mere Saincte Eglise / qui nous fait guerre: sans fainctise / Ce n’est que nostre Mere Sotte’ (655–7) [It isn’t Holy Mother Church who makes war against us: without deception it is only our Mother Folly]. This denouement could certainly be read as buttressing Gallican and royalist ideologies: Sotte Commune illustrates the transformative effects of the sottie by modelling a transition from resistance to compliance and by accepting the prince as the people’s benefactor and the papacy as a legitimate enemy. And yet there is another political message implicit in her words and deeds, one that suggests agency and restiveness rather than docility. To begin with, the manufacturing of her consent comes at a rather steep price: she has been allowed to express popular resentments of social and economic inequities, to reveal the tactical necessity of popular support for the Italian Wars, and to transform herself from a mute, disregarded subaltern into the bearer of the play’s moral and political wisdom. If, moreover, the Jeu asks commoners to agree to a war that will cause them financial hardship and moral anxiety, it simultaneously negotiates a more robust consultative relationship between the monarchy and the Third Estate. Indeed, Gringore not only emphasizes the importance of consultation for sniffing out corruption and defeating France’s enemies; he also casts Sotte Commune in the role of the wise counsellor whose opinions are more astute and valuable than the others. Presumably Gringore intends Louis to learn the same lesson as the Prince des Sotz: that he must acknowledge commoners and heed their words if he wishes to prevail over his enemies.

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This rather overt lesson on the need for political negotiation and balance of power is a bit surprising given that the reign of Le Père du Peuple, as Louis was dubbed at the Estates General of 1506, was known to be an unusually limited, consultative one.51 The king was known to be respectful of the common people and actively courted their approval by lowering their tax burden and ensuring that they benefited from economic expansion. Given these political realities, Sotte Commune’s exhorting of the Prince des Sotz should perhaps be read not as the discreet attempts of an oppressed, silenced underclass to assert itself in national politics but instead as a tactic for extracting even greater allowances from an already accommodating monarch who has been temporarily weakened by religious and political controversy. In other words, festive drama serves here not only as a vehicle for Gallican, royalist ideology but also as a medium through which the Third Estate, including its least advantaged members (Sotte Commune speaks in part for urban workers and the rural poor), can make political demands of the monarchy. Indeed, though Sotte Commune embraces Gallican ideology in the end, she also implies that her conversion may be merely partial and temporary, and that she may continue leveraging the king’s need for solidarity into economic and political allowances for the common people. Thus at the sottie’s close, she returns to her suspicious and perhaps disingenuous complaints about deprivation: while the other fools inveigh against Mere Sotte’s ‘Symonie’ (639) and the ‘mutinerie’ [rebellion] she has incited ‘entre les princes et prelatz’ (640–1) [between princes and prelates], Sotte Commune laments her impoverished state: ‘Et j’en suis, par saincte Marie, / Tant plaine de melencolie / Que n’ay plus escuz ne ducas’ (642–4) [By Saint Mary, I am so filled with melancholy that I have neither crowns nor ducats]. When the others reprimand her for complaining and command her to hold her tongue, she retorts, ‘D’où vient ceste division?’ (646) [Where does this discord come from?]. Though Mere Sotte has instigated a dispute between the First and Second Estates, the word mutinerie denotes insurrection – a violent uprising in which, more often than not, the Third Estate would have been at odds with the other two in its quest for legal entitlements and political rights.52 Sotte Commune’s plaintive lament over lost income rings false in this context and could be read instead as a bold insinuation that the way to prevent mutinerie is through ever more advantageous political and economic concessions. If the fools express frustration with Sotte Commune’s dogged pursuit of material gain, her reply merely ups the ante: a refusal to hear her demands could spell ‘division’ and the collapse of a fragile coalition. When the fools subsequently quell divisiveness by vituperating against Mere Sotte, they point to the contrived nature of the propaganda campaign. Though social strife is blamed on the papacy 51  See Frederic J. Baumgartner, Louis XII (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), esp. 247–51. 52  See Samuel K. Cohn Jr, Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).



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alone, the noisy quarrel we have witnessed suggests that cohesion is artificial and unstable and that the pliancy of the lower classes is an implausible fiction. By comparison with the sottie, the moralité is a relatively sober, balanced and didactic affair. Peuple Ytalique and Peuple François lament their respective situations and hurl accusations at one another: the French are taxed to support a war on the Italians, while the Italians are denied peace, tranquillity and autonomy. Anti-Italian sentiment is relatively muted here, and blame for the suffering of both peoples is heaped upon the Pope’s double, L’Homme Obstiné, who openly acknowledges his own wickedness to the audience: ‘je commetz maint peché execrable’ (100) [I commit many an execrable sin]. The arrival of Pugnicion Divine signals equitable judgement and moral correction: she inveighs against Peuple Ytalique, whose crimes include usury, sodomy and necromancy, but also Peuple François, who ill serves God. Her bitterest censure, however, is reserved for L’Homme Obstiné, who is impenitent despite having betrayed ‘le juste et loyal lys’ (196) [the just and loyal fleur-de-lis]. Ultimately, the moralité depicts sin and the need for salvation as universal – a conclusion that is made visible through the appearance of Demerites Communes, who has the word ‘SY’ emblazoned across her chest and who reveals what the Church, Estates and nations would be like if they were not hobbled by iniquity. All acknowledge their fear of damnation and appeal to God for mercy, with the exception of L’Homme Obstiné, who perseveres in error. This pious call for atonement, which anticipates Lent in the midst of Carnival, is neatly fused with Gallican propaganda, with Julius designated as an illegitimate, godless pope and Louis as the embodiment of French justice and loyalty. Yet even as the moralité focuses attention on human wickedness and traces a path towards international peace through universal contrition, Gringore manages to remind spectators of the common people’s resentment at the levying of taxes and their ingenuity in shirking obligations and resisting power. In the opening ballade, Peuple François, much like Sotte Commune before him, complains bitterly about the financial burden war has placed upon him. Though he acknowledges to the audience that he lives in peace, has enough to eat and pays his taxes, both taille and subside, ‘competamment’ (2) [as is appropriate], he also repeatedly deplores the poverty he supposedly endures. In the process, he demonstrates how abjection and complaint can be fabricated and exaggerated for strategic purposes: il fault que je baille, Sans que aye sommeil, mes motz bien compassez, Brief, les plus grans en sont interessez, Et les petitz n’ont plus or ne monnoye: Tousjours en fin vient ung cop qui tout paye. (5–9)53 53  My thanks to Cynthia Brown, Estelle Doudet and Deborah McGrady for helping me puzzle out the layered meaning of this passage. The translation and analysis are my own.

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[Though I’m not tired, I must yawn/offer my words well measured; in short, great men are harmed by/interested in what I say, and little people no longer have gold or coins: always in the end comes a poor fool/a blow who/that pays for everything.]

Peuple François’s yawn is no doubt meant to communicate that he has been exhausted by the financial demands placed upon him, thereby lending credence to his subsequent pauper’s lament uttered on behalf of ‘les petitz’. Yet he openly acknowledges that his fatigue is contrived (after all, he isn’t actually tired), as is the grievance itself, which has been carefully crafted (‘motz bien compassez’) either to deflect the interests of ‘les plus grans’ or to inflict harm upon them through injurious speech (interesser can mean ‘to be damaged or dishonoured by’). These double entendres are not lost on Peuple Ytalique, who appropriates the refrain for himself, proclaims his suffering to be far greater and bitterly denounces Peuple François as a hypocrite and malcontent: ‘Tu n’as cause d’estre melencolique!’ (35) [You have no reason to be melancholy!]. The latter counters that if he does indeed ‘amasse des biens’ (38) [amass wealth], it simply gets seized from him and taken to Italy. He must concede, however, that he consumes his meals ‘en paix, sans bruit’ (44) [in peace and tranquillity], that he is the master of his ‘maison’ (44) and that if he is threatened there, his rights are immediately guaranteed by the very government he objects to funding. Yet if Gringore seems intent on exposing the Third Estate as shiftless, dishonest and greedy (and therefore, perhaps, in need of moral correction), he also points to the verbal and theatrical tricks commoners could use to obtain economic and political concessions from a temporarily weakened sovereign. The reference to ‘ung cop qui tout paye’ seems to deliver both of these messages simultaneously. On one hand, it can be taken to mean ‘the poor fool who pays for everything’,54 or as a given moment (presumably the Last Judgement) when all debts will be reckoned and paid.55 Read this way, the line would imply the common people’s fatalistic acceptance of their role as overtaxed, overworked indigents who must await the End Days to be rewarded for their travails. On the other hand, one might intuit in these words a considerably stronger statement regarding the relationship between ‘les petitz’ and ‘les plus granz’. The granz would obviously include the royal court, which has levied the subside (a war tax) and waged the Italian campaign against the people’s strenuous moral, political and economic objections. It would also presumably encompass the First and Second Estates, which, despite their massive wealth, were exempted altogether from the taille (a 54  Randle Cotgrave’s A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970) glosses coup as ‘cuckold’. See entry for ‘coup’ (n.p.). 55  See Bénédicte Boudou, ‘Proverbes et dits sentencieux dans l’œuvre de Pierre Gringore’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 51, no. 2 (1989): 378–9.



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direct land tax that targeted the non-privileged) and were greatly resented for that fact. Even as Peuple François casts himself in the role of a poor fool who is required to pay for everything while patiently accepting his subservient status, he simultaneously points to an aggressive hidden transcript here – a threat that political tensions and economic demands may lead to violence and that the people may inflict blows as well as receive them. This threat becomes especially palpable in Peuple François’s second ballade, in which he condemns ruling elites for causing financial instability and a devaluation of the currency. He conceives of these unnamed elites as embodied targets receiving his curses (‘motz’ that could easily be thought of as ‘copz’) in the heart and viscera: ‘ceulx qui ont tous ces brouetz brassez, / Je les maulditz juc au cueur et au foye: / Tousjours en fin vient ung cop qui tout paye’ (25–7) [those who have cooked up all these stews/evil tricks, I curse them straight through the heart and the liver: always in the end comes a poor fool/a blow who/that pays for everything]. The problem of how to resolve conflicts between commoners and elites is addressed in Raoullet Ployart as well, but is left crucially unresolved. The farce invokes traditional themes from conjugal and estates satire but is also tied to immediate political concerns, specifically unjust verdicts pronounced in the king’s name by his ministers and the failure of Louis’s government to achieve Gringore’s ideal of bon conseil.56 The farce’s title character is a vintner whose metaphorical ‘tool’ bends and weakens (ployer) at the excessive sexual demands of his young wife. As her name suggests, Doublette is a two-timer: rather than allowing her ‘vineyard’ to go untended, she takes two lovers, Dire and Faire, with a distinct preference for the latter, who ‘ploughs’ her ‘soil’ with a firm hand. When Raoullet catches his wife ‘doing it’ with Faire, he drags her to the court of the Prince des Sotz to demand justice. The prince is absent but has delegated the task of adjudicating legal complaints to a certain Seigneur de Balletreu, whose name implies prick, hole-stopper or an instrument that makes vaginas dance.57 Balletreu betrays his bias in the case and his lust for Doublette by repeatedly addressing himself to her even though it is her husband who has lodged the complaint. Doublette then turns the tables on Raoullet, accusing him of being ‘lasche à la besongne’ (272) [lazy at his work] and leaving ‘ma vigne en frische’ (274) [my vineyard untended]. When she suggestively declares her willingness to serve ‘la seigneurie de Balletreu … au mieulx que je puis’ (278–9) [Balletreu’s lordship as best I can], the latter delivers his laughable verdict directly to her:

56  See Hochner, ‘Pierre Gringore’, 103–4 57  On Saint Balletrou (who appears in Rabelais’s Pantagruel and the spurious Cinquième Livre), see Jacques E. Merceron, Dictionnaire des saints imaginaires, facétieux et substitués en France et en Belgique francophone du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 160–1.

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noah d. guynn Quant à moy, d’oppinion suis, Puis que dictes qu’il est si lache, Que y facez besongner en tasche. Et si le dis par jugement. (280–3)

[As for me, I am of the opinion that, since you say he is feeble/flaccid, you should get yourself worked over properly. And I pronounce this as a judgment.]

For Balletreu, justice means satisfying Doublette’s lust, and the phrase ‘besongner en tasche’, or ‘finish the job right’, implies bringing her to orgasm. But who will do the work? Perhaps Raoullet, if he is capable of it, though ‘besongner en tasche’ can also mean ‘farm the work out to menials’,58 meaning Doublette will receive her pleasure from a lover. It seems likely she will choose an actual drudge like Faire, though Balletreu is clearly anxious to meet her needs as well. Raoullet vows to appeal the decision, presumably to the prince himself, while Doublette declares that she is Balletreu’s ‘subgecte’, meaning either that she accepts his legal authority or that she is prepared to place herself under him (subjecta, ‘brought under’). The Jeu then closes with a ludicrous, titillating moral pronounced by Balletreu: ‘Les femmes, sans contredire, / Ayment trop mieulx Faire que Dire’ (299–300) [It cannot be denied that women love Action far more than Speech]. It would appear that the serious political content of the sottie and moralité has yielded to fatuous clichés about women’s insatiability and disloyalty. It would be a mistake, however, to see these jokes merely as strategies for appeasing spectators wary (or weary) of the Jeu’s jingoism. Brown concludes that Raoullet Ployart ‘has nothing to do with what proceeds it’ and ‘was undoubtedly left until the end so as to lighten the mood of the audience’; Bernard Faivre agrees that it is a ‘concession’ to the crude tastes of the crowd, a ‘mere nothing’; and André Tissier sees it as an attempt to restore ‘unbridled laughter’ after a heavy dose of didacticism.59 And yet one wonders whether Gringore uses the farce to make the bitter pill of the Italian Wars easier to swallow, or whether instead he uses coarse humour to evoke – and leave unresolved – a set of themes linked to domestic politics: the discontent and defiance of subordinates (Doublette talks back to her husband, while Raoullet rejects Balletreu’s verdict); a corrupt aristocracy and judiciary (Balletreu’s very name implies swaggering, phallic power and transgression of the laws he has been asked to uphold); and a neglectful sovereign who fails to take his seat 58  See André Tissier, Recueil de farces (1450–1550), 13 vols (Paris: Droz, 1987), 2:284 n. 59  Cynthia Brown, The Shaping of History and Poetry in Late Medieval France: Propaganda and Artistic Expression in the Works of the Rhétoriqueurs (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1985), 141 n. 71; Bernard Faivre, Répertoire des farces françaises: Des origines à Tabarin (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1993), 370–2; Tissier, Recueil de farces, 2:241.



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on the throne of justice (where is the Prince des Sotz, after all?). In the end, Doublette and Balletreu are the only contented ‘subgectes’ in the farce, and their allegiance is to their own ungovernable lust rather than marriage, justice or monarchic rule. Impotent and ineffectual though he may be, Raoullet boldly refuses to accept Balletreu’s judgement and, like Sotte Commune, demands that the government respond to his complaints. Significantly, Gringore leaves unanswered the question of whether anyone will hear Raoullet’s appeal: Balletreu indicates that the matter ‘se videra’ (297) [will be settled], but the Prince des Sotz never reappears, and the play’s distinctly amoral moral stands in place of a solid verdict in the case. It is unclear, moreover, whether we should read this miscarriage of justice as the triumph of a neglected subaltern (Doublette) over an ineffectual master (Raoullet) or instead as a dereliction of royal duty that prompts another subaltern (Raoullet) to cry out in protest against the monarchy’s misrule. Will Louis heed the petitions of the underclass? Will he allow himself to be manipulated or supplanted by corrupt ministers (bending and weakening like Raoullet’s unfortunate member)? Is he capable of guaranteeing justice and economic expansion for commoners? If he fails to do so, will they refuse to lend him their moral, economic and political support at a moment of truth for the monarchy? And what will the future hold if social hierarchies and institutional authorities are permanently destabilized? The Jeu thus ends not with emotional purgation, moral clarity and political consensus, but rather with the promise of a legal appeal and a variety of unresolved and potentially infinite struggles – personal and public, ethical and religious, legal and governmental, domestic and international. If there is one thing that is clear in the ambivalent ending of the Jeu du Prince des Sotz, it is that this Carnival play does not achieve, or even aim at, social consensus and organic solidarity, as a functionalist analysis might lead us to expect, but instead greatly amplifies conflict and uncertainty. Carnival 1512 passed without a tax revolt or other uprising, and it therefore seems reasonable to surmise, as Brown has, that the Jeu du Prince des Sotz ‘helped Louis XII to sustain public support to some degree and, consequently, to maintain his authority and respect’.60 We should not conclude, however, that Carnival revellers simply accepted what they were told, laughed exuberantly at the absurd woes of an emasculated vintner and were thereby purged of mutinerie through a stabilizing catharsis. On the contrary, they were just as likely to take Raoullet’s legal appeal (or Doublette’s lascivious rebellion) as ‘a dress rehearsal … for actual defiance’ – as an invitation, that is, to perceive their very real power to shape the political future in a moment of truth for the French monarchy. Though the Jeu’s ethical and political negotiations remain largely implicit and indirect, Gringore clearly did not – and could not – use the carnival stage instrumentally to transform spectators into blindly obedient 60 Brown, Shaping of History, 122.

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subjects of their king. On the contrary, the Jeu du Prince des Sotz, the farce with which it concludes and the 1512 Carnival celebration as a whole should be understood (in Max Harris’s words) as ‘enacted dialogues’ or ‘implicit negotiations’ between the ‘hierarchical powers’ of the state and ‘the unwritten but no less articulate power of the street’, between a monarchy that was gravely compromised on domestic and international fronts and urban playgoers who were willing to parlay the threat of civil unrest into political and economic concessions for the Third Estate.61

Conclusion What does the ambivalent, apparently noncathartic denouement of Raoullet Ployart have to tell us about the politics of festive drama and about the aggressive hermeneutics that is, as Rita Copeland has influentially argued, inevitably linked to translation?62 Copeland notes that Roman theories of translation are imbued with, and struggle to resolve, anxieties regarding Greek cultural superiority. They are, moreover, instruments of a disciplinary struggle in which the rhetor endeavours to overshadow the grammarian and cast him in an ancillary, servile role. Influenced by Roman precursors, medieval academic translation works ‘to displace the very text that it proposes to serve’. Similarly, ‘arts commentary does not simply “serve” its “master” texts’ but also ‘rewrites and supplants them’.63 Hermeneutical bending is discernible in the Arabic and Latin Middle Commentaries, though here we must acknowledge that Averroës and Hermannus were striving to translate a text and tradition they were ill equipped to understand and that flummoxed the greatest minds of their era. Far more tendentious assumptions are made in modern scholarship on premodern drama – scholarship that has for decades imposed notions of ‘comic catharsis’ and functionalist theories of organic solidarity on farce and sottie, translating the ‘acting of conflict’ on the festive stage into a strategy for achieving social conformity and political stability. Adhering to what Scott called a ‘thick theory’ of false consciousness (the claim that ideology persuades subalterns ‘to believe actively in the values that explain and justify their own subordination’),64 scholars have viewed institutional power as effectively preempting political and even psychological resistance through ritualized, sham forms of rebellion. Indeed, they have gone so far as to translate overt signs of 61  Max Harris, Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 78. 62  See Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9–36. 63 Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 2, 3. 64 Scott, Domination, 72.



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provocation and dissent into evidence of the pliability of medieval revellers, who submitted joyously and unconsciously to ‘catharsis through displacement’ before returning to a state of quiescence.65 This rather ham-fisted, conservative hermeneutics of suspicion razes political subtleties in favour of a rigidly hierarchical, top-down model of medieval society and a deeply cynical view of festive culture. Scott offers a compelling alternative to the cathartic, ‘safety-valve’ approach to festive drama precisely by emphasizing the ambivalence inherent in public interactions between sovereign and subordinate groups. Subalterns, he argues, are anything but benighted and disempowered, even when they are depicted – or depict themselves – as such. On the contrary, they possess ‘manifold strategies’ for ‘insinuat[ing] their resistance, in disguised forms, into the public transcript’,66 including more or less veiled forms of political expression. As we have seen, there are many such strategies at work in Gringore’s Jeu du Prince des Sotz. While the sottie can be read as blatant propaganda designed to induce spectators to keep faith with the monarchy and its Italian Wars, it also allows Sotte Commune to deliver a political and economic message on behalf of the urban workers and the rural poor: popular compliance with Gallican ideology will come at a cost. The moralité laces its message of universal contrition with oblique threats against the granz who have levied taxes against the petitz and with curses upon those ‘cooks’ who have concocted evil tricks and asked the common people to ‘swallow’ them. Finally, Raoullet Ployart allows spectators to laugh at the seemingly innocuous misadventures of an impotent vintner and his mutinous wife, even as it suggests that their ridiculous disputes contain subversive subtexts: one subordinate betrays her lord with impunity and debases the judicial system itself; another appeals to his absentee sovereign to restore the rule of law but receives no response. Raoullet’s unanswered appeal and the farce’s lack of cathartic resolution leave open the troubling question of what might happen if the Prince des Sotz should fail to heed his subject’s plea or should prove himself to be, like the vintner himself, incapable of restoring order. Of course, in seeking hidden transcripts in the Jeu du Prince des Sotz, I have myself relied upon a theoretical model that is imbued with hermeneutical aggression, one that seeks to translate the lack of overt dissent or actual rebellion into universal and transhistorical claims about popular resistance. It is worth recalling, then, two claims Koopmans advances in defending his nongeneralizable, microhistoricist approach to late medieval drama: first, there is no national theatre tradition in the Middle Ages and no comprehensive model for understanding theatrical or festive praxes; second, those praxes are purely local and experimental phenomena that respond to immediate social and political needs. Koopmans urges theatre scholars to prioritize the investigation of 65 Scott, Domination, 187. 66 Scott, Domination, 136.

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those needs, to excavate the archives for information about performance and to refrain from elaborating global theories of theatre aesthetics or politics on the basis of published texts, most of which have been heavily censored and severed from their performance contexts.67 He would no doubt also recommend, and rightly so, that I resist the temptation to translate my reading of Gringore’s Jeu du Prince des Sotz into a theory of the political contestation inherent in all medieval festive drama. That said, I would argue that there is considerable legitimacy in using Scott’s theory of hidden transcripts as a heuristic method for rethinking the aesthetic and political assumptions scholars have made by reading festive drama through the lens of modern glosses on Aristotle. It would perhaps be going too far to claim that farce and sottie are medieval counterparts to Brechtian epic theatre or leftist agitprop or that they deliberately thwart catharsis in order to incite political action. And yet it is high time that critics reconsidered the anachronistic use of Aristotelian aesthetic canons, including catharsis and its cognate terms, for understanding medieval festive drama. Do farce and sottie rely upon techniques of absorption, integration and synthesis, and thereby produce collective ideological captation? Or do they instead use estrangement, interruption and suspension to awaken social resentments and inspire overt and covert acts of resistance? These questions can only be fully and convincingly answered if theatre scholars decide to interrogate the ways in which catharsis has been translated and models of social cohesion and political conservatism have been foisted on the unruly, satirical, occasional plays that entertained – and often provoked – urban audiences during periods of festive misrule.

67  See Koopmans, ‘Universités’, 236.

5 The Ethics of Translatio in Rutebeuf ’s Miracle de Théophile

Emma Campbell Rutebeuf ’s Miracle de Théophile is a work connected to translation on a number of different levels. As the essays in this collection attest, translatio (and its vernacular cognates) had a broad range of meanings in the Middle Ages that could be used to refer to textual or linguistic translation but that also denoted non-textual forms of movement, relocation and transfiguration. Rutebeuf ’s play, in addition to translating and adapting other versions of the Theophilus legend, participates in this expanded notion of translatio; along with other religious or moralizing works examined in this volume, this text also demonstrates the close relationship between such notions of translation and the sacred.1 Commissioned by the bishop of Paris and thought to have been performed in 1263 (or 1264) as part of the festivities for the Nativity of the Virgin, Rutebeuf ’s play, like other religious works, aims to translate between the human and the divine for the benefit of the author’s and the community’s souls. Translatio in Rutebeuf ’s text – insofar as it is related to the mediation between human subjects inclined towards sin and the divine forces that might save them – is thus inevitably related to Christian ethics. The play establishes contrasts between good and evil, divine and diabolical, which are intended to serve a clear didactic purpose while, at the same time, dealing with human examples that themselves move between these polarities. Exploring the nature of this text’s participation in and representation of translatio, this chapter examines a peculiar feature of the Miracle that, I suggest, complicates as well as illuminates the relationship between translation and ethics in the play: the transformation of Théophile’s charter into an open letter from the devil. Other scholars have examined the position of the Miracle in Rutebeuf ’s 1  See, for example, the chapters by Griffin and Gilbert in this volume.

108 emma campbell oeuvre and the differences between the text and its sources;2 though comparison of different versions will not be the main focus of this chapter, some of these findings are briefly worth mentioning here. Rutebeuf was a clerical author most probably from Champagne whose writing career spanned the decades between 1249 and 1277 (possibly extending into the 1280s). By the time he came to write his Miracle de Théophile, the Theophilus legend, which was incorporated into the Marian repertoire in the twelfth century, was already widely known and represented in medieval literature and art.3 The legend as it appears in a Greek work attributed to Eutychianos relates the story of the pious secular deputy of the bishop of Cilicia. Following the death of the bishop, his deputy, Theophilus, is nominated as his replacement but turns down the charge. When the bishop’s eventual successor takes up his new role, Theophilus is stripped of his functions and made destitute – a turn of events that leads the formerly virtuous clergyman to enter into a pact with the devil at the instigation of a Jewish intermediary. Theophilus is thus restored to wealth and status at the price of his soul; however, he repents of his error shortly afterwards and his invocation of the Virgin results in the miraculous recovery of the diabolical pact that he signed. As a story of sin and redemption, the Theophilus miracle was associated at a relatively early stage with the legend of the repentant prostitute Mary the Egyptian. In the ninth century, Paul the Deacon of Naples offered his Latin translation of Eutychianos’s text to Charles the Bald along with his translation of Sophronios’s Greek life of Mary the Egyptian; subsequent writers such as Guibert de Nogent also mention Mary the Egyptian and Theophilus together.4 Rutebeuf may thus have composed the Miracle at around 2 Rutebeuf, Œuvres complètes, ed. and trans. Michel Zink (Paris: Livre de poche, 2001), 6–23, 531–53; Michel Zink, ‘De la repentance Rutebeuf à la repentance Théophile’, Littératures 15 (1986): 19–23. For comparison between Rutebeuf ’s work and his sources, see Jean Dufournet and Françoise Lascombes, ‘Rutebeuf et le Miracle de Théophile’, in L’Univers de Rutebeuf (Orleans: Paradigme, 2005), 161–80 (originally published in Mélanges de langue et de littérature médiévales offerts à Alice Planche, 2 vols, ed. Maurice Accarie and Ambroise Queffelec (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984), 1:185–97); Moshe Lazar, ‘Theophilus: Servant of Two Masters. The Pre-Faustian Theme of Despair and Revolt’, MLN 87, no. 6 (1972): 31–50. 3  Minnie B. Sangster, ‘Envisioning the Miracle de Théophile in France: Stained Glass, Sculpture and Stage’, Medieval Perspectives 14 (1999), 191–201; Jerry Root, ‘A Precarious Quest for Salvation: The Theophilus Legend in Text and Image’, Medievalia et Humanistica new series 34 (2008): 43–69. 4  Paul the Deacon of Naples, ‘Paulus diaconus Neapolitanus Karolo (Calvo) regi libellum conversionis S. Mariae Aegyptiacae iterum offert, eodem libello una cum poenitentia (Theophili) vicedomini casu quodam deperdito’, Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Epistolae (Berlin: Weidmannsch, 1925), 6:193–4, no. 29. Guibert de Nogent, ‘Rhythmus ad B. Virginem et S. Joannem Evangelistam’, Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 217 vols (Paris: Migne, 1844–55), 156:577c.

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the same time as he wrote his Vie de sainte Marie l’Egyptienne. Both works can be placed in the period following his so-called ‘conversion’ in the 1260s, when Rutebeuf himself repented and dedicated himself more fully to God following the defeat of his secular protectors in the Parisian querelle universitaire (c. 1252–56). The Miracle has in fact often been seen in terms of this spiritual turning point in Rutebeuf ’s life and career as a writer. As well as some obvious similarities between the tone of the play and what we are able to glean of Rutebeuf ’s biography from the works he produced, this connection is underlined by parallels between the Repentance Rutebeuf – a poem in which the author laments his sins and pleads for the Virgin’s intercession – and Théophile’s own repentance speech in vv. 384–431 of the Miracle, which, in the C manuscript, is excerpted as the Repentance Théophile.5 The fact that the Miracle was a commission from the bishop of Paris also suggests that Rutebeuf had by this stage returned to favour in the eyes of the church, even as the work stands as further testimony to the spiritual turn that presumably earned him that favour. In terms of sources, Rutebeuf probably used one Latin and one French version of the legend of Theophilus. Rather than drawing directly on the Latin text by Paul the Deacon, it is thought Rutebeuf used an eleventhcentury résumé of this version of the story which he found in a sermon by Fulbert of Chartres.6 His other probable source was Gautier de Coinci’s thirteenth-century version in his Miracles de Nostre Dame, the longest and most elaborate version of the legend in French.7 Rutebeuf substantially abridged the story found in his sources, removing preliminary details such as the bishop’s death and Théophile’s nomination as his successor in order to plunge directly into a dramatic monologue in which Théophile laments his destitute state. Unlike Gautier, Rutebeuf focuses on the central character’s manipulation by external forces and offers various perspectives on Théophile’s conduct, rather than offering a univocal explanation for his behaviour. He also places greater emphasis on Théophile’s homage to Satan, his reconciliation with the bishop, his public confession and the reading of the charter. In so doing, Rutebeuf ’s retelling underlines the role played by Satan, while downplaying the role of the Jewish magus who appears in other versions (a character whom Rutebeuf names ‘Salatin’). Rutebeuf also creates an ending for the story unlike that found in his sources. Though his retelling is not unique in insisting on the importance of the pact that both condemns and redeems his protagonist, Rutebeuf alters the ending of the legend in a way that redefines Théophile’s charter as a letter written by Satan. The origins and 5 Rutebeuf, Œuvres complètes, ed. Zink, 32, 532–3; Zink, ‘De la repentance Rutebeuf ’. 6  Fulbert of Chartres, ‘Sermo IV, De Nativitate beatissimae Mariae Virginis’, in Patrologia Latina, ed. Migne, 141:323a–324b. 7  Gautier de Coinci, Miracles de Nostre Dame, 4 vols, ed. V. Frédéric Koenig (Geneva: Droz, 1955–70), 1:50–176.

110 emma campbell addressees of Théophile’s document thus shift in the course of Rutebeuf ’s retelling: what begins as Théophile’s undisclosed charter becomes an open letter written by the devil himself, addressed to future readers. This ending differs from that found in Rutebeuf ’s sources, which, instead of disclosing the contents of the charter, claim the document is read and then burnt.8 Critics have responded to this seeming incoherence in different ways. In their edition of Rutebeuf ’s complete works, Edmond Faral and Julia Bastin suggest that the letter read at the end of the Miracle is not Théophile’s charter at all, explaining this substitution through the audience’s possible knowledge of Gautier de Coinci’s version of the legend.9 Rejecting this explanation, Denis Lalande instead proposes that the charter’s transformation marks a shift in the Miracle from individual repentance to the struggle between good and evil.10 Michel Zink, by contrast, dismisses the transformation of the document as a ‘légère inconséquence (qui) a été longuement commentée par (Faral et Bastin)’ [a slight, inconsequential detail (which) has been commented on at length by (Faral and Bastin)].11 Other critics pass over the shift without comment or acknowledge it without attempting to explain it.12 From a medieval perspective, what appears to be an alteration in the form of the letter may not have been seen as a problem in the way it is for some modern readers; yet dismissing the change altogether leaves unexamined its possible significance as a detail introduced by Rutebeuf. I argue here that, far from being inconsequential, the redefinition of Théophile’s charter foregrounds ethical questions concerning how texts underwrite divine and diabolical relationships – questions that also have a bearing on the translatio in which Rutebeuf ’s text participates. Jacques Derrida’s consideration of the ethics of translation offers a means of pinpointing the specificity of Rutebeuf ’s treatment of similar issues, as well as its relevance for broader questions. Derrida’s reading of Shakepeare’s Merchant of Venice in ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’ examines the ethics of translation as this is connected to notions of mercy and justice in

8  In Gautier’s version, the letter is read and commented on; the bishop then leads an act of worship that ends in the burning of the charter. The precise contents of the charter remain undisclosed to the reader. Gautier de Coinci, Miracles de Nostre Dame, vv. 1456–698. See also Fulbert of Chartres’ sermon (‘Sermo IV’, in Patrologia Latina, ed. Migne, 141:323d), where the document is similarly commented on and burnt. 9  Œuvres complètes de Rutebeuf, 2 vols, ed. Julia Bastin and Edmond Faral (Paris: Picard, 1959–60), 2:170. 10  Denis Lalande, ‘De la “chartre” de Théophile à la “lettre commune” de Satan. Le Miracle de Théophile de Rutebeuf ’, Romania 108 (1987): 548–58. 11 Rutebeuf, Œuvres complètes, ed. Zink, 533. 12  See, for example, Stéphane Gompertz, ‘Du dialogue perdu au dialogue retrouvé: Salvation et détour dans le Miracle de Théophile, de Rutebeuf ’, Romania 100 (1979): 528.

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the play.13 At the heart of Shakespeare’s text is a conversion narrative that emphasizes issues of translation and economics through its association of the unpayable debt with the forced conversion of Shylock the Jew, both of which represent the impossibility of translation. In Derrida’s reading, the process of conversion from literal to spiritual seen in the Merchant of Venice requires a decision that overcomes the aporia presented by the play in a way that does more than simply apply existing rules (and that, in its partial flouting of established notions of law and justice, is quasi-divine).14 In a comparable way, Derrida suggests, translation is caught in a double bind that can only be overcome by an ethical decision. The ethics of translation are, in Derrida’s lecture, related to the notion of ‘relevance’.15 Choosing the most ‘relevant’ translation involves deciding between contradictory principles of property and quantity that insist either that translation should render the full meaning of the source text (and thereby enumerate all of its possible meanings) or that it should provide a version of the original that is quantitatively equivalent to the source. Applying neither of these rules absolutely, ‘relevant’ translation would thus perform in the way that mercy ‘seasons’ justice in Shakespeare’s play, lifting translation beyond pre-established possibilities.16 Derrida’s reading brings into focus a connection between contract, conversion and translation that similarly lies at the heart of Rutebeuf ’s text. The Miracle, through its depiction of the transformation of Théophile’s charter, represents a trajectory from literal to spiritual similar to the one Derrida identifies in the Merchant of Venice and, in so doing, addresses comparable issues of translation and ethics. Presenting Théophile’s spiritual trajectory in a way that associates the spirit and the letter with the forces of good and evil, the Miracle suggests that the only means of mediating between these opposing forces is through a form of divine intervention that both cuts across established conventions and makes translation possible. What I propose here is a reading of the Miracle that textually and historically reframes the issues considered by Derrida by exploring how ethics and translation – in the medieval sense of translatio – are foregrounded by Rutebeuf ’s treatment of the chartre. This document (in its various permutations) symbolizes and performs what might be described as ‘relevant’ translation through its impossible reconciliation of conflicting voices, 13  Jacques Derrida, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’ in Quinzième assises de la traduction littéraire (Arles 1998), ed. Claude Ernoult and Michel Volkovitch (Paris: Actes Sud, 1999), 21–48. 14  See further Griffin in this volume on the way Derrida’s notion of translation is elsewhere linked to an encounter with the sacred. 15  On the significance of this untranslatable term in Derrida’s argument, see Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translating Derrida on Translation: Relevance and Disciplinary Resistance’, Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2 (2003): 240, 250–2. 16  On ethics, translation and deconstruction, see Kathleen Davis, Deconstruction and Translation (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2001), 101–6.

112 emma campbell imperatives and ethical positions. However, unlike the Merchant of Venice, Rutebeuf ’s text addresses such issues in the context of thirteenth-century documentary culture, relating the ethics of translatio to the ways texts may, in turn, be implicated in more or less ethical forms of translation, substitution and mediation. This chapter thus considers the ethics of translation in connection with an expanded, specifically medieval notion of translatio that places the questions Derrida addresses into dialogue with the historical context in which Rutebeuf was working.

‘The Letter Killeth’: Texts and Spiritual Translatio The Miracle’s engagement with translatio is inflected by Rutebeuf ’s more general interest in the potency of language as an instrument for intervening in the human world and as a vehicle for communication with the divine. The action of the text depends on linguistic utterance: Théophile condemns himself by swearing allegiance to Satan and is saved through prayer. Indeed, the focus on Théophile’s interior struggle means that the play’s action is often expressed less through gesture than through language.17 This exploration of the transformative, redemptive power of language also informs other texts by Rutebeuf, particularly those written during the period of his conversion. Something the Miracle shares with other contemporary works – such as the Repentance Rutebeuf and the Vie de sainte Marie l’Egyptienne – is the use of Rutebeuf ’s characteristic linguistic and poetic play to achieve certain spiritual effects.18 There is nonetheless an additional dimension to this treatment of language and translatio in the Miracle not found in quite the same form in Rutebeuf ’s other religious works from this period. The focus on the chartre that governs Théophile’s damnation and ultimate salvation attaches the concern with language and its salvific potential to an exploration of how written texts mediate social and spiritual relations – a feature of this work that may be connected to the evolving production of religious literature in the vernacular and the increasing visibility of bureaucratic, documentary culture in 17  Gompertz, ‘Du dialogue perdu’, 527; Hans-Joachim Lope, ‘Remarques pour l’interprétation de la Repentance Théophile de Rutebeuf (Miracle de Théophile, vv. 384–431)’, Marche Romane 19 (1969): 83–7; Dufournet and Lascombes, ‘Rutebeuf et le Miracle’; Lalande, ‘De la “chartre” de Théophile’, 553. 18  See Emanuel J. Mickel Jr, ‘Free Will and Antithesis in the Miracle de Théophile’, Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 99, nos 3–4 (1983): 312–15. On Rutebeuf ’s use of language and linguistic play, see Albert Junker, ‘Über den Gebrauch des Stilmittels der “annominatio” bei Rutebeuf ’, Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 69, nos 5–6 (1953): 223–46; Denis Hüe and Hélène Gallé, Rutebeuf (Neuilly: Atlande, 2006), 109–12; Nancy Freeman Regalado, Poetic Patterns in Rutebeuf: A Study in Noncourtly Poetic Modes of the Thirteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), esp. 190–254.

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the thirteenth century.19 This contractual framing has some important effects: the Miracle’s redefinition of Théophile’s charter – which begins as a sealed pact and ends as a communal vehicle for divine translatio – is linked to a shift in notions of property and ownership as these are defined through written documents. The mouvance of this charter thus not only registers shifts in Théophile’s relationship to God but also comments on the different function the text performs in relations of diabolical and divine exchange. Whereas the original definition of Théophile’s charter suggests a correspondence between text and author that reduces the soul to an item of property swapped in an unequal exchange, the Miracle’s final definition of the document emphasizes its salvific potential as a gift and multi-vocal vehicle of translatio. Significantly, the letter appears in a context that emphasizes a particular kind of reciprocity. At the start of the play, Théophile reproaches God with not upholding his side of the bargain between them: a failure that undermines the clergyman’s faith in prayer (vv. 51–61).20 Théophile’s concern that his poverty will leave him at the mercy of others makes him ready to do whatever it takes to recover his former status (vv. 68–71, 76–80). His first monologue marks a crucial moment, when the destitute clergyman decides to overlook eternal damnation in order to recover his wealth (vv. 101–32). The final passage of this monologue articulates what is, from a Christian perspective, a clearly futile attitude that transforms Théophile’s previously reciprocal relationship with God into a sequence of tit-for-tat slights: Diex m’a grevé: jel greverai, Ja més jor ne le servirai! Je li ennui. Riches serai, se povres sui! Se il me het, je harrai lui: Preingne ses erres, Ou il face movoir ses guerres! Tout a en main et ciel et terres: Je li claim cuite, Se Salatins tout ce m’acuite Qu’il m’a promis. (vv. 133–43) [God has wronged me: I’ll do him wrong; I shall serve him no longer! I mock Him. I shall be rich as I am poor! If He hates me, I shall hate Him: let Him march to wherever He wants to wage war! Heaven and earth are in his palm: 19  On the bureaucratization of hell in thirteenth-century depictions of the Theophilus legend see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 188–9. 20  All references are to Rutebeuf, Œuvres complètes, ed. Zink, provided in parentheses. Translations are my own.

114 emma campbell I leave them to Him, if Salatin can now acquit himself of everything he has promised me.]

This superbly childish outburst, in which Théophile fails to see the logical implications of his acknowledgement of God’s omnipotence, alludes to many of the structural oppositions in the play between rich and poor, love and hate, power and impotence. Théophile here vows to repay in kind the withdrawal of God’s favour: if his divine master hates and mistreats him, he will hate and mistreat Him in return, and they will then be quits. The material riches promised by the diabolical go-between Salatin fill the gap this annulment of relations opens up, offering an exchange that, unlike that between Théophile and God, promises to deliver the goods. This speech thus establishes an economy of short-sighted give-and-take that is essential to Théophile’s relationship with Satan as well as to his altered attitude to God. As others have noted, the financial concerns that Théophile articulates do not feature in earlier versions of the story.21 In addition to evoking such concerns, the use of economic vocabulary in this passage also comments on Théophile’s relationships to God and Satan. The use of a lexis with financial connotations (claimer cuite; acuiter) associates Théophile’s preoccupation with equal exchange with an ethos of payment and debt,22 suggesting that part of his error is his reliance on notions of equivalence more appropriate to commercial relations than to relationship to God. The relational model outlined in this speech is developed in Théophile’s dealings with the devil and influences the definition of the document sealing this pact. During the homage ceremony that confirms his fate, Théophile pledges allegiance on condition that Satan restores what he has lost (vv. 242–4). In turn, Satan demands a clearly written, sealed letter (‘lettres pendanz / bien dites et bien entendanz’) underwriting their agreement, so he can make sure Théophile upholds his side of the bargain (vv. 248–54).23 The 21  Lazar, ‘Theophilus’; Gompertz, ‘Du dialogue perdu’; Regalado, Poetic Patterns, 16–17. 22 See quiteclamer and aquiter in the Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle, 10 vols, ed. Frédéric Godefroy (Paris: Vieweg, 1880– 1902), 6:521c, 1:368b–369b. 23  ‘Lettres pendanz’ would refer to a sealed document with a pendant seal (as opposed to a seal imprinted on wax placed directly on the parchment). Though charters were not necessarily sealed systematically before the late twelfth century, this was a common means of validating charters in the thirteenth century. See Olivier Guyotjeannin, Jacques Pycke and Benoît-Michel Tock, Diplomatique médiévale, 3rd edn (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 91; Robert-Henri Bautier, ‘Caractères spécifiques des chartes médiévales’, in his Chartes, sceaux et chancelleries: Études de diplomatique et de sigillographie médiévales, 2 vols (Paris: École des chartes, 1990), 1:167–82 (originally published in Informatique et histoire médiévale. Communications et débats de la Table ronde CNRS, organisée par L’École française de Rome et l’Institut d’histoire médiévale de Pise, Rome, 20–22 mai 1975, ed. Lucie Fossier, André Vauchez and Cinzio Violante (Rome: École française de Rome, 1977), 81–96).

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sealed letter thus guarantees a return on what is effectively an investment on Satan’s part.24 Satan’s insistence on having this document as insurance against the problems he has encountered from those who have not provided such a letter (vv. 252–3) means the charter establishes a legal basis for his relationship with Théophile that dispenses with the need for trust. The sealed letter thus stands for precisely the kind of reciprocal, tit-for-tat arrangement that Théophile fails to find with God and for which he reproaches his divine master. At the same time, Théophile’s document stands for a dangerous equivalence of self and text that is linked to its contractual function. The charter is a textual substitute for Théophile himself and cannot therefore be transferred – an impossibility also communicated through the insistence on the document’s privacy. Despite the emphasis placed on its clarity, the charter remains undisclosed; Théophile simply produces it and confirms he has written it himself (v. 255). The unusual nature of Théophile’s authorship of this letter should be underlined: in the thirteenth century, professional notaries were normally responsible for drawing up legal documents, a fact that contributed to the authenticity and validity of such documents. Théophile’s exceptional role in drafting the letter thus further contributes to its privacy (it has not been witnessed by a third party) and reinforces the identification between him and the document bearing his seal.25 As an autograph document passed from Théophile to Satan, the charter figures in documentary terms the submission also represented in the physical gesture of homage and symbolizes the body and soul that Théophile signs away. The equivalence of text and soul is further emphasized by the parallels between the placing of the charter into Satan’s hands and Théophile’s homage, which involves him putting his hands between those of his new master. After receiving the letter, Satan affirms that his new disciple has now – literally and figuratively – placed himself in his hands (‘tu t’es en mes mains mis’, vv. 256–8). In his repentance speech, Théophile later recalls this parallel between hands and letter, linking the rendering of the letter to the rendering of his soul in tribute (vv. 390–1) and associating the gesture of homage with the letter sealed with his ring (vv. 425–6). The document Théophile hands over thus represents a dangerous equivalence between text and author that reduces the soul to exchangeable property. Though the equivalence of text and self means the 24  See also vv. 149–53, where Salatin speaks to Satan about the benefits of throwing resources into ensnaring such a prize catch. Edelgard DuBruck notes that the pact ‘somewhat resembled a commercial transaction’ in Rutebeuf ’s version. See DuBruck, ‘The Devil and Hell in Medieval French Drama: Prolegomena’, Romania 100 (1979): 168. 25  The seal itself already suggests this identification: see Robert-Henri Bautier, ‘Origine et diffusion du sceau de juridiction’, in Bautier, Chartes, sceaux et chancelleries, 1:342 (originally published in Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. Comptes rendus des séances 115e année, no. 2 (1971): 304–21).

116 emma campbell document is non-transferrable, it simultaneously performs a dangerous act of substitution in representing the immortal soul that Théophile promises in return for earthly riches. Théophile’s relationship of exchange with Satan is revisited and revised during his repentance speech, as he realizes that the price for earthly riches will be eternal damnation. The speech offers an alternative picture of the reciprocity between Théophile and Satan from that seen previously: Sathan, plus de set anz ai tenu ton sentier. Maus chans m’ont fet chanter li vin de mon chantier. Molt felonesse rente m’en rendront mi rentier. Ma char charpenteront li felon charpentier. (vv. 404–7) [Satan, for more than seven years I trod your path. The wines of my estates have made me sing bad songs; those who owe me money will pay me a cruel payment; my flesh will be worked over by cruel carpenters.]

Thus, the logic of exchange underpinning Théophile’s relationship with Satan is shown to invert the benefits that should have accompanied the restoration of the clergyman’s property and status. Théophile has certainly received a return on his property, but it detracts from rather than increases his spiritual standing. The last three verses of this stanza echo the tit-fortat logic of Théophile’s earlier outburst while demonstrating how what might have seemed an advantageous exchange in fact offers something other than what Théophile bargained for. The logic of exchange that Théophile initially regarded as appealing works according to a perverse economic principle that withdraws and spoils the benefits it promised – something that similarly applies to the homage ceremony in the penultimate stanza of the repentance speech, which reinterprets the exchange of charter and riches as a transaction that will yield suffering as well as material rewards (vv. 424–7). The Virgin’s recovery of Théophile’s letter transforms its function in a way that interrupts the logic of tit-for-tat that it previously underwrote, transforming a text that is initially part of a closed contractual agreement into a gift and vehicle of divine translatio. Attempting to retain the charter that Mary has come to retrieve, Satan unsuccessfully reminds her of his initial agreement with Théophile, suggesting this was a fair and open exchange: ‘ja li rendi je sa provande, / et il me fist de lui offrande / sanz demorance’ (vv. 581–3) [I restored his prebend to him and he offered himself to me without hesitation]. Mary’s intervention challenges this way of thinking in more ways than one. In returning the document to Théophile, the Virgin reminds her protégé of what he should have realized all along: ‘trop aime avoir qui si l’achate: / l’ame en est et honteuse et mate’ (vv. 596–7) [he who buys wealth in this way loves it too much: the soul is shamed and defeated by it]. Not

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only was what appeared to be a reciprocal relationship profoundly unequal, but, the Virgin suggests, this was also a commercial transaction of the most perverse kind: Théophile’s avarice caused him to purchase (acheter) material goods with the death of his immortal soul, to acquire that which money can buy with that which should have no economic value. Confirming the rejection of this faulty logic, the restoration of the charter overturns its function in Théophile’s relationship to Satan and redefines it as a gift, while doing so in a way that mirrors this initial, diabolical agreement. For what is given here is also given back, a parallel reinforced in this section of dialogue by the use of the verb rendre to describe both the handing over of the charter and Satan’s earlier restoration of Théophile’s prebend (vv. 577, 579–84). The way the Virgin returns Théophile’s charter thus both echoes and overwrites Théophile’s reciprocal arrangement with Satan, restoring that which was never really Théophile’s to give away. Mary’s subsequent instruction to Théophile to give his letter as a gift (present) to the bishop and to demand that it be read publicly as a warning (vv. 590–5) confirms the redefinition of the charter.26 What was a private document cementing an unequal pact between two parties thus becomes – through a process of transmission that includes Mary and Satan – a divine gift transmitted via Théophile to the bishop and the Christian public. The transformation the charter undergoes at the end of the Miracle not only reflects its new status as a gift but also extends the reframing of Théophile’s pact with Satan. Théophile’s handing of the charter to the bishop evokes the previous scene of homage, as Théophile gives his sealed letter to an individual to whom he submits (vv. 602–31). As well as the gestural similarities between the homage scenes, the gloss Théophile provides retells the miracle story in a way that further contributes to the letter’s redefinition. Whereas previously it seemed that Théophile composed the letter independently, he now explains that he sealed with his ring a letter dictated by Satan: ‘ma chartre en ot de quanqu’il dist; / seelé fu quanqu’il requist’ (vv. 620–1) [there was in my charter everything he dictated; everything he demanded was sealed with my seal]. This new detail does not necessarily contradict the earlier dialogue (which simply informs us that Théophile wrote the document himself ); it does, however, add to the reinterpretation of the pact as a coercive rather than freely negotiated exchange, while making this re-evaluation part of an alternative act of donation. Moreover, in giving his charter to the bishop for public reading, Théophile makes a previously untransferrable document transferrable. Not only is the charter physically subject to a different kind of giving, but, in being read so others might avoid similar tricks (vv. 627–31), 26  In Gautier’s version the Virgin does not give Théophile explicit instructions to the same effect and the causality of this episode is thus rather different. See Gautier de Coinci, Miracles de Nostre Dame, vv. 1395–460.

118 emma campbell it also acquires an exemplary function that means its contents no longer relate exclusively to Théophile’s person. Thus, whereas the charter given to Satan represented a fatal correspondence between self and text that made exchangeable that which should never have had exchange value, the gifting of this document significantly alters this correspondence. If Théophile’s charter represents a story that remains unique, that story is also typological and exemplary, standing for a relationship that might plausibly be reproduced if others are not placed on their guard. In keeping with Théophile’s gloss, the text read by the bishop is not a document written by Théophile and addressed to Satan but an address by Satan to ‘toz cels qui verront ceste lettre commune’ (v. 640) [all those who shall see this open letter]. Satan goes on to testify to the agreement between himself and Théophile, becoming the author of the document as well as its beneficiary. The formula used here is commonly found in charters from this period in both Latin and the vernacular.27 Focusing on the use of such language in royal and seigneurial acts in French, Lalande suggests this would have been a reminder to audiences of the power of the devil, thereby augmenting the Virgin’s victory.28 While this may be true, it should also be noted that the charter that is read aloud fails to perform effectively as a legal document: though it uses a common interpellative mode in its opening, the text that follows contains no declaration of juridical action and describes a situation that is no longer legally binding. The appropriation of a common formula of address thus serves to highlight the failure of Satan’s lettre commune as a legal text, making the public reading of the charter a warning that neutralizes the coercive function of the document once and for all. An important aspect of the way this is achieved is the privileging of narrative over performative enunciation: instead of declaring a juridical action, Satan simply tells his readers a story. This confirms the transition from legal document to Christian exemplum already implicit in Théophile’s words to the bishop and in the Virgin’s request that the charter be read aloud. As a largely narrative text framed by the bishop’s introductory and closing speeches, the letter hesitates between legal document and religious literature, between closed contract and public focus for communal devotion. The redefined charter thus has a complex relationship to translatio. As a document miraculously recovered by the Virgin, it symbolizes the possibility of divine pardon. In its new incarnation as a gift and public document, the letter also acts as a point of contact between Théophile and God, and between the Christian faithful and the divine. As such, the letter is a documentary 27  For examples of charters containing such formulae from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries see Guyotjeannin et al., Diplomatique médiévale, 203, 207, 209 (documents 21–3). On English charters, see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 253–4. 28  Lalande, ‘De la “chartre” de Théophile’.

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duplicate for the Miracle itself, which, as a text also voiced by others, similarly mediates between God and the Christian community. Nonetheless, the lettre commune is a text that does not translate in a simple way: it is, after all, not the voice of God or Mary we hear, but that of Satan – or, more precisely, that of Satan as transcribed by Théophile and read aloud by the bishop. The work of translatio in which the letter participates requires an appreciation of the way in which this document continually moves. Seeing the charter as a symbol of contact between fallen humanity and the divine involves a narrative perspective that overturns the legal document’s deadening association of text and referent and associates this contact between the human and the divine with the charter’s movement between Théophile and Satan, Satan and Mary, Mary and Théophile, Théophile and the bishop, the bishop and the community of the faithful. Furthermore, crucial to the letter’s role in translatio at the end of the Miracle is its redefinition as a text that is neither possessed by anyone nor attached to any particular author or addressee. What begins as a text written by Théophile and given to Satan finishes as a jointly composed letter read by the bishop – a letter transmitted as a gift to a community of listeners through a similarly multiple set of donors (the bishop, Théophile, the Virgin and, by extension, God). The lettre commune thus comes to embody the very principle of translation insofar as the significance of its ultimate performance, far from fixing its origins or addressees, depends instead on a complex appreciation of its continuing transferral as an object that both transmits and is itself transmitted. Essential to this process is the detachment of the charter from the model of equivalence that lies behind its redaction. As argued earlier, the charter initially stands for Théophile himself, translating what should be beyond economic value into a spiritually fatal, exchangeable form. By contrast, the charter’s progressive redefinition as a gift and example, as well as its final public reading, draw attention to the fact that the text is ultimately shared by all rather than possessed outright. Rutebeuf ’s Miracle thus makes the charter a focus for a model of translatio based upon an ethics of the gift – a model in which the Miracle itself participates. To expect the letter to communicate literally what Théophile put into writing thus not only misses the point but also echoes the destitute clergyman’s original mistake: this mode of reading is more associated with the spiritually damaging equivalences in which Théophile dabbles with Satan, in which writing is a contract been individuals based on a presumed – though illusory – equivalence of exchange. By contrast, what the end of the play suggests is that, in order to participate in the work of spiritual translatio, writing should be interpreted not as a contract, but as a gift that communicates something beyond itself. If the only means for Théophile to save his soul is by freeing himself from the literalism of the diabolical agreement and by unsettling the relationship between self and text that underpins this contract, this is a stance that also applies more generally to the interpretation of the charter written in his blood.

120 emma campbell Pardon My French! The Vernacular as Language of Salvation The use of French for the letter that is read aloud merits some additional comment. Though in some respects a natural choice for a document featuring in a vernacular text, French seems to occupy a privileged position among languages in Rutebeuf ’s Miracle in ways that make its use in this document especially appropriate. The selection of French as an idiom of communication between the human and the divine – as well as the human and the diabolical – in Rutebeuf ’s text is highlighted by the play’s allusions to other languages, most notably Latin and Hebrew. Théophile’s familiarity with Latin as well as French is made clear at the beginning of the play, where he specifies that he has (unsuccessfully) prayed to God in both languages (vv. 52–4). Théophile’s later repentance and prayer to the Virgin are nonetheless articulated in French, suggesting that the vernacular is deliberately chosen as the most appropriate idiom for this form of expression. Théophile’s choice of language in these contexts also contrasts with the languages used by Salatin to invoke the devil. Though Rutebeuf ’s text makes relatively little of Salatin’s Jewish associations when compared with other versions, Salatin is connected with Hebrew (as well as Latin) in the Miracle: he is told not to bother Satan ‘ne en ebrieu ne en latin’ (v. 203) [neither in Hebrew nor in Latin] and the jargon he uses to summon the devil could similarly be intended to resemble Hebrew.29 Given that Latin and Hebrew were both sacred languages in the Middle Ages, Satan’s complaint that Salatin should not torment him with them may have an ironic twist. More importantly, however, this linguistic combination implicitly recalls the French and Latin in which Théophile claims he has incessantly prayed to God and sets up a linguistic contrast with the French that Théophile eventually uses to summon the Virgin.30 Seen alongside the Miracle’s interest in the salvific power of language, these contextual details suggest that French is singled out by Rutebeuf as a medium of redemptive interpellation. As just mentioned, the Miracle chooses French over Latin not only for the lettre commune read at the end of the play but also for Théophile’s repentance and prayer to the Virgin, suggesting a privileging of French as the most appropriate language for communication with the divine as well as an emphasis on its possible diabolical uses. The privileging of French thus implicitly has less to do with the superior spiritual value of the vernacular and more to do with its greater flexibility as 29  Salatin is a Jew in other versions of the legend, but this is never mentioned explicitly in Rutebeuf ’s Miracle. The proximity of Salatin’s name to ‘Saladin’ suggests Muslim rather than Jewish associations. See Gilbert Dahan, ‘Salatin, du Miracle de Théophile de Rutebeuf ’, Le Moyen Âge 83, nos 3–4 (1977): 445–68; Edmond Faral, ‘Quelques remarques sur Le miracle de Théophile de Rutebeuf ’, Romania 72 (1951): 182–201; Rutebeuf, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bastin and Faral, 2:175. 30  The invocation of the Christian divinity and Salatin’s summoning of Satan are juxtaposed in Satan’s comments to Salatin (vv. 196–203).

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a language of confession and socially inclusive religious communication. In Théophile’s case, French – as a fallen language without the spiritual credentials of Latin – seems a more appropriate choice for the sinner’s communication with God. Considered in terms of the thirteenth-century emphasis on the interiority of repentance, French is also perhaps a more authentic vehicle for the sentiments that will eventually earn Théophile his divine pardon. The use of French in the letter read to the Christian faithful suggests a valorization of the vernacular that is similarly equivocal. On the one hand, the use of French as a widely comprehensible, spoken language serves the purpose that the Virgin gives the text, which is to act as a warning to an audience of ordinary people (v. 594). On the other hand, French also appears as a language of diabolical communication. The formal similarity between the devil’s letter and Théophile’s repentance speech implicitly connects these discourses in other ways: they are the only sections of dialogue in the play in alexandrine verse. Both of these discourses hesitate between the fallen, diabolical realm and the realm of divine salvation; both also expose a truth with didactic potential – be it the truth of genuine repentance articulated by Théophile or the truth of diabolical deception and exploitation revealed in Satan’s letter. If French is the language in which the truth is revealed for the edification of the faithful – a language which therefore acts as a medium of both religious education and Christian salvation – it is also a language available to God and Satan, saints and sinners alike. Indeed, it is by implication precisely its ability to operate within and between different spheres that makes French a particularly useful instrument in reinforcing relations between the human and the divine, an instrument that is essential to the model of translatio with which the chartre and the Miracle are both associated. Conclusion I have argued that Rutebeuf ’s Miracle, through its treatment of Théophile’s charter, not only concerns itself with the communication of the spirit rather than the letter of the text but also that, in doing so, this work reflects on how texts translate between the human world and the divine. The mouvance of Théophile’s charter which has exercised modern critics is integral to the play’s depiction of salvation, which associates the shifting meaning of the document with the functions it performs in Théophile’s relationships to God and Satan. The charter that awards Satan dominion over Théophile’s soul does not operate in an ethical way: it mediates a closed relationship between the clergyman and his diabolical master in which an exchange that might appear advantageous ultimately proves to be profoundly unequal. Moreover, what is emphasized by the reassessment of Théophile’s pact is the perverse logic of the exchange agreement sealed by the charter, in which something that should have no economic value (the soul) is offered in exchange for that which does

122 emma campbell have economic value (material wealth and social position). The charter thus initially represents the spiritually fatal translation of the immortal into the mortal realm, the subordination of the spirit to the letter. By contrast, the translatio the charter performs at the end of the text is inclusive rather than exclusive, salvific rather than damning. This document still, in a sense, stands in for Théophile insofar as it figures the salvation of his soul. Crucially, however, the restoration of the charter means that Théophile receives as a gift what he initially assumed was his to sign away – a gesture that confirms his acknowledgement that his soul was never his to exchange in the first place. The transformation of the charter in the final part of the Miracle figures this shift in emphasis in other ways. This document is no longer simply part of a closed agreement between two parties but a gift offered to Théophile and the community of the faithful. If, on one level, the chartre figures Théophile’s salvation, it also represents the potential salvation of the Christian community at large; it is in this function as an example that is at once specific and potentially universal that the document is shared with the community. The contents of the document that is read aloud emphasize this new function on the level of form: what was initially an undisclosed autograph document becomes an open letter combining different voices and speaking positions, a letter that itself marks a shift in register from legal to religious text. The opening up of the text as a source of edification and vehicle of translatio, precisely insofar as it blends the voices of Satan, Théophile, the bishop and the Miracle, is also a reminder of the situation of this document between the human, the diabolical and the divine – a situation that makes French the natural choice for its articulation. The ethics of translatio in this text thus both resemble and differ from the ethics of translation considered in Derrida’s essay. If, for Derrida, the ethical decision in the domains of justice and translation depends on a choice between conflicting alternatives, this is to some extent reflected in the way Théophile’s repentance indicates his choice of good over evil. However, in Théophile’s case, this choice promises a salvation that ultimately depends on God’s mercy. The ethical decision involved in ‘relevant’ translation, which lifts and ‘seasons’ the text by reconciling conflicting imperatives is thus partially displaced in the medieval play by the miraculous demonstration of divine mercy, which overcomes the ethical dilemma in which Théophile finds himself without ever being properly constrained by it. The chartre – as a document that stands as an example not only of God’s forgiveness but also of the inevitability of human weakness – nonetheless draws these elements together in a way that projects the ethical decision Théophile eventually makes onto the audience that Rutebeuf represents and addresses through his text. The ethics of translatio as I have explored them here thus operate on at least two, related levels. On the one hand, Théophile’s charter translates the story of his salvation in a way that evokes and constructs the ethical oppositions that structure the play, coming to symbolize the impossible (but also inevitable)

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overcoming of the letter by the spirit, of the diabolical by the divine. On the other hand, it is precisely in condensing and participating in the (un)ethical decisions Théophile makes that this document is able to re-present the ethical dilemma facing the community at large. What is underlined in this process is not only the role that the charter plays in translating between the diabolical, the human and the divine, but also the way the text in which this document features performs a similar function. It is, finally, worth noting how the transformation of Théophile’s charter also comments on Rutebeuf ’s own implication in the work of translatio performed by the Miracle. The Miracle has this in common with the religious works Rutebeuf composes at around the same period: it is a religious text that mediates not only between the faithful and God but also between its author and his maker. Though we should of course be wary of identifying Rutebeuf with Théophile in an overly simplistic way, the likeness between the personal poetry and the Miracle is well established.31 This is especially true of the Repentance Rutebeuf, comparison with which, as Michel Zink has demonstrated, is encouraged by the abridgement of the Miracle in the C manuscript.32 The fourth stanza of the Repentance Rutebeuf is especially reminiscent of Théophile’s plight, regretting as it does Rutebeuf ’s deception by the devil and articulating his reliance on the Virgin for salvation from a rebellious heart that will cruelly repay him.33 If poetry here is partly at fault for leading Rutebeuf astray, it is also paradoxically the means to his salvation. Similarly, in the concluding lines of his Vie de sainte Marie l’Egyptienne, Rutebeuf highlights his authorship of the text as a means of recognition that might win him divine favour, reminding his readership not only to pray on their own behalf but also to remember him in their prayers.34 Rutebeuf is nonetheless less present in the Miracle than he is in other works of the same period. This is also the case when comparison is drawn with his French source for the play: as Dufournet and Lascombes suggest, when compared to Gautier de Coinci in his version of the same story, Rutebeuf remains relatively invisible as an author.35 Though this is doubtless partly to do with the fact that Rutebeuf ’s Miracle is a text designed for a certain kind of performance, it 31 Regalado, Poetic Patterns, 232–3 and, more generally, 255–311; See also Grace Frank, ‘Rutebeuf and Théophile’, Romanic Review 43, no. 3 (1952): 161–5. 32  The presentation in the C manuscript of Théophile’s monologue and prayer as independent poems suggests equivalence between the poetic mise en scène of Rutebeuf and that of Théophile; as mentioned above, Théophile’s monologue is presented in this manuscript under the title Repentance Théophile. 33  The formulation here echoes that of Théophile’s repentance (vv. 404–7). Rutebeuf similarly opines in the Repentance Rutebeuf that ‘de male rente m’a rentei / mes cuers ou tant truis de contraire’ (vv. 45–6). See Rutebeuf, Œuvres complètes, ed. Zink, 334. 34 Rutebeuf, Œuvres complètes, ed. Zink, 528, vv. 1295–306. 35  Dufournet and Lascombes, ‘Rutebeuf et le Miracle’, 164.

124 emma campbell also echoes the more general movement towards a model of divine translatio that emphasizes shared investment in the text over outright possession. The redefinition of Théophile’s relationship to the chartre – which changes his role from one of authorship to one of transmission – draws attention to a relationship between authors and texts that also implicitly applies to Rutebeuf. Like Théophile, Rutebeuf passes the text he has written to others so that its performance might benefit the wider community, retelling a story that is at once specific and universal, personally relevant and anonymously exemplary. Though the Miracle still bears Rutebeuf ’s distinctive poetic signature, his self-effacement as the text’s author thus aligns him with the repentant sinner whose story he retells and silently includes him in the gesture that opens the text to its Christian audience as a vehicle of translatio. In a similar way to Théophile’s charter, the Miracle is a text that ultimately has no fixed point of origin or any particular addressee and, as such, is a work that Rutebeuf, as the undeclared but discernibly present writer of the piece, translates rather than owns.

6 Invisible Translation, Language Difference and the Scandal of Becket’s Mother

Robert Mills The translator’s invisibility has been identified by Lawrence Venuti as a major ethical dilemma facing contemporary practitioners of translation. The tendency, especially within English-language translations commissioned by commercial publishers, to efface the translator’s labour through the promotion of ‘fluent’ translation techniques and unreflexive reading practices is symptomatic of an attitude that is, Venuti maintains, ‘imperialistic abroad and xenophobic at home’.1 Although Venuti’s account of this trend begins in the seventeenth century, after which it becomes increasingly yoked to the demands of corporate capital, invisible translation is also of course a premodern phenomenon.2 The story of medieval Europe is a story of languages in contact, yet the precise mechanisms through which exchanges across linguistic frontiers were effected only come into focus intermittently in literature of the period. One text that famously draws attention to the problem of language difference while simultaneously effacing it is Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale.3 First, the tale’s protagonist, Custance, is married off to the sultan of Syria, following reports of her beauty by Roman merchants. 1  Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2008), 13. See also Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards An Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998), which similarly laments the lowly status of translation as a mode of production in contemporary culture and advocates, in response, a model of ‘minoritizing translation’, as opposed to ‘fluent translation’, which demystifies the invisibility commonly accorded to the translation process. 2  On the invisibility of the interpreter/translator in early modern linguistic encounters, see Patricia Palmer, ‘Interpreters and the Politics of Translation and Traduction in Sixteenth-Century Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies 33 (2003): 257–77. 3  Man of Law’s Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford:

126 robert mills This traffic in women, goods, power and knowledge takes place without any explicit acknowledgement of linguistic borders between sixth-century Syria and Rome. No mention here of an interpreter at the wedding, or fumbled linguistic exchanges between Custance’s entourage and that of her husbandto-be. The real issue, Chaucer’s narrator makes clear, is the ‘diversitee’ (220) between Syrian and Roman religions, a situation effortlessly resolved, at least initially, by the sultan’s conversion from Islam to Christianity. The second of Custance’s geographical displacements, which again we might expect to occasion an encounter with language difference, generates an alternative but equally mysterious resolution. Put to sea in a rudderless ship by the evil sultaness, who, encouraging her supporters to ‘feyne us cristendom to take’ (351), subsequently conspires to have all the Syrian converts murdered at the wedding banquet, Custance finds herself wrecked on the shores of Northumberland. Discovered there by a local constable, she begs for mercy in the only way she knows how: In hir langage mercy she bisoghte, The lyf out of hir body for to twynne [separate], Hire to delivere of wo that she was inne. A maner Latyn corrupt was hir speche, But algates [nevertheless] therby was she understonde. (516–20)

This episode draws attention to the fact of language difference – Custance speaks in ‘hir langage’, identified as a kind of ‘corrupt’ Latin – but it bridges the divide separating the protagonist from her Northumbrian, Saxon-speaking hosts by suggesting that something remarkable has taken place: despite her linguistic strangeness, she manages to be understood ‘algates’.4 Although hagiography is by no means the only prism through which this generic hybrid of a tale can be viewed, the reader potentially bears witness, in this instant, to a moment of miraculous xenoglossia, which allows Custance to be translated, against the odds, into the language of her listeners.5 Meanwhile she herself, true to her name, remains unchanged by the translatio she undergoes: Oxford University Press, 1987), 87–104. Subsequent references are to this edition by line number, provided in parentheses. 4  This represents an alteration by Chaucer to his source, Nicholas Trevet’s AngloNorman Les Cronicles, which describes Custance as being educated in numerous languages and able to talk to the constable in Saxon. On sources for the Man of Law’s Tale, see Edward Block, ‘Originality, Controlling Purpose, and Craftsmanship in the Man of Law’s Tale’, PMLA 68, no. 3 (1953): 572–616; Robert M. Correale, ‘Chaucer’s Manuscript of Nicholas Trevet’s Les Cronicles’, Chaucer Review 25, no. 3 (1991): 238–65. On the reference to ‘corrupt’ Latin, see J. A. Burrow, ‘A maner Latyn corrupt’, Medium Ævum 30 (1961): 33–7. 5  See further Christine F. Cooper, ‘“But algates therby was she understonde”: Trans-

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as a ‘text’ (as well as exchange object) her basic substance stays the same. In so doing, the protagonist’s saint-like pretensions bring into focus one of the elements necessarily foregrounded in medieval manifestations of the translator’s invisibility: the translator’s labour is shadowed by that of God himself, who represents the authoritative obverse to Venuti’s impoverished translators of modernity. It is an invisible God that ensures that Custance’s inner core – her Christian faith – is preserved, despite being shuttled repeatedly across cultural and linguistic frontiers. Chaucer’s meditations on interpretation and linguistic (in)difference provide the backdrop, in what follows, to another, contrasting narrative that highlights the political and ethical dimensions to occluded translation in the Middle Ages: the legend of Thomas Becket’s crusading father Gilbert and of his mother, who is identified as a ‘heathen’ convert. This narrative also presents translatability as a thematic element within the story, as well as being a widely disseminated tale in its own right. Whereas Custance is a figure for textual fidelity – a ‘foreigner’ effecting change in the cultures she encounters, someone who successfully resists domesticating manoeuvres – Becket’s mother inhabits the role of convert so effectively that her foreigner status is ultimately displaced.6 Both tales offer a resolution to the translatable/untranslatable polarity by enlisting God as the agent of translation. But whereas Chaucer’s female protagonist remains largely unchanged – a constancy of faith that inspires those who come into contact with her, whether Syrian or Northumbrian, to convert – Becket’s mother is herself the object of conversion.7 Conversion is an act literally presented as an experience of translation from nothing into something. Linguistically and culturally, the female protagonist has no identity to speak of prior to Christian baptism. The issue of whether translation is rendered visible or mystified within the legend of Becket’s parents is, I suggest, crucially related to the specific domesticating agendas it is asked to serve. This in itself is an obvious conclusion for lating Custance in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale’, Yearbook of English Studies 36, no. 1 (2006): 27–38. 6  My use of the word ‘foreigner’ is not meant to imply that the domestic/foreign polarity is identical in medieval cultures to its deployment in modern translation theory, where it may also assume particular meanings in the context of geopolitical formations such as the nation state (as in the concept of a governmental ‘foreign policy’). Rather, it serves here as a general marker of the strangeness that may be associated, in medieval contexts, with linguistic, religious, cultural or occasionally sartorial or corporeal difference; domestication in this chapter is defined with reference to the idea of Christendom as a homeland for believers as well as efforts to link a language (English) to such notions of religious belonging. 7  For other connections between the Man of Law’s Tale and the Gilbert Becket legend, see Lawrence Warner, ‘Adventurous Custance: St Thomas of Acre and Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale’, in Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative, ed. Laura L. Howes (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 51–4.

128 robert mills a narrative whose interests, in the Middle Ages at least, were closely aligned with the fantasy of a universal church. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when several of the Becket legends discussed in this chapter were in circulation, the Roman Church was developing new institutional standards of belief, Christian identity and orthodoxy – standards that, as Maria Tymoczko has shown, have left an indelible mark on concepts of translation in the West.8 But there is also another element that a perspective on translation opens up here: the multiple and heterogeneous shifts in the narrative across time and space. This is a story that moves incessantly within as well as across languages and cultures; it transfers between media and genres; its afterlife extends almost to the present day. I identify here some of the factors that may have fuelled this wide appeal. First, I assess the role translation plays as a narrative device within the earliest surviving, Middle English redaction of the thirteenth century. What values does the translator’s visibility (or invisibility) support? Does the text open up any spaces of resistance to the universalizing, Christocentric frame? Second, I turn to several other translations, analogues and adaptations of the story and ask to what extent dissemination redirects the ideological programme. Does multiple translation open up the possibility of an ethical relation between the different languages and cultures in which the story travels? Or is there (like Chaucer’s Custance) an enduring moral core that the tale carries with it as it travels?

The Laud 108 Narrative and Language Difference Beginning in the thirteenth century, Thomas Becket’s vita starts to be supplemented by a legend describing the saint’s sensational origins in the Holy Land. His father, so the story goes, is a London burgess called Gilbert who travels east as an act of penance, only to be locked up by the local emir. The woman who eventually becomes Becket’s mother is the emir’s own daughter. She takes such a liking to Gilbert while visiting him in jail that she vows that she will happily convert to Christianity in exchange for his hand in marriage. Barriers are erected to the consummation of this union along the way – not least the fact that Gilbert escapes from the emir’s prison and returns to England without his eastern lover in tow. She eventually finds her way there, all the same, and seeks out Gilbert in London – all without knowing more than a word or two of English. Granted permission to marry by the church authorities, on condition that the woman first fulfils her conversion pledge, the pair wed, conceive a child called Thomas, and the rest, as the saying goes, is history. Or rather it is a case of history repeating itself: the 8  See Maria Tymoczko, ‘Western Metaphorical Discourses Implicit in Translation Studies’, in Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors, ed. James St André (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2010), 109–43, esp. 125–34.

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story of Becket’s mother makes its first appearance in a thirteenth-century interpolated version of Edward Grim’s Vita Sancti Thomae (completed in the 1170s) known as the First Quadrilogus; it finds its way into the compilations of Middle English hagiography categorized collectively by scholars as the South English Legendaries, manuscripts of which circulated between the late thirteenth and the early fifteenth centuries; and it has subsequently enjoyed a rich and varied afterlife in the hands of numerous translators, even in the modern period.9 I turn to these later versions in conclusion, but at the outset my focus is the earliest English text. Middle English redactions, unlike some of the later ones, place emphasis on the linguistic dimensions of the conversion narrative – but only when the translation process can be co-opted in the service of a larger moral structure. The ability to converse in the language of the other is presented as being directly related to the speaker’s religious status; as such it assumes an explicit ethical dimension. Indeed the ability to cross linguistic borders is so closely aligned with religious identity that it literally goes without saying: so long as the translating agents are Christian, conjectured exchanges across languages remain invisible. Conversely, the inability to translate and to be translated is representable, since this necessitates human or divine intervention. Linguistic incompetence is a load carried by the emir’s daughter alone. The moral values attributed to the motif of translation are especially apparent in the version of the story contained in the earliest surviving copy of the South English Legendary, the late thirteenth-century Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 108.10 From the moment that the narrator announces the story of Gilbert Becket’s adventures in the Holy Land as ‘þis englische tale’ (1), it is clear that a domesticating agenda conditions the narrative’s retelling. According to the Laud narrator, Gilbert is kept in the prison of a heathen ‘Amiral’ for two and a half years; during this period, the Amiral’s affection for Gilbert grows and he begins inviting him to dine with him at table. At this point there is no question of a linguistic barrier to be breached: readers can enjoy the story of a blossoming interaction between a prisoner and his keeper without the burden of wondering precisely how the pair communicate. Nor is linguistic difference an issue when the Amiral’s daughter herself visits Gilbert in his cell and begins questioning him about his land of origin and beliefs. ‘Of engelonde ich am’, Gilbert asserts, ‘and cristine Man · þei ich 9  For the text of the First Quadrilogus interpolated version of Grim’s vita, taken from London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius C.XII, see James Robertson and J. B. Sheppard, eds, Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, 7 vols, Rolls Series 67 (London: Longman, 1875–85), 2:453–8. For analogues and retellings, see Paul Alonzo Brown, The Development of the Legend of Thomas Becket (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930). 10  For the text of the Laud legend, see Carl Horstmann, ed., The Early South-English Legendary, Early English Text Society original series 87 (London: Trübner, 1887), 106–12. Subsequent references are to this edition by line number, provided in parentheses.

130 robert mills beo nouþe here [though I am now here]; / Mi name is Gilbert beket · of Londene þe cite’ (34–5). The daughter’s own response, inspired by Gilbert’s talk of accepting death for the love of Christ and his ‘trewe bi-leue’, is to undertake Christendom herself in exchange for marriage vows: ‘Cristine-dom ichulle onder-fonge’ [I shall undertake Christendom], she declares, on condition that ‘þou an-non aftur-ward · treweliche [truly] weddi me’ (39–40). The role of translation is nowhere to be seen at this point in the narrative. We catch no glimpse of an interpreter oiling the wheels of Gilbert’s exchange with the Amiral’s daughter, or of Gilbert himself speaking in the woman’s tongue; her dialogue with the burgess is recorded uncomplicatedly in English. This is a classic case of the translator’s invisibility. Presented as if the Amiral’s daughter’s speech is something that can be communicated without mediation to the reader in English, the line separating Gilbert’s ‘engelonde’ from the daughter’s ‘heþenesse’ is presented in crude cultural and religious terms (she’s a heathen from the Holy Land), but not linguistic ones. The divide is gendered too. Terrified by the marriage proposal, which he fears lays bare the ‘traison of þat womman’ (46), Gilbert locates the Amiral’s daughter within a misogynistic stereotype of fickle womanhood; figuring that he would be best off out of there, he effects his escape from prison, along with his fellow captives, that very night. Language difference only assumes significance when the Amiral’s daughter finally follows Gilbert to England, and to what is presented as an anglophone world. This physical relocation is accompanied by a profound sense of linguistic dislocation on the woman’s part, as her arrival in London makes clear: And þo heo was þudere i-come · þare ne knev heo no man, Ne heo ne couþe speke ne hire bi-seo · bote ase a best þat a-strayed were. Þare-fore on hire gapede alday · swyþe muche folc þere, Boþe Men and wommen · and children suyþe fale – For hire continaunce was wonderful · and hire speche no Man ne couþe þare (64–8) [And though she had arrived in that place she knew no one there. They could neither speak nor look at her, except as a stray animal. Therefore lots of people there gaped at her all day, men, women and a large number of children alike – for her countenance was wonderful and no one there understood her speech.]

The daughter’s incomprehensibility is literally dehumanizing: speaking the language of the other aligns her, in the minds of onlookers, with a ‘best þat a-strayed were’. But her ‘wonderful’ appearance also points to another dimension to this imaginary encounter between medieval Londoners and a heathen princess: only a miracle has the power to effect a rapprochement between the foreigner and her English-speaking hosts. Indeed it has already done

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so. The journey to England itself is represented as an act of God, who not only assumes the role of ‘lodes-man’ [navigator] but also ensures that she is accompanied by ‘men þat onder-stoden hire langage’ (55). On the way from the coast to London itself, moreover, God’s role as divine translator is highlighted once again: ‘Ake euere heo axede in hire langage · to londone for-to go / Mid pilgrimes and þoru grace of god · to londone heo cam’ (62–3) [And repeatedly she asked in her language how to get to London. With pilgrims and through the grace of God she came to London]. Finally the role of miracle is reinforced a third time when, reunited with her beloved Gilbert, the Amiral’s daughter is led by the hero before a council of six bishops, who debate the question of whether the pair can legitimately marry.11 Gilbert emphasizes the fact that it is a great wonder that she has managed to find her way to London, given the language barrier, and the bishop of Winchester agrees: it must be an act of God, he confirms, for otherwise she would not have been able to travel all that distance without language; as he puts it, ‘heo ne couþe language non · with men for-to speke’ (113). The other bishops assent, but before her christening in St Paul’s a final dialogue ensues between the princess and the prelates. Significantly, Gilbert himself facilitates this conversation by acting as translator. The woman answers the bishops’ questions ‘in hire langage’ (131), we are told, confirming in her responses that the only deal on the table is a straight swap of conversion for marriage; Gilbert himself, who the narrator now confirms ‘couþe hire langage’ (135), conveys this message to the bishops. The phrase ‘in hire langage’ in each of these references echoes the passage from the Man of Law’s Tale quoted at the outset, except that Custance’s own ‘langage’, miraculously understood by the Northumbrians on whose coast she is marooned, is identified positively as a variety of Latin. The language of heathendom is not named in the Laud manuscript, and nor in fact is the Amiral’s daughter. The narrator explicitly states that of ‘hire heþene name ne j nouȝt telle’ (139) [I say nothing of her heathen name] and it is only after baptism that she is assigned a clear moniker – ‘Alisaundre’ – which at last signals her reception into the English Christian fold. Before that time she is confined to a hazy non-identity – not language-less, exactly, but a position without real substance all the same. It is the moment of recognition enabled by the assumption of a proper (Christian) name that finally ensures her translatability as the mother of a future saint. Thus far my analysis of the Gilbert legend has turned on the fact that the heathen daughter’s culture is figured as a kind of absence. Those features that would make it truly ‘foreign’ (in the sense taken up by modern translation 11  The motif of the bishops’ consultation prior to marriage also finds a possible counterpart in the sultan’s consultation with his ‘privee conseil’ (204) in the Man of Law’s Tale prior to his marriage to Custance, which, as discussed by Warner (‘Adventurous Custance’, 53), is uniquely found in Chaucer’s version of the tale.

132 robert mills theorists) are ultimately suppressed in favour of a somewhat more flimsy vision of difference, in which the cultural other is largely emptied of identifiable traits such as language, religious practice or a name. While from a modern perspective this is clearly ethically troubling, the larger question that could be asked here is why Becket’s mother needs to be represented as a convert at all. Historically speaking, after all, she was probably a woman called Matilda who hailed from Caen in Normandy.12 The explanation for these efforts to reimagine Becket’s parentage in the thirteenth century probably lies in the fact that another cultural trope, religious conversion, is playing out here, a motif that also assumes importance in the Thomas Becket story proper. Conversion and translation work in tandem with one another to promote the idea that spiritual conversion is a fully realizable activity.13 Among the cultural forces shaping this interplay we need to take into account political theories, contemporary with the early South English Legendaries, which promoted the importance of language learning as a mechanism of conversion. De recuperatione terre sancte (c. 1306), a treatise by the Norman polemicist Pierre Dubois (also discussed by Zrinka Stahuljak in this volume), recommends precisely such a strategy – along with intermarriage – as a means of winning back the Holy Land from Muslim control. Dubois cites the example of the apostles themselves to back up his claim that ‘it is in every way advisable and necessary to procure far in advance men fluent and well-trained in languages’.14 Gilbert Becket, with his apostle-like ability to speak in tongues, participates in this project: although the exact means by which he acquires his language skills is effaced, it is his capacity to communicate with the Amiral’s daughter that inspires her thoughts of conversion in the first place. Gilbert’s role as an interpreter here is crucial. As a crusading Christian, prepared to die for his beliefs, he has no trouble communing across the linguistic divide that potentially separates him from his heathen captors. He plays this role again in the narrative, as we have seen, when he mediates between the bishops and his future wife. The final time when an interpreter comes into view is in the conclusion to the tale. The night of the wedding Thomas is conceived and the very next day Gilbert experiences a desperate urge to return to his calling in the Holy Land. The only thing holding him back is his concern for his (now pregnant) wife, and specifically his worry that ‘langage ne couþe heo non / Þat ani Man couþe onder-stonde’ (152–3). Alisaundre encourages him to depart despite his fears, but Gilbert is finally persuaded to leave on condition that his knave Richard, with whom he

12  Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 10–13. 13  See further Robert Mills, ‘Conversion, Translation and Becket’s “Heathen” Mother’, in Rethinking the ‘South English Legendaries’, ed. Heather Blurton and Jocelyn WoganBrowne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 381–402. 14  Pierre Dubois, The Recovery of the Holy Land, trans. Walter I. Brandt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 177.

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was imprisoned in the Holy Land and who also understands her language, will stay behind to act as interpreter and ‘speke to hire with mouþe’ (178). These references to acts of interlingual transfer articulate a layer of language activity that is more commonly occluded in medieval literature. The language impediment experienced by Becket’s mother is forcefully emphasized by the presence of interpreters – first God, and then Gilbert and Richard – who nudge her out of the indecipherable shadows in which she has been hiding. What at the outset is effaced – the experience of cultural exchange across linguistic borders – becomes, in conclusion, a discernible presence: the translator enters the scene. Up to a point, that is, since God himself continues to be an absent presence. His agency is everywhere but the mechanisms remain mysterious; grace is the guiding principle of divine translation. And the labour of human interpreters itself is hardly transparent, even when Gilbert and his knave intervene. We know that they act as translators but we are not afforded a precise glimpse of how they do it. These fleeting references to interpreters thus fail fully to restore the discursive texture of the period’s encounters with language difference. Dialogue between Gilbert and his female admirer is rendered unproblematically; he speaks her language and that is that. A staggered linguistic exchange is of no interest here, at least to the extent that it concerns a Christian hero such as Gilbert; indecipherability is the burden of the other. As a work of hagiography, the references to Gilbert and his man’s translating activity thus promote a predictably domesticating scenario: Christians translating non-Christians into mirror images of themselves.

Antecedents, Precedents and Scandals of Translation Looking beyond the motif of translation in the tale to translations of the tale, is it possible to perceive any ripples on the surface? Are there any chinks in the ideological armour that allow alternative or (in Venuti’s terms) ‘minoritizing’ perspectives to come to the fore? I now turn to another element in the Becket’s mother story that demands reflection from the perspective of its ethical positioning: the narrative’s own status as a translation directed towards evangelizing ends. The story of Becket’s mother is inherently translatable, as the numerous versions circulating from the thirteenth century onwards testify; it is also itself a product of incessant translation, as can be seen by charting some of its multiple antecedents and analogues. What interests do these reinventions satisfy? Do the ‘domestic’ agendas that inevitably mould the landscape of translation hold sway in every instance, or is it possible to discover traces of what – from the perspective of modern translation theory – might be perceived as manifestations of the ‘foreign’ within that domesticating ethos? Against the backdrop of all that dissemination, what constants (if any) drive the story forward? Staying, for the time being, with the Laud text itself, traces of its own

134 robert mills status as a translation are relatively slight. As I have already mentioned, the narrator’s description of it, in the opening line, as a characteristically ‘englische’ tale signals something profoundly domesticating about the tale’s retelling: while the inability to speak sense provokes an experience of difference that borders on the uncanny, linguistic ability is connected to notions of Christian belonging and coming home. This is in keeping with the nationalizing trend identified by scholars as a feature of South English Legendary collections more generally: a number of saints’ lives in Laud 108 are heavily invested in the production of political fantasies of ‘Englishness’.15 The narrator labels Thomas Becket himself as ‘pris-martyr of engelonde’ (142) during the account of his ancestry, a reference cementing the bond between his geographical origins (England) and the language (English) in which the legend is conveyed. For all this emphasis on the tale’s ‘Englishing’, though, we are afforded occasional glimpses of the multilingual contexts in which it circulated. The first thing to note is the text’s generic hybridity, a quality it shares with Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale. As the prequel to a major saint’s life, in a manuscript dominated by hagiographic narratives, the Gilbert legend is modelled on exemplary biography. Romance, with its emphasis on the quest, is as important as hagiography in conditioning the reception of Gilbert’s adventures here; the motif of exile-and-return signals this overlap. Additionally we need to bear in mind the influence of chanson de geste, a genre that was at the height of production and copying in thirteenth-century England. Again the requirements of chanson de geste may explain the decision to transform Becket’s mother into a convert, which necessitates the transformation of a hazy heathen absence (nameless, languageless) into a Christian presence by the tale’s conclusion. Not only would producers of early South English Legendary manuscripts have been familiar 15  Kimberly K. Bell, ‘“Holy mannes liues”: England and Its Saints in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108’s King Horn and South English Legendary’, in The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative, ed. Kimberly K. Bell and Julie Nelson Couch (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 251–74; Julie Nelson Couch, ‘The Magic of Englishness in St Kenelm and Havelok the Dane’, in Texts and Contexts, ed. Bell and Couch, 223–50; Jill Frederick, ‘The South English Legendary: Anglo-Saxon Saints and National Identity’, in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 57–73; Renee Hamelinck, ‘St Kenelm and the Legends of the English Saints in the South English Legendary’, in Companion to Early Middle English Literature, ed. N. H. G. E. Veldhoen and H. Aertsen (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1988), 21–30; Klaus Jankofsky, ‘National Characteristics in the Portrayal of Saints in the South English Legendary’, in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 81–93; Anne B. Thompson, Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative in the ‘South English Legendary’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 21–57; Thorlac TurvillePetre, England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 60–7.

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with the genre, but twenty or so surviving chansons de geste incorporate a close parallel to the legend of Becket’s mother: the Saracen princess plot. This class of story concerns the daughter of a powerful Saracen ruler who falls in love with a Frankish hero, converts and becomes an exemplary Christian wife.16 Middle English appropriations of the Saracen princess storyline exist: the earliest manuscript of Bevis of Hampton, based on the Anglo-Norman Bueve d’Hantone, dates to just a few decades after Laud 108 and features the story of the eponymous hero’s escapades with a woman called Josian, the daughter of King Ermin of Armenia.17 Josian assertively declares her love for Bevis, who initially rejects her until she pledges conversion to Christianity; eventually the couple make it to Cologne, where they marry – but not before Josian has been baptized by the city’s bishop.18 There are clear similarities here with the Becket narrative, but we need not necessarily imagine an English ‘source’ for the latter’s allusions to chanson de geste. Evidence that the earliest recorded version is in Latin notwithstanding, it is also worth considering the possibility that the Laud legend deliberately draws on French intertexts as a means of enhancing the text’s status in the minds of readers. Aligning the adventures of a provincial London burgess with the heroes of chansons de geste potentially draws it into a different (perhaps even more ‘aristocratic’) cultural ambit. A rubricated incipit which appears to the right of the text on folio 61r of Laud 108 (which introduces the Gilbert legend) and a further incipit on folio 63r (which introduces the Becket legend proper) enhance this view: uniquely in the manuscript, each heading is rendered in French.19 We should not necessarily attribute too much significance to the apparent incongruity of French headings in an otherwise almost entirely monolingual manuscript. In an environment such as medieval England, unmarked 16  Sarah Kay, The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 30–48; Jennifer R. Goodman, ‘Marriage and Conversion in Late Medieval Romance’, in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 115–28; F. M. Warren, ‘The Enamoured Moslem Princess in Orderic Vital and the French Epic’, PMLA 29, no. 3 (1914): 341–58. 17  The earliest English version of Bevis of Hampton appears in the Auckinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Adv. 19.2.1), produced in London in the 1330s. On Josian’s conversion, see Bonnie J. Erwin, ‘A Good Woman is Hard to Find: Conversion and the Power of Feminine Desire in Bevis of Hampton’, Exemplaria 23, no. 4 (2011): 368–89; for an edition, see Bevis of Hampton, ed. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1999). For a full account of the dissemination, see Sunderland’s chapter in this volume. 18  Bevis of Hampton, lines 1137–200 ( Josian declares her love for Bevis and pledges conversion); lines 2571–96 ( Josian’s baptism in Cologne). 19  ‘Ici poez oyer coment seint Thomas de Kaunterbures nasqui. E de quev manere gent de pere e de Mere’ (fol. 61r); ‘Hic Isci Comence la vie seint Thomas Erceeueske de Kaunterbury’ (fol. 63r). For reproductions of the relevant folios in which these rubrics appear, see Bell and Couch, eds, Texts and Contexts, figs 5, 6.

136 robert mills by the disciplinary boundaries of modern academia, we might expect less emphasis on the idea that English and French operate as discrete languages; code-switching and pragmatic movement between languages are hardly out of the ordinary in such a context.20 And yet the Laud manuscript sometimes makes strident claims for the ‘Englishness’ of its subjects. Brief snatches of French vocabulary attributed to the evil tormentors of saints also support the view that the makers of the Laud manuscript had an interest in sharpening the lines between languages for ideological reasons.21 Even as it betrays its conditions of production within a more fluid linguistic situation, the text simultaneously has an investment in maintaining a sense of linguistic borders. One of the strategies Venuti promotes as a means for contemporary translators to bypass the structures through which they are rendered invisible is to engage in what he calls ‘minoritizing’ translation – a demystifying practice that manifests ‘in its own language the foreignness of the foreign text’.22 Concurring with Antoine Berman’s view that the properly ethical aim of the translator is a reception of the ‘Foreign as Foreign’, Venuti hopes to redirect the ethnocentrism of contemporary, English-language translation by alerting readers of literary translations to the effects of the domesticating process and opening their minds, in so doing, to linguistic and cultural difference.23 Examples of such a translation practice might include the use of a jarring domestic lexicon (say, one that sounds anachronistic to the ears of a modern reader), or the deployment of what he terms ‘discursive heterogeneity’;24 it is motivated by ambivalence on the translator’s part towards domestic norms, as opposed to their silent reification. It would be difficult to argue that the Laud account of Becket’s parents unleashes minoritizing translation of this sort. The deployment of French headings and chanson de geste themes might superficially convey a certain amount of discursive heterogeneity, but the evangelizing tone of the South English Legendaries ensures that the totalizing demands of the church take precedence over any effort to adopt what, from the perspective of contemporary theorists such as Venuti, might be viewed as a more hospitable stance towards alterity. For this reason, representations of translation within the 20  Laura Wright, ‘The Languages of Medieval Britain’, in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c. 1350–c. 1500, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 143–58. 21 Thompson, Everyday Saints, 53; Robert Mills, ‘The Early South English Legendary and Difference: Race, Place, Language, and Belief ’, in Texts and Contexts, ed. Bell and Couch, 207–9. 22 Venuti, Scandals of Translation, 87. 23  Antoine Berman, ‘La traduction comme épreuve de l’étranger’, Texte 4 (1985): 67–81, translated as ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004), 276–89. Berman’s theory is cited in Venuti, Scandals of Translation, 81–2. 24 Venuti, Scandals of Translation, 12.

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text appear to be driven for the most part by a domesticating agenda. When language difference does come into view it tends to be exoticized (and potentially also eroticized), as revealed by the bewilderment and ‘wonder’ Becket’s mother provokes on the streets of London; or it is dematerialized, as the vague references to the heathen’s nameless ‘langage’ show. The modern scholar is in the privileged position of being able to deconstruct this process, but the Laud text itself hardly provides fertile ground for the promotion of Venuti’s recommended strategies. What, then, of the story’s subsequent dissemination? Do any of the other versions command the kinds of respect for linguistic and cultural difference that Venuti’s ethics of translation seeks to generate? I now briefly survey four moments in the afterlife of the legend. The first stage concerns later South English Legendary redactions, which continue to convey an explicit alignment with the evangelizing aims of hagiography; the second relates to visualizations of the conversion narrative in manuscript miniatures and stained glass; the third involves a group of popular ballads recorded in the late nineteenth century but probably the product of centuries of diffusion; the fourth encompasses a series of nineteenth-century prose accounts that pass the legend off as historical fact. Finally, in conclusion, I ask why the dissemination process appears to have abated somewhat (at least, if we discount modern scholarly ‘retellings’). What is it about the story that currently makes its domestication a less attractive option? As one might expect, the transfer of the Becket story from one South English Legendary collection to another produces a certain amount of variation. Most striking is the shift in identity attributed to the non-Christians whom Gilbert encounters on his travels. In the earliest English text, as we have seen, they are named somewhat imprecisely as ‘heathens’, but in manuscripts dated to a decade or two after Laud 108 they assume a more particularized identity: London, British Library, Harley 2277 (c. 1300) and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 145 (early fourteenth century) call them ‘Sarazins’.25 By the fifteenth century, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawl. poet 225, Saracens have mutated into Jews and Gilbert is imprisoned in the land of ‘Iewry’.26 These modifications may simply reflect a desire to keep the narrative fashionably up-to-date: whichever group is in vogue as the enemy of the moment (or of the individuals who commissioned the manuscript in question) becomes the target of the hagiographer’s condescending gaze. What has not altered is the basic moral structure. The culture of 25  For Corpus 145, see Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill, eds, The South English Legendary, Edited from Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 145 and British Museum MS Harley 2277, 3 vols, Early English Text Society original series 235, 236, 244 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956–9), 2:610–15. Subsequent references are to this edition by line number, provided in parentheses. For Harley 2277, see also William Henry Black, ed., The Life and Martyrdom of Thomas Beket, Archbishop of Canterbury (London: Percy Society, 1845), 1–126. 26  Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawl. poet 225 (formerly Bodleian 14716), in Brown, Development of the Legend, 262–8 (appendix A).

138 robert mills Gilbert’s captors, whoever they are, remains fuzzily indistinct; English-speaking ‘engelonde’, the Christian homeland, is the place to be. Other sites of slippage concern the relative importance of the motif of translation as a means of conveying this message. Even turning from the Laud text to the slightly later Corpus/Harley texts we encounter a shift in emphasis here. While the fact that Gilbert’s eastern admirer reaches London is still viewed as a ‘bitokne [token] of God … and noȝt of manne’ (102), the linguistic dimension to the miracle is radically underplayed. First, unlike the Laud version, the Saracen princess is assigned a single word of English – ‘Londone’ (74) – which enables her to find her way. This restores a motif found in the Latin First Quadrilogus text, which is also revived in all the other Middle English retellings; by the fifteenth century, the woman’s vocabulary has inflated threefold, to ‘gilbert gilbert beket beket ∙ and meri loundon’.27 No longer a traveller with ‘language non’, and thus wholly reliant on the mediating tool of God’s grace, the princess is attributed with a modicum of linguistic agency, albeit not in a language of her own. Significantly the words ascribed to the woman are – with the exception of the adjective ‘meri’ – proper nouns, which, as Derrida indicates in his analysis of the Babel myth, raise the issue of the untranslatable; making claims for the linguistic specificity or pure ‘Englishness’ of such words is surely questionable when viewed from such an angle.28 The language used by the princess to facilitate her journey to England thus serves to demonstrate how untranslatability continues to inflect her identity as a representative of ‘heathen’ alterity. In the Corpus/Harley text the downgrading of translation as a necessary step in the negotiation of cultural difference also continues during the interrogation of Becket’s mother by the bishops: the woman’s direct speech is recorded in English, without any reference to Gilbert’s role as her interpreter. And when Gilbert returns to the Holy Land, he leaves his wife in the capable hands of his man Richard, who, as she herself assures Gilbert, ‘knoweþ me wel & my langage’ (142) – but Richard acts as her ‘wardein’ (141) [guardian] rather than specifically as her interpreter. Gilbert expresses the fear, in leaving her behind, that she is ‘so ȝong & ne couþe ∙ of þe londes maner noȝt’ (124), a statement ascribing her with youth and cultural naivety but not expressly with linguistic ineptitude. This change of emphasis from one text to another suggests more than simply the inevitability of mouvance in acts of literary transfer; it further accentuates the translator’s invisibility. Not even God is required to play the role of verbal mediator any longer. He is still a source of miracle, of course, but the 27  Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawl. poet 225, in Brown, Development of the Legend, 264. William Caxton’s printing of the Legenda aurea in 1483 includes an abbreviated version of the Gilbert narrative, in which the only ‘englyssh’ words spoken by the woman are ‘beket, beket’. See Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea sanctorum, sive, Lombardica historia (London: William Caxton, 1483), 105r. 28  Jacques Derrida, ‘Des tours de Babel’, in Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 203–35. See further the chapters by Griffin and Gaunt in this volume.

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Figure 6.1. The emir’s daughter reaches London and is recognized by Gilbert’s servant Richard. Queen Mary Psalter (early fourteenth century). London, British Library, Royal 2.B.VII, fol. 288v.

translatio he facilitates is physical and religious rather than linguistic. Becket’s mother herself is assimilated further as a result. Her foreigner status, signalled bluntly in Laud by her incomprehensible babble, now just boils down to not knowing the ‘londes maner’. Having explored the textual dissemination of the legend in English, it is also instructive to consider artistic treatments of the narrative. Does the effacement of Becket’s mother’s difference have a visual counterpart? Complete illuminated cycles of Becket’s life and martyrdom rarely survive in manuscript form and in the extant examples the Gilbert legend is more infrequent still, but London, British Library, Royal 2.B.VII – a large, early fourteenthcentury volume better known as the Queen Mary Psalter – uniquely contains a sequence of twenty-two marginal images that illustrate both the story of the saint’s parentage and his subsequent career.29 The first relevant image, 29  The Queen Mary Psalter dates to the reign of Edward II and may have been commissioned by him personally, although the prominence given to women in the miniatures (including Becket’s mother) could indicate a female owner, possibly Edward’s queen Isabella of France. See Anne Rudloff Stanton, The Queen Mary Psalter: A Study of Affect and Audience (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 2001) and, for reproductions, see the facsimile Queen Mary’s Psalter: Miniatures and Drawings by an English Artist of the Fourteenth Century Reproduced from Royal MS. 2 B. VII in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1912) and the British Library Images Online service at www.imagesonline.bl.uk (accessed 11 January 2011). Another illustrated life of Becket, the ‘Becket Leaves’, predates the South English Legendary texts by several decades; surviving

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Figure 6.2. Baptism of the emir’s daughter by bishops. Queen Mary Psalter (early fourteenth century). London, British Library, Royal 2.B.VII, fol. 289r.

on folio 288v, shows the emir’s daughter reaching London and being recognized by Gilbert’s servant Richard (Figure 6.1). To the woman’s left is another servant, and to the right a seated group of five males appear to be gesturing in her direction, perhaps in mockery or confusion. The new arrival, if she is differentiated at all from the inhabitants of London, is marked out sartorially: her head is wrapped in a scarf.30 The woman’s eyes appear to be closed, as if to indicate her own confusion but also signalling, perhaps, a kind of preconversion moral blindness; Richard, taking her by the hand, appears to lead her forward. Our next view of the emir’s daughter is on the facing page, on folio 289r, which shows her baptism in a large font by four bishops (Figure 6.2); this is followed by miniatures representing her marriage to Gilbert (fol. 289v) and the infant Thomas being cradled by her side (fol. 290r). Our view of the woman in the baptism scene contrasts dramatically with the miniature depicting her arrival: gone is the head scarf, and she is now shown full frontal, eyes wide open, as if to indicate the moral transformation that has ensued. Not only in fragmentary form, it does not include the Gilbert story. See Janet Backhouse and Christopher de Hamel, The Becket Leaves (London: British Library, 1988). The classic study of Becket iconography is Tancred Borenius, St Thomas Becket in Art (London: Methuen, 1932). 30  A Saracen in a marginal scene earlier in the Psalter, at folio 149v, is also differentiated by his headdress, as well as by an exotic-looking sword and a flowing beard.

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Figure 6.3. Consecration of Thomas Becket by bishops. Queen Mary Psalter (early fourteenth century). London, British Library, Royal 2.B.VII, fol. 291r.

really ‘foreign’ in the first place (except, perhaps, in terms of certain aspects of her clothing), she now appears to be fully integrated into the Christian community. Significantly a further act of translation takes place in the image sequence, which reinforces this view. At folio 291r Thomas Becket himself is consecrated as archbishop (Figure 6.3), in a miniature clearly designed to echo the image showing his mother in the moment of her conversion: he assumes the same full-frontal pose and is again flanked by two bishops on either side. This serves to emphasize visually Becket’s own status as a convert, from worldliness (as King Henry’s chancellor) to his subsequent holiness (as prelate), a revolutionary turnaround that mirrors the transformation of his mother. The images in the Queen Mary Psalter do not – and arguably cannot – represent the linguistic dimensions to the emir’s daughter’s experience, but

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they do follow the texts in the South English Legendaries in emphasizing the translator’s invisibility: the woman’s assimilation is highlighted through a process of visual translatio. A series of thirteen early sixteenth-century stained glass windows in York, which miraculously survived the destruction of Becket-related imagery later in the century, incorporate several scenes telling the story of the saint’s parentage.31 Now divided between the north window of the parish church of St Michael le Belfrey, York, and a window in the Chapter House of York Minster, panels depict Gilbert embracing and kissing the emir’s daughter (Figure 6.4); the discovery by the jailer and the emir of Gilbert’s escape from prison; Gilbert’s arrival in England and subsequent homecoming; the princess’s arrival in England and reception at Gilbert’s house in London; the princess’s baptism by a prelate; and Gilbert and the princess’s wedding, consecrated by the same churchman. The sequence then continues with scenes portraying events from the life of Thomas Becket, including a panel showing the child Thomas being taught to read, accompanied by his mother. This is an episode also found in the main Laud life of the saint, which recounts how ‘His Moder him wolde al day rede’ (211), except that now, in the glass, the mother’s own agency as educator has been eclipsed by the male tutor shown helping the boy with his book. In each of these scenes the main identifying feature of the princess, even after baptism, is an elaborate coif with large, winged earpieces.32 As in the Queen Mary Psalter miniatures, the woman is differentiated sartorially, except that now her exotic costume remains even following conversion. The panel showing the young Thomas learning to read still identifies her via 31  I am grateful to Tom O’Donnell for drawing my attention to these windows and to Emma Campbell for supplying photographs. The provenance of the windows is unknown, but it is thought that they may have come from the parish church of St Wilfred, which was demolished following a merger with the parish of St Michael le Belfrey in 1547. See further Eric Milner-White, Sixteenth Century Glass in York Minster and in the Church of St Michael-Le-Belfrey, York (York: St Anthony’s Press, 1960), 7–15 and plates II–IX. In this particular study Milner-White fails to identify the subject matter of the panels correctly, even though one of the Minster panels includes a fragment of inscription bearing the word ‘Beckit’. See, though, Eric Milner-White, ‘Another Glass Discovery’, The Friends of York Minster, Thirty-Fifth Annual Report (1963): 14–16, which identifies them as corresponding to the Gilbert Becket narrative; Peter A. Newton, ‘Some New Material for the Study of the Iconography of St Thomas Becket’, in Thomas Becket: Actes du colloque international de Sédières 19–24 août 1973, ed. Raymonde Foreville (Paris: Beauchesne, 1975), 258 and plates X.3, XI.1–4. 32  The coif is identified in Milner-White, Sixteenth Century Glass, 12, as continental in style, ‘Rhenish or Low Country’.

Left: Figure 6.4. Gilbert Becket embraces the emir’s daughter. North window, St Michael le Belfrey, York (early sixteenth century).

144 robert mills the same, distinctive headgear, which continues to communicate her former identity as a heathen or Saracen princess. Compared with the images in the Psalter, there seems to be a greater need in the glass panels to convey a sense of her enduring alterity. Again, though, linguistic difference is not represented visually. Indeed this lack of emphasis on verbal interaction is dramatically heightened in the scene showing Gilbert embracing the emir’s daughter. The lovers stare into one another’s eyes and press their faces together as if they have no need for any mediating words; here, body language is the only mode of communication that matters. Turning to the first of the post-medieval retellings, a series of popular ballads that circulated in England and Scotland into at least the late nineteenth century, the progressive effacement of language difference as a narrative device continues. This is partly an effect of genre: the ballad form necessarily relies on a pared-down plot and image bank. The songs in question were collected together by the Victorian folklorist Francis James Child under the heading ‘Young Beichan’ and, while undated, they are probably the products of a centuries-old process of transmission. Although subject to variation in the specifics, the ballads generally recount the marriage of the English-born Beichan or ‘Bekie’ to one ‘Susie Pye’, a Moor’s daughter who he meets while imprisoned in the Holy Land. Susie helps Beichan escape from prison, but not before getting him to agree to marry her within seven years. Once the seven years are up, Susie goes in search of the object of her affections – and just in the nick of time, for Beichan is about to take another bride. (Some versions describe how she is woken from a deep sleep by a fairy called Billy Blin, who announces that Beichan’s wedding day has arrived.) Arriving in Beichan’s hometown by the grace of God, Susie confronts Beichan and reminds him of his promise; rejecting his other lover, he marries Susie, who in several versions is also baptized and henceforth takes the name of Lady Jean.33 While the second bride and additional characters such as Billy Blin are obviously supplementary, many features of the plot are nonetheless familiar from the Becket narrative (not least the hero’s ‘Bekie’ namesake). And again, following the shift towards effacing translation as a plot device in the later medieval texts, no version makes references to Susie Pye’s linguistic challenges on her travels.34 A domesticating ethos holds sway once again; cultural difference is even less visible than before. Finally, turning to some literary retellings by nineteenth-century romantic novelists and historians, other factors begin to shape the story. A number 33  ‘Young Beichan’ (no. 53) in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Francis James Child, 5 vols (1882; repr., New York: Pageant, 1957), 1:454–83. 34  Just one rendition, Child’s Version H, makes direct reference to language difference, announcing that the skipper of the ship in which Susie sails to London ‘could speak the Turkish tongue’, but the woman’s ability to communicate directly with Beichan is never questioned. See Child, ed., English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1:474.

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of nineteenth-century writers, including Charles Dickens, incorporate the story into histories or historical romances inspired by the reign of Henry II. Dickens himself, in A Child’s History of England (1852), remains fairly close to the Middle English accounts, though he does speculate further on the motives behind Gilbert Becket’s linguistic abilities. Supposing that Gilbert’s relationship with his lover was facilitated by the fact that ‘he must have learnt the Saracen tongue himself and made love in that language’, the novelist also elicits an affective response to the Saracen lady’s predicament: Gilbert catches sight of her outside his house in a ‘foreign dress, so forlorn’ and it is his emotional response to this reunion, rather than any talk of miracle, that inspires him to take her as his wife.35 Dickens, the master storyteller, could be forgiven for trying to pass off such embellishments as fact, but this is also a tendency in other Victorian historical appropriations. Elizabeth Stewart’s 1896 study A Legend of Canterbury, or, The People’s Martyr, true to its title, promotes a nationalizing view of the saint, which attributes conflicts within Becket’s character to his hybrid heritage: ‘The steady determination, the keen sagacity of the grim stern Anglo-Saxon race from whom his father sprung, was mingled in À Becket, with the fervid imagination, the impassioned impulses of his mother the beautiful Syrian.’36 Meanwhile Thomas Miller, several decades earlier, published a lengthy historical romance, Fair Rosamund (1839), which has Thomas declare to King Henry’s lover, Rosamund, ‘Thinkest thou that I, who have the hot eastern blood dashing through my veins, have never worshipped at the altar of thy sex?’37 To a lesser or greater extent all these nineteenth-century responses advance exoticized concepts of the foreign: for Dickens alien dress is significant as a means of generating pathos; Stewart is guided by orientalist assumptions about eastern character; Miller identifies Saracen character explicitly with physiology. Racialized perspectives such as Miller’s, which import a biological concept of race, do not seem to have strongly shaped the Middle English texts or the illustrations in medieval manuscripts and stained glass, but they may well have exerted an influence on the subsequent reception of the legend. Today Thomas Becket remains, in some circles at least, a thoroughly nationalized figure. This perpetuates the anglicization of the legend initiated seven centuries earlier, but without acknowledging the saint’s status as the product of what might be called – at least from the perspective of some nineteenth-century novelists – a ‘mixed race’ marriage. In 2001 that bastion of the right-wing British press, the Daily Mail, went so far as to enlist the saint among one hundred of 35  Charles Dickens, A Child’s History of England, 3 vols (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1852), 1:139–40. 36  Elizabeth M. Stewart, A Legend of Canterbury, or, the People’s Martyr (New York: Kenedy, 1896), 15–16. 37  Thomas Miller, Fair Rosamund, or The Days of King Henry II: An Historical Romance, 3 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), 2:268.

146 robert mills the nation’s ‘Great Britons’, because he epitomized the ‘existence of a national conscience that had been shaped by Christianity’.38 Though the Daily Mail would surely approve of the early South English Legendary’s efforts to translate this legend of the ‘pris-martyr of engelonde’ into English, the newspaper’s editorial team would perhaps be surprised by the Saracen mother tradition. One possible reason why, in recent decades, the dissemination of the tale of Becket’s parents appears to have gone into decline – at least if we regard the translating activities of scholars as a separate phenomenon – is because the narrative no longer serves the ideological agendas in which it has tended to be implicated since the Middle Ages: a vision of Christian sameness in which the ‘foreignness’ of the cultural other represents a very hazy kind of alterity. A politics of multiculturalism, discourses of ‘cultural diversity’ and resistance to the notion of mono-ethnic or monolingual nation-building may well have contributed to a tacit recognition that beneath those fantasies of Christian unity and sameness exists another message too – of linguistic multiplicity, cultural hybridity, generic overlap and textual transformation. The Daily Mail has no interest in such a message, clearly, and chooses to ignore it, but an overview of the many translations that the tale inspires highlights all the movement beneath that seemingly stable moral surface. Whether dissemination serves the interests of corporate capital or an evangelizing religious programme, it is a process that is neither totalizing nor ideologically sealed; a focus on the translator’s labour, whether as a motif within the text or as a condition of the text, occasions revelations that question as well as reinforce the authority of dominant values and institutions. Venuti has claimed that ‘the authority of any institution that relies on translations is susceptible to scandal because their somewhat unpredictable effects exceed the institutional controls that normally regulate textual interpretation’.39 Perhaps the greatest scandal of Becket’s mother is that a more respectful communion with difference has eluded translators of her story for so long.

38  Lawrence James, ‘100 Great Britons’, Daily Mail (29 December 2001). It should be pointed out, however, that a poll conducted by BBC News Magazines in 2006 places Becket second in a list of ‘worst Britons’, so efforts to nationalize the saint are hardly universal. See Sean Coughlan, ‘Saint or Sinner?’ BBC News Magazine (31 January 2006), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4663032.stm (accessed 25 August 2008). 39 Venuti, Scandals of Translation, 68.

7 Medieval Fixers Politics of Interpreting in Western Historiography

Zrinka Stahuljak The focus of this chapter is the fixer, who plays a pivotal role in a number of Western medieval historiographies. A term I borrow from translation studies, ‘fixer’ has gained new currency since the beginning of the war conflict in Iraq (2003). In translation studies, ‘fixers’ are identified as performing a range of duties in addition to interpretation and/or translation, acting as local informants, guides, negotiators and more. While there is no easy synonym for this term of journalistic provenance, we can think of fixers as mediators, go-betweens endowed with multiple linguistic, social, cultural, topographic, etc., skills. Until Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility and simultaneous explorations of legal, medical and military interpreting in the 1990s, interpreters were almost by definition stripped of their agency.1 Since then, researchers have not only acknowledged their agency in the translation process, but have also identified a host of conflictual issues which interpreters in war face and in relation to which they must negotiate their positions. Among the most important is the question of trust and credibility, but other issues also come up, such as ethics (the ethical conflict for an interpreter that arises when a code of professional ethics is contradicted by the political, military and social conditions on the ground and when the fixer is caught between two power differentials), and activism in the context of volunteer interpreting and translation.2 Interpreter activism and agency merely render 1  Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2008). The first edition appeared in 1995. See also Ruth Morris, ‘The Moral Dilemmas of Court Interpreting’, The Translator 1, no. 1 (1995): 25–46; Robert F. Barsky, ‘The Interpreter as Intercultural Agent in Convention Refugee Hearings’, The Translator 1, no. 2 (1996): 45–64. 2  Mona Baker, ‘Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Commu-

148 zrinka stahuljak visible what is inherent in translation, that is, that interpreters do not occupy neutral, in-between positions, that they do not reside outside cultural and ideological systems, but are their integral components. This expanded notion of translation reflects more accurately the roles interpreters play in situations of conflict; it is a source of new paradigms of communication and interaction, and of a new, deeper understanding of translation in its social, political and ethical aspects. Translation and interpreting are thus acknowledged as central to an effective communication – local and global – of a conflict. The conduct of war, its success and legitimation, as well as that of peace-making efforts, largely depend on and are conducted in translation; translation and interpreting are part of the institution of war (war in its physical and also symbolic meaning of permanent conflict and tension). Translation in the Middle Ages was a crossroads of multilingual and multicultural contacts and encounters; in fact, it was understood in much broader terms than our modern linguistic translation.3 The medieval Latin term translatio stands for transfers of power (translatio imperii), knowledge (translatio studii), physical objects (such as relics in translatio reliquiarum) and linguistic translation. Medieval translation was thus a nexus of a will to knowledge and technologies of power; translatio theorized the origin and the effect of their transmission, but not its medium, that is, human agency. Put differently, even when medieval translatio refers specifically to linguistic translation, it does not highlight or theorize issues of linguistic difference and identity and it rarely gives us the privilege of seeing the human being behind translation. Our modern studies of medieval translation have thus focused on the material evidence of translation of texts and on textual transmission across time and space, most often by anonymous translators; occasional, rich

nity’, Massachusetts Review 47, no. 3 (2006): 462–84; Esperanza Bielsa and Christopher W. Hughes, eds, Globalization, Political Violence and Translation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Sue-Ann Harding and Moira Inghilleri, eds, Translation and Violent Conflict, special issue of The Translator 16, no. 2 (2010); Moira Inghilleri, ‘The Ethical Task of the Translator in the Geo-political Arena: From Iraq to Guantánamo Bay’, Translation Studies 1, no. 2 (2008): 212–23; Zrinka Stahuljak, ‘War, Translation, Transnationalism. Interpreters in and of the War (Croatia, 1991–1992)’, in Critical Readings in Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker (London; New York: Routledge, 2010), 391–414. See Baker, ‘Translation and Activism’, on how activism should not be understood here as necessarily involving a conscious distortion and manipulation of source materials. 3  For a reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’ and a comparative reading of multilingualism in the Middle Ages and contemporary discourses on multiculturalism, see Zrinka Stahuljak, ‘An Epistemology of Tension: Translation and Multiculturalism’, The Translator 10, no. 1 (2004): 33–57. On the impossibility of translation, see also Zrinka Stahuljak, ‘Translations of Genealogy (Translatio Imperii et Studii)’, chap. 5 in her Bloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages: Translatio, Kinship, and Metaphor (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 142–89.



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evidence made it possible to produce biographical studies of translators or to trace a textual or scientific genealogy of texts in translation. I contend that the fixer can help us comprehend more fully mechanisms of translation and technologies of transmission in the Middle Ages. Instead of problematizing the translator’s invisibility, as Robert Mills does in this volume, I wish, in what follows, to bring to light the human agency involved in medieval translation and interpretation. Medieval interpreters are not invisible, but they are configured differently from modern translators. Just as translatio exceeds our contemporary definition of translation, so we need to cast a wider net around medieval translators and interpreters and think in terms of ‘fixers’. For instance, there is no mention of interpreting in Marco Polo’s Le devisement du monde, although translation makes possible Polo’s travels and their narrative.4 Marco Polo is at the centre of the text, he translates for his francophone audience stories about Asia and, at Kubilai Khan’s court, he translates stories about the West. In both cases, he is a fixer who speaks directly into the ‘translated’ language. Since a fixer does not need an interpreter because he himself is one, we are led astray if we look for evidence of interpreters, rather than of fixers, in Polo’s text. Casting a wider net also requires us to reposition our attention away from textual genealogies and their agents to (war) conflicts. Conflict zones are contact zones, flashpoints of intense human interaction, transmission and exchange.5 In a conflict, to be functional, the fixer is plugged into at least two enemy cultures and languages. By virtue of this (inter)connectivity, the fixer is a network of exchange: a relay, interface, information depository and information watershed. It is the specificity of a fixer that he is intimate with two or more environments and his efficacy – as well as his life and death – depend in large part on his degree of intimacy with each. The fixer functions in a permanently changing context of conflict, which demands both flexibility and acumen. However, the higher the (perceived) intimacy and familiarity and the higher the exigencies of flexibility and adaptation, the more pressing the question of the fixer’s fidelity becomes. In medieval texts the fixer is the site of deliberation over questions of fidelity: what is the essence of fidelity, what degree of flexibility can loyalty withstand, how is (in)fidelity signified in language and in acts? Interpreting in situations of conflict calls for an approach to human exchange (and not textual transmission) that focuses on networks of interconnectivity and intersubjectivity (rather than subjectivity) and trans-mobility (the cross-linguistic, cross-confessional, cross-cultural), without taking the subject position as the focus of analysis (not a biography). What is at issue is not accuracy of information or fidelity to an intended meaning, but loyalty of the fixer in the 4  I thank Simon Gaunt for inspiring me to think in this direction. 5  Jocelyne Dakhlia’s recent work on the hybrid lingua franca, of which there are few written records, demonstrates that a history of oral encounters is possible. See her Lingua franca. Histoire d’une langue métisse en Méditerrannée (Arles: Actes Sud, 2008).

150 zrinka stahuljak deployment and flow of information and meaning. As Marilynn Desmond’s essay in this volume shows, even in the Middle Ages translators could be judged through the lens of ethnicity; they thus found strategies to combat the identification of their fidelity with their geo-linguistic or ethno-linguistic origins. Ultimately, the fixer’s fidelity raises the issue of ethics itself, in that an ethics of translation that would conform or correspond to our modern ethical standards of professionalism is simply not conceivable; in the case of fixers, an ethics of translation may be defined more by the contingencies of survival than by a set of theoretical precepts. I begin with Pierre Dubois’s early fourteenth-century theoretical treatise De recuperatione terre sancte [The Recovery of the Holy Land] in order to demonstrate the centrality of language and interpreting to medieval legal theory and governmental (royal) policy in matters of military action and conquest. I further elaborate on the challenges that the transformation of military conquest into a durable and stable colonization and cultural assimilation raises with the analysis of two late fourteenth-century historical descriptions of sieges: the siege of Mahdia in Jean Froissart’s prose Chroniques, and the siege of Alexandria in Guillaume de Machaut’s verse history, La prise d’Alixandre.6 Jean Froissart’s account shows that cultural negotiation is necessary in the colonization process, otherwise the conquest is compromised. My analysis of Machaut’s account focuses more narrowly on the kinds of accusations that a fixer may face precisely because of the necessity of cultural negotiation.

Theorizing Fixers: Pierre Dubois Pierre Dubois (c. 1250/55–1320?), a French civil lawyer and advocate for royal ecclesiastical cases in the bailiwick of Coutances, wrote his theoretical treatise De recuperatione terre sancte between June 1305 and July 1307,7 some fifteen years after the loss of Acre and just a few years after the definitive loss of the last Christian outpost in the Levant, the island of Ruad (Arwad), in 1302.8 The 6  The use of the term ‘fixer’ can be extended to a number of situations, wherever there is mediation. For instance, a fixer can be a squire in the court, a jongleur, a troubadour. However, I define fixers as agents in situations of conflict who pass between languages. While the term ‘fixer’ can be transposed to situations of conflict without linguistic difference, conflictual situations in an environment of linguistic sameness demand a different kind of analytics. 7  References are to Pierre Dubois, The Recovery of the Holy Land, trans. Walter I. Brandt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), provided in parentheses. 8  Walther I. Brandt, ‘Introduction’, in Dubois, Recovery, trans. Brandt, 7; Angelo Diotti, ‘Premessa’, in Pierre Dubois, De recuperatione terre sancte, ed. Angelo Diotti (Florence: Leo Olschki, 1977), 19.



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treatise is a theoretical account of the practical considerations in mounting a crusade and, among almost thirty treatises written between 1291 and 1336, the year Benedict XII cancelled the crusade by Philip VI of France,9 it is unique in its focus on the maintenance rather than the recovery of the Holy Land. Recovery alone is not enough, since when crusader armies ‘return home, those same Saracens, fiercer than ever and in greater numbers, will return at once on the departure of (the) troops’ (§2). A stable and durable ‘maintenance’, that is, permanent occupation and systematic colonization, has to be the ultimate objective: people are called upon to inhabit and populate the land (‘terram populandam et inhabitandam’, §18). Dubois nonetheless wonders how to achieve that ‘a sufficient number of people may be induced to journey thither and remain there’ (§2) as ‘inhabitants’ (‘habitatores’, §57). ‘Universal peace and harmony’ (§70; also throughout ‘pax universalis’) among all Christian nations who obey the Roman pope and that will subsequently form ‘a single commonwealth’ of Catholics (‘una respublica’, §2; ‘respublica catholicorum’, §27), and a single army (§16), are the precondition to the successful recovery and maintenance (§9). The rapprochement with eastern Christians will complete the reform of the universal church (§3; §§29–57). In many ways, in this text the conquest of the Holy Land is a foil for a reform of the West. But lest we think this a utopian project of universal spiritual rule, Dubois reveals that the purpose of colonization is to provide ‘valuable commodities, abundant in those regions but rare and highly prized among us … in adequate amounts at a reasonable price, once the world were made Catholic’ (§63). Quite a pragmatist, Dubois would like to ‘regulate the purchase price and transportation charges’, resulting in ‘moderate prices’ (§67). Furthermore, ‘the economic advantages resulting from the proposed foundation will be of great benefit to the communities of those [eastern] lands. They will export their products and thereby profit much more than if those goods were faithfully devoted to the poor which would rarely if ever happen’ (§67). This is then a commercial civilizing mission, not for the purposes of the development of the colonized lands, but with the goal of exploitation. This commercial civilizing mission aims to achieve efficiency in the economic model, without concern for the human element. Thus, a Catholic monopoly will essentially amount to a punitive measure for non-Catholics, Arabs and eastern Christians, who will not be able to prosper materially, ‘unless they share with the Catholics the commerce in their products’ (§105). The only means to economic and spiritual dominion is language acquisition. Unification is ‘a vain hope, unless the Roman Church had many men well lettered in their idiom. The Holy Land and its rulers could not get the full benefit of their aid and cooperation unless they also had many persons well lettered in their idiom’ (§59). The head of the (future) kingdom of 9  Antony Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land: The Crusade Proposals of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).

152 zrinka stahuljak Jerusalem should ‘have many skilled and trustworthy secretaries acquainted with the language and writings of the Arabs and other idioms of the world’ (‘secretarios multos fideles’, ‘peritos’, §59; translation modified). They should be ‘wise and faithful interpreters’ (‘interpretes prudentes, fideles’), but as of now ‘there are no (such) interpreters prepared for this task, nor can they be found for all the money in the world unless provided far in advance’ (§59). How then to provide for such a long-term need that cannot be remedied with an instant solution, but only with a long-term investment that may not even yield results ‘during the lifetime of him who begins the execution of this plan’ (§59)? The technology that Dubois proposes is the systematic education of an equal number of children of both sexes, first, ‘children of noble birth …; afterwards, other children … accepted with the proviso that they shall never be returned to their parents unless they refund all expenses’ (§61; also §71). Along with logic, they will be taught three languages: first Latin, then either Greek or Arabic (‘in lingua latina … in lingua greca, alii in arabica’, §61).10 More brilliant students will be trained in three ‘lettered languages’ (‘in linguis … litteratis’, §83); the rest will train to serve as ‘speech interpreters’ (‘interpretes sermonum’, §83) of ‘the lettered idioms and vernacular tongues’ (‘ydiomata tam litterata quam materna’, §84).11 The male children ‘trained to speak and write the languages of all peoples’ (§61) will establish communication between the universal church and the rest of the world. In addition to linguistic skills, colonization will require theoretical and practical knowledge (§81).12 This indoctrination by training will start ‘at the age of four or five’ (§60) and will create disciplined, learned and, above all, loyal subjects by the age of thirty (§76). The Templars’ and Hospitallers’ priories will be converted into educational facilities (§60). The merger of the two orders into one and the confiscation of their property will finance the entire project of education (§60) and the transportation overseas of supplies and human resources (§15).13 What such training will create, according to Dubois, are fixers par excellence. The ‘interpretes’ will be fixers because their agency will exceed by far their 10  Dubois echoes Ramon Llull’s De Fine (1305), which advocates the acquisition of Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Tatar. See Norman Housley, Documents on the Later Crusades, 1274–1580 (London: Macmillan, 1996), 35–40. 11  Of the different ‘ydiomata litterata’, ‘gallicum’ is the preferred one (§83). 12  Boys will be educated in grammar, logic and the articles of faith (§61), medicine and surgery (human and veterinary, §61), civil and canon law, astronomy, mathematical and natural sciences, theology (§62), military art and handicrafts (§84). Girls will be educated in Latin grammar, logic, one foreign language, surgery and medicine (§85). 13  This was not a novel idea. See ‘Enquête pontificale sur l’opportunité de la fusion des deux ordres des Templiers et des Hospitaliers. Réponse de Jacques de Molay (1306–1307)’, in Le dossier de l’affaire des Templiers, ed. Georges Lizerand (1923; repr., Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007), 2–15.



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linguistic skills: ‘Such interpreters must know how to respond so reasonably to the objections of the barbarians that they destroy their erroneous opinions; they must be able to convince them with incontrovertible arguments and draw them to the truth of the Christian faith’ (§59). Highly skilled in every branch of knowledge, ‘They would outdo the experts of that country in disputing, advising, discussing and in every other way, so that there would be no one who could withstand the wisdom of the Roman Church’ (§62). Men by their dedicated service to eastern Christians and women ‘of noble birth and others of exceptional skill who are attractive in face and figure … married off to the greater princes, clergy and other wealthy easterners’ (§61) and ‘Saracen chiefs’ (§69) will ultimately ‘draw them to the Catholic faith and into unity with its head’ (§61). Women’s knowledge of medicine and surgery will impress and influence their husbands, children and especially other women ‘to adhere to the Roman faith’ (§61). Language learning is thus essential to successful domination, temporal or spiritual: ‘I cannot see how this can come to pass unless provision is made for learning languages’ (§63). Dubois’s maintenance of the Holy Land would be predicated on subjects fully domesticated and loyal, linguistically, sexually and epistemologically. A perfect mastery of language and Western knowledge is crucial, Dubois argues, but the question of loyalty is primary. Linguistic skills must be attached to a loyal subject. This text was written on the eve of the arrest (1307) and the trial (1310–11) of the Templars in the French kingdom of Philip IV.14 Among contemporaries, the Templars were considered as the example of the dangers for the colonizer who soon starts to look like the colonized; since the First Crusade, it had been known that religious, linguistic and cultural barriers quickly become permeable.15 This sheds new light on the disciplinary and security measures implemented through linguistic and liberal arts training that Dubois proposes in order to control the overseas settlements. Because the colonizer assimilates, fresh contingents of colonizers must be deployed from the centre and perpetually renewed from there; schools and education will be only ‘on this side of the Mediterranean’ (§14) and preferably in Paris: ‘In this way, all the kings of Egypt, Acre, and the emperors of Constantinople … would be conceived, born, nourished and educated in France’.16 14  Part II of De recuperatione terre sancte was dedicated to Philip IV. Part I was dedicated to Edward I of England. Soon after completing De recuperatione terre sancte, Dubois launched a series of pamphlets against the Templars. See Lizerand, Le dossier, 84–101; Brandt, ‘Introduction’, 33 and 82 n. 34. 15  Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem: 1095–1127, ed. Harold S. Fink, trans. Frances Rita Ryan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), 271; Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978; repr. 2004); Lizerand, Le dossier, 122–3, 197. 16  A short memoir in Dubois’s style was added shortly after the original treatise. A rubric, added still later, in a fifteenth-century hand, summarizes it as ‘The Opinion of

154 zrinka stahuljak Such a deployment of strategies of disciplinary control of population corresponds exactly to the rule over the modern colonies from the mainland centre, analysed by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities.17 The administrative functionaries could be dispatched from the mainland to the colony, but not vice versa; in Anderson’s example of Spain’s colonies, ‘the accident of birth in the Americas consigned [the functionary] to subordination’. And with time ‘with their ever-growing numbers and increasing local rootedness with each succeeding generation’, they became a growing menace.18 Uniform education from the mainland centre will counter assimilation and institutionalize the society of the Holy Land, a society that will be mixed ‘by peoples from many lands’ but who will be trained in France and thus coerced to abandon the peculiar customs and mode of life of any of the peoples newly migrating thither, and substitute a mode of procedure beyond all others easy, less cumbersome, less wasteful and shorter, and which the inhabitants of the Holy Land … would find easier above all others to comprehend, to remember and to be trained in. (§90)

And when these projects have been accomplished, monopoly will have been created: ‘Catholics of the same mind will be in possession of the whole Mediterranean coast, from the west all the way to the east on the north side, and the greater part touching the Land of Promise on the south’ (§105). Dubois’s long-term solutions shed a clear light on the practical problems of logistics and linguistics encountered by his contemporaries. The lack of linguistic education could only create long-term problems of logistics when it came to maintaining the recovered lands, if all the military and logistical support were to come from afar and there were to be no supply network on the ground. Logistics can be catered to only by preparing ‘far in advance’ linguistically: it will be difficult to dwell in a land whose lettered language and all of whose spoken dialects are unfamiliar to all Frenchmen. It will also be difficult to seek

one urging the king of France to acquire the kingdom of Jerusalem and Cyprus for the second of his sons, and on the invasion of the kingdom of Egypt’. See Dubois, Recovery, trans. Brandt, 199. 17  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised edn (New York: Verso, 1991), esp. 53–9. See also Joshua Prawer, ‘The Roots of Medieval Colonialism’, in The Meeting of Two Worlds: Cultural Exchange between East and West during the Period of the Crusades, ed. Vladimir P. Goss (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1986), 23–38; Joshua Prawer, ‘The Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem: The First European Colonial Society? A Symposium’, in The Horns of Hattin, ed. B. Z. Kedar (London: Variorum; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1992), 340–67. 18 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 58.



medieval fixers 155 the friendship and alliance of the natives, who naturally are accustomed to hate the Latins, and to rule them if they are subjugated, and to mingle with them. (§117)

It is notable how in the space of one sentence the desire for an alliance with the natives is transformed into rule over them and their subjugation. Any linguistic proximity, ‘friendship and alliance’, is also a threat of cultural assimilation. The engagement with the natives is commendable only until it eliminates its own necessity for engagement by subjugating them. Therefore, a safe distance must be maintained by importing the colonizers from the mainland centre, preventing their assimilation by early indoctrination, and simultaneously coercing the natives to adopt the Western lifestyle and epistemology.

Logistics and Linguistics: The Siege of Mahdia ( Jean Froissart) Jean Froissart’s Chroniques illustrate the necessity of co-ordination of logistics and linguistics in any occupation and colonization.19 In July 1390, the French and Genoese forces began the siege of the city of Mahdia that was to last almost ten weeks. Mahdia in today’s Tunisia was a haven for corsairs disrupting Genoese trade in the Mediterranean (213) and also ‘la clef de tout l’empire de Barbarie et des royaulmes qui s’ensuieuvent: premièrement du royaulme d’Affrique, du royaulme de Thunes, du royaulme de Maroch et du royaulme de Bougie’ (213) [the door to the empire of Barbary and all the kingdoms beyond it: the kingdom of Africa, the kingdom of Tunis, the kingdom of Morocco and the kingdom of Bougia], and the door to the reconquest of Jerusalem (213).20 During the siege, an interpreter, or ‘drug(e)man’, intervenes on three separate occasions, each time from the Arab side. Once, the language of engagement is not specified, though the interpreter presumably speaks to a Frenchman, squire Affrenal (242–4). On two other occasions, it is said that the interpreter (or interpreters) ‘moult bien et bel le langaige jennevois parler sçavoit’ (232) [knew how to speak a good and fluent Genoese language].21 During the first contact between the attackers and the besieged, the interpreter for the Arabs speaks Genoese (275–7) and a Genoese captain translates to the French military 19  References are to Jean Froissart, Chroniques, in Œuvres de Froissart, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 25 vols (Brussels: Academie Royale de Belgique, 1867–77), 14:151–9, 211–53, 269–80, provided in parentheses. All translations are my own. 20  See Ramon Llull’s proposal for the conquest of Jerusalem through north Africa in De acquisitione terrae sanctae (1309), discussed in Housley, Documents, 47–9. 21  The number of interpreters is uncertain. See Henry Lublinski-Bodenham, ‘The Interpreter or Interpreters in Froissart’s Account of the Siege of Mahdia (1390)’, Romanische Forschungen 90, nos 2–3 (1978): 254–9.

156 zrinka stahuljak leaders: ‘Le Jennevois … Anthoine Marc … les paroles que les seigneurs (le duc de Bourbon et le seigneur de Couchy) ne sçavoient entendre, … leur exposoit et refourmoit en bon françois, car bien l’entendoit’ (232–3) [Anthony Mark, who was Genoese but knew French well, explained and retranslated into good French the words that the lords, the duke of Bourbon and the lord of Coucy, could not understand]. If the Arabs have the capacity to translate from and to Genoese, it is because of the proximity that their mutual war has created: ‘nous et les Jennevois nous sommes guerroiés et hustinés … et les Jennevois nous sont voisins’ (232) [we and the Genoese have been at war and in conflict … and the Genoese are our neighbours]. But because the French host is, as the Arabs tell them, ‘de moult loingtaines nations’ (232) [from faraway nations], the French do not even have the capacity to translate from Genoese to French, let alone from Arabic to French, or vice versa. Geographic distance or proximity regulates translation needs and the military stance. In this logic of proximity and distance, the French are not there to debate with the enemy. Indeed, when an opportunity for engagement presents itself, the French immediately circumscribe the agency of the interpreter. The Arabs send their interpreter to propose a judicial combat between two parties of ten, which the Arab interpreter justifies theologically. But before he can engage in any disputation, a French knight stops him: ‘Ha! a! drugman … ne parles plus avant de ceste matière; car à toy n’en appartient point de parler, ne à disputer nostre loy’ (244) [Hey ho, dragoman … do not speak a word more of this matter for it is not up to you to speak or dispute our law]. Because of their distance from the Arabs, the French refuse the debate and the verbal engagement that could compromise their offensive, and they resort instead to military engagement. Despite this sharp reminder, which limits the actual agency of the Arab interpreter and highlights the French refusal of cultural negotiation, the French lack of linguistic skills serves only to underline the agency of the fixer in the contact zone that is in fact essential to a successful conclusion of such an enterprise. The French are unable to supply themselves on the ground, for they lack familiarity with the terrain and do not have horses: ‘nos ennemis … sont sur leur terre et … congnoissent le pays’ (271) [our enemies are on their land and know the country]. But the French do not know the lie of the land, and so the host can last only eight days before supplies have to be renewed from Naples, Sicily (226) and Crete (227). The colonizers should, but cannot, attain the level of physical fitness and adaptation to the country’s climate (‘ayr de ce pays’, 220), and they should block the enemy from being on their land (‘sur leur pays’, 228) and make it their own country (‘nostre pays’, 220).22 But concerns about supply lines and climate conditions influence 22  See Philippe de Mézières, Le songe du vieil pelerin, ed. G. W. Coopland, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 2:§284: ‘il se fault habiliter es Francois de mectre de l’eauue en leur vin’.



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the decision to withdraw: ‘L’iver approche. Nous serons en grant dangier de vivres et de pourvéances’ (273) [Winter is approaching and we will be threatened by a lack of supplies and provisions]. Perhaps because Pierre Dubois’s linguistic project was never implemented, these ‘crusaders’ suffered serious setbacks and the short-sightedness of the Franco-Genoese expedition led to the loss of dominion in the Mediterranean: ‘les royaulmes sarrazins … furent seigneurs des mers, sique toutes marchandises qui venoient de Damas, du Quaire, d’Alexandrie, de Venise, de Naples et de Jennes furent ung temps tellement renchiéries en Flandres … et espécialement toute espicerie’ (278) [the Saracen kingdoms … became lords of the sea, so that all merchandise, and especially all manner of spices, coming from Damascus, Cairo, Alexandria, Venice, Naples and Genoa rose greatly in price in Flanders]. Contrary to a strategy of systematic colonization, the strategy of incursions and sieges, of confrontation without linguistic and cultural negotiation, was counterproductive to the moderate prices and a regulated market imagined by Dubois.

Logistics and Fidelity: The Raid of Alexandria (Guillaume de Machaut) Guillaume de Machaut composed his verse history La prise d’Alixandre [The Taking of Alexandria] sometime between 1369 and 1377.23 Peter I, King of Cyprus and Jerusalem, was supposed to lead a preliminary expedition that was to be followed by a large-scale crusade. Machaut presents Peter’s expedition as an effort to reconquer Jerusalem, ‘ton heritage’ (308) [your heritage], by means of a passagium to Egypt. Alexandria would have been the foothold to the recovery of the Holy Land (3491–3). On 9 October 1365, the host – Peter with his own Cypriot fleet, the knights of St John of Rhodes and an international band of mercenaries, altogether about ten thousand troops – reached Alexandria, which it entered on 10 October, at which point it engaged in rape, murder and pillage. Since the city gates were burnt or destroyed and the host unable to bring down a key bridge linking Alexandria to Cairo (whence the Muslim reinforcements were going to arrive), the crusaders began an immediate withdrawal despite Peter’s resistance. The army set sail from Alexandria back to Cyprus on 16 October. Although Machaut makes Peter a God-anointed defender of Christianity, an Eastern hero of a Western crusade, the subterranean hero who directs the actual raid is Perceval of Coulonges, the king’s chamberlain and captain. 23  References are to Guillaume de Machaut, La prise d’Alixandre, trans. and ed. R. Barton Palmer (New York: Routledge, 2002), provided in parentheses by line number; translations modified. For a more complete reading of fixers in the Prise, see Zrinka Stahuljak, ‘History’s Fixers: Informants, Mediators, and Writers in the Prise d’Alixandre’, in A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Master, ed. Deborah McGrady and Jennifer Bain (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 277–92.

158 zrinka stahuljak Machaut stages a scene in which Perceval plays a decisive role in what is presented as a last-minute decision, on the eve of the departure, of the target of the attack: se te prie que tu me vueilles consillier ou nous porrons mieux esploitier car tous desesperez seroie sen vain la haute mer passoie et tous li mondes le saroit si que chascuns se moqueroit de mon armee et de mon fait que jay a si grant peinne fait. (1978–86) [So I ask you to please counsel me about where we could best succeed, for I would be completely ashamed to cross the high seas in vain and everyone would know this and mock my army and my exploit that I have assembled with such great pain.]

Both the target of the military expedition and the attack plan are based on Perceval’s local knowledge: maintes fois as estet au quaire en alixandre et en surie et en egypte … Sire jay este vraiement en alixandre longuement prisonniers. Mais je mesbatoie par mi la ville ou je voloie si vous diray la verite dou pais et de la cite. (1976–8, 1997–2002) [you have been many times in Cairo, in Alexandria, in Syria and Egypt … Sire, it is true that I was a prisoner for a long time in Alexandria. But I was able to disport myself through the city as I wished. I will give you an accurate account of the city and the customs.]

Although the inhabitants number 100,000 (2013), they are weak and cowardly warriors (2015–19). Close to the city, says Perceval, there is an old port, through which ‘the city of Alexandria will be laid waste’. Perceval bases his advice not only on the topographical knowledge of the terrain ‘de la cite’, but also on the cultural knowledge ‘dou pais’ that he acquired during his imprisonment:



medieval fixers 159 ce sont gens qui vivent par sort … il tiennent veritablement tous et toutes communement que cest droite neccessite que par ce viez port la cite dalixandre sera gastee destruite prise arse et brulee et desconfite. (2025, 2031–7) [These are people who live according to divination … The people, men and women altogether, think truly that true necessity dictates the city of Alexandria will be laid waste through the Old Port, destroyed, captured, burned, set afire and undone.]

The people of Alexandria know that the city is vulnerable to an attack by way of the Old Port; yet they are superstitious enough that they do nothing to fortify the city. Moreover, they know that the city will fall on a Friday, ‘ciert en jour de venredi’ (2038) [this shall be on a Friday]; this tells us that Perceval is familiar with the Friday prayer and that he has knowledge of the role of fate in Islam. Not only does the king follow Perceval’s advice and targets Alexandria, but Perceval devises the attack plan (the landing in the Old Port that must take place on a Friday). After the first failed attack on the city, the king orders that Perceval lead the army (2797–8). Perceval proposes to attack the Customs Gate (‘porte de laudouanne’, 2781), ‘une porte qui est mendre des autres’ (2772–3) [a gate that is smaller than the others] and ‘ne me samble pas si forte’ (2788) [does not seem to me so strong]; subsequently, the crusaders enter Alexandria. Perceval is clearly identified in the Prise as belonging to ‘les nostres’ (4807) [ours], ‘chevaliers de France’ (2421) [French knights], and is thus opposed to the foreigners, ‘estrangier’. France was the ancient homeland of the Lusignan family. In other words, to the notion of birth origin we must add the notion of familiarity with the locale, as both are indispensable to having access to the king. The intimacy of Perceval with Peter, which allows him to influence privately the king’s decisions, is replicated in his familiarity with the city of Alexandria and Islamic tenets; in fact, his intimacy with both is the base for his intimate counsel to the king. The familiarity with the locale – its topography and culture – and familiarity with the sovereign are intertwined in the figure of Perceval the fixer. The fixer is not the one who knows both the inside and the outside; rather, the fixer is inside on both sides. This, of course, is cause for ambivalence about where – if anywhere – the fixer really belongs. By having Perceval counsel the king twice, first in private (1972–3) and then in public (2769), Machaut also points to a larger problem of the privy counsel of kings. The final destination is not announced to the crusade participants immediately; Peter justifies it with the need to mislead the enemy,

160 zrinka stahuljak nous ferons samblance de traire en chipre – qui est le contraire par quoy des anemis sceue ne puist estre vostre venue. (2077–80; also 2092–5) [We will make it look as if Cyprus, which lies in the opposite direction, is our destination. In this way our enemies cannot be informed of (our) coming.]

Only several days later, on the high seas, Peter declares that Alexandria is the final destination. Taken hostage by the situation, the nobles immediately point to the problem of counsel: ‘nostres roy pour neant labeure et si nest pas bien consilliez’ (2130–1) [Our king labours for nothing and he has not been well advised]. Nevertheless they take up the adventure (2135) and promise to serve him unswervingly, alive or dead (2177–80). But already after the first failed attack on Alexandria, we read of the first brief opposition of the nobles (2650–742), before they go on to take the city in the second attempt led by Perceval. Since the city is not fortified – the gates have been burnt or destroyed – and the key bridge linking Alexandria to Cairo has not been disabled, Machaut recounts questranges y avoit pluseurs chevaliers et autres signeurs qui ne loent pas quon la tengne pour nulle chose qui avengne. (3281–4) [that there were a number of foreigners, knights and lords of other degree who do not advise holding (Alexandria), no matter what the circumstances.]

Peter calls an assembly to be counselled on how to hold on to the conquered city until the arrival of additional crusader troops (3295–6, 3302). But the viscount of Touraine, who promised to serve Peter loyally for one year, mounts an immediate resistance. His arguments: not enough men, no more artillery, no victuals to buy or pillage, the sultan’s hatred of the crusaders (3321–84). Point by point, the king refutes him: it is easier to defend the city than to conquer it; the enemy left enough artillery and victuals and they can send for more from Cyprus, which is not far; the emperor of Constantinople promised help in the case of success; and the western knights will flock once the news spread (3385–502). But ‘li estrangier’ (3377), ‘les estranges’ (3504), say that the city nest mie tenable comment quelle soit deffensable … les estranges dont je parole respondirent quil sen iroient et que tenir ne la porroient. (3393–4, 3504–6)



medieval fixers 161 [cannot in any way be held no matter how defensible it is … the foreigners I speak about answered that they would leave and that they could not hold the city.]

Certainly, one way to interpret the withdrawal of the nobles is their sense of betrayal by the king who made the initial decision without them, and thus perhaps their withdrawal points to the contested space of intimate friendship/privy council in the king’s court. Those who abandon the king are clearly identified as ‘estrangier’; pursuing this line of inquiry, the term ‘estrangier’ is perhaps a reference not just to their place of origin that is neither Cyprus nor France, but also to the fact that they are not of the intimate council of the king: unlike Perceval, they are not insiders, but utter outsiders. Fixers, these shadowy figures, acquainted both with the lie of the land and language are precisely those to whom Peter’s own chancellor, Philippe de Mézières, refers as being essential to the institution and conduct of war in Le songe du vieil pelerin (1389): ‘en toute guerre et doubtance de guerre la premiere et principale chose morale si est d’estre inform de ses ennemis par les vrayes espies’ [in any war and fear of war the first and foremost thing of common sense is to keep informed of one’s enemies by real spies]. But the spy’s double intimacy with a king and with his enemies has its risks: ‘il te fera assavoir a menu tout l’estat de ton ennemy, voire se ton ennemy ne sera plus soubtil de toy et lui fera plusgrans biens que tu ne lui auras promis, seurmontans la plegerie qu’il t’aura baillie’ [he will keep you abreast in detail of your enemy’s entire state of affairs, unless your enemy is cleverer than you and so bids him larger possessions than what you had promised him, thus overcoming the pledge the spy gave you]. There is no such thing then as ‘loyalles espies’ [loyal spies].24 This certainly casts a shadow of doubt over Perceval. He says that he was a prisoner in Alexandria, yet he was allowed to ‘s’esbatre’: ‘je mesbatoie / par mi la ville ou je voloie (1999–2000) [But I was able to disport myself through the city as I wished]. If he is the kind of prisoner who is allowed to walk freely around the city as much as he likes, this raises the question of what kind of a prisoner he is exactly; it perhaps even raises the spectre of a double spy. In the Prise, Machaut describes several other fixers. The first is a guide in Alexandria, ‘une guya’, who will take the king to the bridge connecting Alexandria to Cairo to destroy it so that Muslim reinforcements have no access to Alexandria (2985–96). This unidentified guide is perhaps the same Ibn Gharab who was in charge of the Customs Gate, and who was tellingly later convicted of treason for delivering the city to Peter.25 The most telling example is also 24  Philippe de Mézières, Le songe du vieil pelerin, ed. Coopland, 2:§276. 25  Jo Van Steenbergen, ‘The Alexandrian Crusade (1365) and the Mamluk Sources’, in East and West in the Crusader States III: Context, Contacts, Confrontations, ed. Krijna Nelly Ciggaar and Herman G. B. Teule (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 126.

162 zrinka stahuljak the longest, and comparable in length to the scene of Perceval’s counsel. It concerns Peter’s messengers to the sultan and Nasreddin, ‘amiraus et grans druguement … dou soudan’ (6017–18) [admiral and chief interpreter to the sultan]: nassardins les vint querre li renoiez car en la terre navoit homme qui les peust si bien conduire ne sceust pour ce quil savoit les langages le pais et tous les passages. (6251–6) [Nasreddin the renegade came for them because in that land no other man could or knew how to guide them well, but he spoke the languages and knew the customs and the roads.]

Because he became Muslim (‘devenus estoit sarrazins’, 6015), this Genoese renegade is ‘false’ (‘faus’, 6014). A fixer can easily become a traitor, a renegade because of his exposure to and assimilation in the ‘enemy’ culture. Perceval, to disport himself freely, had to abandon the position of unquestionable fidelity, engage in cultural negotiation, perhaps even contemplate the possibility of becoming a ‘renegade’ in order to accomplish his mission. Nevertheless, this ambiguous and potentially compromising position in Perceval’s case enabled a successful raid.

Fidelity and Linguistic Difference Fixers open a hitherto unstudied window onto medieval political, social and ethical conflicts in the contact zone that conflicts create. The role of fixers and interpreters in the medieval military conquest and economy seems clear, but their allegiance is problematic. Fidelity underlies the whole project of conquest and colonization, as seen, for instance, in the fixer’s loyalty to the leader and the fidelity of the fixer’s information. In a sensitive environment of conflict and survival, fidelity emerges not as a static term, but as a highly fluctuating one. Dubois teaches us that, in theory, the fidelity of interpreters depends on simultaneous familiarity and distance. A case study of fixers in Froissart shows the interdependence of the role of proximity and distance in linguistic acquisition and successful colonization, while Machaut reveals that fidelity is both agency and alienation, proximity and estrangement, and always under the question mark of its ambiguous status. For Machaut, fixers are local to the situation, but not by virtue of being born in the locality or into the language. They are a form of currency that can be exchanged and have different value in different contexts, because they are a kind of local that



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cannot be attached to just one place (of birth). The contours of what fidelity is (or can be) thus come sharply into focus in the war contact zone, where cultural negotiation is part and parcel of linguistic engagement. Given this ambiguity and instability in the fixer’s fidelity to a leader and in the transmission of information, it is perhaps not surprising that the medieval texts and historiography exhibit a certain degree of indifference to and erasure of linguistic difference. The factual difference of languages used in the Mediterranean often seems invisible, as texts stage scenes of interpretation rarely and often present, for instance, communication between Franks and Muslims as unmediated. However, I contend that linguistic difference is significant to medieval historians and legal theorists; its extraordinary importance surfaces when we focus on the human agency in the transmission of information. When the fixer’s fidelity is put into question, linguistic difference becomes legible: the focus on the fixer’s (in)fidelity to and negotiation of political, religious and cultural identity reveals that these issues belie an underlying preoccupation with linguistic difference. We can thus read linguistic difference, which may not be explicitly named, in most situations of conflict where translation cannot be disassociated from politics and ethics. The fidelity of fixers and interpreters is thus a key concept in their deployment and, I would venture, a key term in the analysis of Western medieval history and geopolitics.

8 The Task of the Dérimeur Benjamin and Translation into Prose in Fifteenth-Century French Literature* Jane Gilbert This chapter proposes a rapprochement between Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1921) and fifteenth-century works that claim to be translating older French verse into prose. Benjamin’s essay is famous, its meaning obscure. As Paul de Man claimed, it ‘is very well known, both in the sense that it is very widely circulated, and in the sense that in the profession you are nobody unless you have said something about this text’.1 Contrastingly, the late medieval French prosifications have attracted little critical attention; being considered largely self-explanatory, even banal in their moralizing content and legitimizing programme, they have been read primarily as documents in the history of culture. However, Benjamin’s work suggests new ways of thinking about the prosifications as translations, while the fifteenth-century material throws light on contentious aspects of Benjamin’s essay. In the context of the present volume, my interest is less in the ethics of translation than in its historical and political dimensions.2 Specifying the particular notions of history and of politics with which I am concerned will be a major task of this chapter. To begin with the medieval: from the thirteenth century onwards, there *  I am grateful to my colleague Prof. Theo Hermans for guidance and material on Benjamin. 1  Paul de Man, ‘“Conclusions” on Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator”’, trans. William D. Jewett, in ‘The Lesson of Paul de Man’, special issue of Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 26. 2  For a helpful recent discussion and bibliography on the relations between ethics and politics in translation, see Moira Inghilleri and Carol Maier, ‘Ethics’, in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 2nd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 100–4.



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arose differing trends for producing lengthy narrative works in French prose. I am concerned here with a trend of the mid- to late fifteenth century, when these prose vernacular works were variously sponsored: by the dukes of Burgundy especially, but also by other branches of the French royal family, by noble families and by towns or regions.3 The enterprise was typically mobilized to support claims to authority and sometimes to sovereignty. One can easily see how legitimizing interests in the Middle Ages are served by the process of translation from Latin (which brings imperial precedent, martial example and academic authority) or by the production of original works (resonant with creativity, innovation, modernity, refoundation). It is less obvious why many of these fifteenth-century prose writings should present themselves as translating older French verse. In this chapter I focus on the metatextual passages – mainly prologues and conclusions – in which these prosifiers or dérimeurs explain and justify their own procedures.4 My examples are chosen to indicate the genre’s commonplaces rather than its exceptions, thus they are representative although perhaps unusually aptly expressed.5 Before embarking on detailed study, we must observe that the prosifiers’ own explanations seem incomplete to modern sensibilities. Scholars who have compared the prosifications with identifiable verse originals conclude that their presentation often significantly simplifies the process of 3  The Burgundian ducal and noble output is much the most studied; among a large number of publications, see especially Hans-Erich Keller, ‘The mises en prose and the Court of Burgundy’, Fifteenth-Century Studies 19 (1984): 91–105. Rosalind Brown-Grant has recently produced a rich cultural and literary account of late prose romances (not limited to mises en prose) emanating from a number of sources, and comparing these romances with earlier narratives and with contemporary works in other discourses: see Brown-Grant, French Romance of the Later Middle Ages: Gender, Morality and Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). On an early sixteenth-century prosifier and writer glorifying the town of Metz, see Catherine M. Jones, Philippe de Vigneulles and the Art of Prose Translation (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008). 4  I use the terms ‘dérimeur’ and ‘prosifier’ without distinguishing them from prose ‘remanieur’, a distinction established and collapsed by Hans-Erich Keller, ‘La technique des mises en prose des chansons de geste’, Olifant 17 (1992): 5–28. I am interested less in what remaniements were actually carried out than in the remanieurs’ self-presentations. 5  The most complete study of the mise en prose phenomenon remains Georges Doutrepont, Les mises en prose des épopées et des romans chevaleresques du XIVe au XVIe siècle (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1939). The Association Internationale pour l'Étude du Moyen Français (AIEMF) has announced a project to update this work, on which see Maria Colombo Timelli, ‘Refaire Doutrepont? Projet pour un nouveau répertoire des mises en prose des XVe et XVIe siècles’, Moyen français 63 (2008): 109–15 and 64 (2009): 1–12; see also the proceedings of the 2008 AIEMF conference, Mettre en prose au XIVe– XVIe siècles, ed. Maria Colombo Timelli, Barbara Ferrari and Anne Schoysman, with Irene Finotti (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). The AIEMF team aims to chart prosifications of other genres as well as epic and romance.

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transmission.6 Those who say that they are de-rhyming one poem usually draw on much wider sources that may include multiple retellings of the story, in verse and in prose, as well as other relevant evidence. Sometimes texts which are in reality dérimages profess to be translations from Latin or Greek, but the reverse is also found. While texts usually claim to abridge, they often also add, openly or silently – sometimes adducing Latin or chronicle material for this extra authority. Regardless of this complexity, the core, common activity is declared to be dérimage of older French works: [ J]e … ay mis et fermé mon propos de mectre par escript, en langaige maternel, les nobles fais d’armes, conquestes et emprises du noble roy Alixandre, roy de Macedoine, selom ce que j’ay trouvé en ung livre tout rimet dont je ne sçay le nom de l’acteur, fors que il est intitulé l’Istore Alixandre.7 [I have fixed and set my intention to put down in writing, in maternal language, the noble feats of arms, conquests and exploits of the noble King Alexander, King of Macedonia, according to what I have found in a book all in rhyme, whose author’s name I don’t know, only that it is entitled the History of Alexander.]

Once past this prologue, Jehan Wauquelin’s Alexandre adduces a wide range of learned references, mainly from Latin, to confirm or add to the original’s information. The prologue therefore constitutes a selective account of the actual process of composition. It demands to be considered not as a neutral description of that process but as a textual and authorial self-positioning. The second preliminary point to make is that the dérimage programme is presented as one of translation. As Claude Buridant showed in a classic essay, translation as conceived in the Middle Ages was not clearly separate from commentary:

6  On the complexities of such identifications, see François Suard, ‘Les mises en prose épiques et romanesques: Les enjeux littéraires’, in Mettre en prose, ed. Timelli et al., 34–7. See also the introductions to the excellent editions cited in these notes. 7  Jehan Wauquelin, Les faicts et les conquestes d’Alexandre le Grand (1448), ed. Sandrine Hériché (Geneva: Droz, 2000), 3 (book 1, chapter 1, lines 12–21). The livre rimet is thought by modern scholars to be the Roman d’Alexandre in alexandrines by Alexandre de Paris and Lambert le Tort, probably in a late version with many additions of related material. The anonymity Wauquelin ascribes to the Roman appears to be part of a programmatic representation of the past and of sources. For a detailed study of Wauquelin’s sources and reworking, see Sandrine Hériché, Alexandre le bourguignon: Étude du roman ‘Les faicts et les conquestes d’Alexandre le Grand’ de Jehan Wauquelin (Geneva: Droz, 2008); the hypotheses concerning the source manuscript of the Roman used by Wauquelin are examined at 225–9. Wauquelin is attracting current interest; see especially Marie-Claude de Crécy, ed., Jean Wauquelin: De Mons à la cour de Bourgogne (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006).



the task of the dérimeur 167 Même dans le cas extrême où on se flatte de respecter scrupuleusement la lettre, on admet la liberté par rapport au texte pour le gloser, l’embellir ou accentuer son impact moral: des préoccupations didactiques provoqueront des développements explicatifs, des préoccupations paragogiques, des développements moraux, des enjolivements rhétoriques aidant aussi à appuyer la leçon.8 [Even in the extreme case where the translator prides himself on scrupulously respecting the letter of the text, he considers himself free to gloss or beautify the original, or to accentuate its moral character. Didactic concerns motivate explanatory developments, paragogical concerns moral ones, with rhetorical embellishments adding further force to the lesson.]

This explains much of the activity recorded in my first point, above: translating a text involves not only transferring it between discourses but also incorporating into it commentary of various kinds. The terms that the prosifiers use to describe their work are employed elsewhere for interlingual translation: translater, transmuer, transporter, convertir, reduire, etc. Buridant quotes G. Folena, who argues that suchlike erudite terms underline the link with learned exposition, and are to be distinguished from terms that use roman (‘vernacular’) – such as mectre en romanz (‘put into the vernacular’) – which signal popular diffusion.9 Thus the prologues to the dérimages enhance the cultural prestige of works, authors, translators and audiences by situating all within a venerable, Latinate, edifying tradition. It is not uncommon for a prologue to use distinct terms to describe the passage from Latin into French verse and the further passage from older French verse into ‘langaige maternel’, by which Wauquelin seemingly means modern French prose.10 Thus the Angevin Ovide 8  Claude Buridant, ‘Translatio medievalis: Théorie et pratique de la traduction médiévale’, Travaux de linguistique et de littérature 21, no. 1 (1983): 117. The translation is mine. Rita Copeland’s equally classic monograph explores further the links between exegetical commentary and medieval translation. See Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 9  Buridant, ‘Translatio medievalis’, 96–103 (terms used for translation), 99–100 (Folena). Folena further implies that popularization entails verse. Note that reduire does not have a modern sense of ‘reduce’ as in ‘diminish’, or even ‘condense’ or ‘abbreviate’, but means rather ‘recall’ or ‘return’. I have translated it in various ways here, signalling its use in the original by square brackets. 10  Compare the following doublet, from the Hainaulter Mathieu d’Escouchy’s prologue to his Chronicle, c. 1453: ‘ce ayant mis et fermé mon propos de faire, escripre, et composer ung livre, en prose et langaige maternel, des nobles faiz d’armes, conquestes et haultaines entreprinses qui ont esté faictes en ce dit très crestien Royalme de France, ès pays voisins, et aultres marches loingtaines’ [having thus fixed and set my intention to make, write and compose a book, in prose and maternal language, of the noble feats of arms, conquests and high exploits performed in the above mentioned very Christian kingdom of France, in

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moralisé en prose consistently uses translater for Latin to French translation and convertir for translation from older French verse to modern French prose; however, each of these terms occurs in other texts to mean either interlingual translation or dérimage.11 There is no consistency that I can discern across texts, rather the discursive field is much the same for the two processes.12 If the past is a foreign country, rhyme is somehow a foreign tongue. I propose therefore to treat the dérimages as translations and the dérimeurs as translators. Aiming to give this aspect of the works more emphasis than it generally receives, I shall turn to Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay on translation and those who exercise it. We are used to reading the Middle French prosifications anthropologically and historically. Excellent work has been done over the past century, and particularly over the last twenty-five years, to present them as cultural reprogrammings that remodel stories to fit late medieval sensibilities and interests, which they consequently reveal. In this context, Benjamin’s opening sentences pose something of a challenge: When seeking knowledge of a work of art or an art form, it never proves useful to take the receiver into account … No poem is meant for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience.13 the adjoining countries, and in other, distant regions]. See Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (1330–1500), 2010 version consulted at www.atilf.fr/dmf/ ‘maternel’ (accessed 18 April 2011). 11  C. de Boer, ed., Ovide moralisé en prose (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1954), 42–3. This version was produced for René d’Anjou; an independent Burgundian prosification, still unedited, formed the basis for Colard Mansion’s and Caxton’s versions. See Stefania Cerrito, ‘L’Ovide moralisé mis en prose à la cour de Bourgogne’, in Mettre en prose, ed. Timelli et al., 109–17. 12  Correspondingly, Buridant argues that given the nature and usage of medieval Latin, translating from or into the vernacular would have been felt by medieval clerks to be closer to what we should today call an intralingual transposition, from a ‘langue de culture’ [language of high culture] to a ‘langue de diffusion’ [language of popularization]. See Buridant, ‘Translatio medievalis’, 119. 13  ‘The Translator’s Task’, trans. Steven Rendall, TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10, no. 2 (1997): 151–65, consulted at http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/037302ar (accessed 1 February 2011). Subsequent references are to this translation, provided in parentheses. The best known, and much criticized rendering, is ‘The Task of the Translator’, trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 70–82. For further discussion relating to Rendall’s translation, see Rendall, ‘Notes on Zohn’s Translation of Benjamin’s “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”’, TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10, no. 2 (1997): 191–206, consulted at http:// id.erudit.org/iderudit/037304ar (accessed 1 February 2011); Susan Ingram, ‘“The Task of the Translator”: Walter Benjamin’s Essay in English, a Forschungsbericht’, TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10, no. 2 (1997): 207–33, consulted at http://id.erudit.org/ iderudit/037305ar (accessed 1 February 2011).



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He dismisses the idea that translation, unlike original art, serves the reader. If [the translation] were intended for the reader, then the original would also have to be intended for the reader. If the original is not created for the reader’s sake, then how can this relationship allow us to understand translation? (152)

The point here is not that art is timeless. Both original and translation are living things (Benjamin dismisses the notion that life is only organic), but they are different life-forms. The life of art is long, that of translation short. Nor is art ahistorical. Benjamin stresses that translation presents to human consciousness two dimensions of historical process that are equally present, though less visible, in original art: on the one hand the greater pattern and millennial development of a transcendent teleology, on the other hand the momentary – here today, gone tomorrow. And these are intimately related, even interdependent. Much modern commentary on Benjamin’s essay has nevertheless attempted to decouple them, the transcendent aspect particularly causing embarrassment. For Benjamin, however, part of the translator’s task is to conjure up the sense of there existing a greater, metalinguistic whole, ‘die reine Sprache’ [pure language], the inexpressible, sacred language of thought and of truth.14 All natural languages tend towards this pure language, in which they are mystically related; they yearn for fulfilment in it, a fulfilment located at once in the Edenic or Creational moment and at the end of human time. This metaphysical, openly theological aspect sits uneasily with modern materialism and is often played down. Some critics consider it to represent Benjamin’s early Hegelianism, underlying or superseded in his later turn to Marxism.15 De Man responds with denial: according to him, Benjamin’s text aims to desacralize the notion of an ‘original’ by levelling it to the same secondary, inessential status generally accorded to the ‘translation’. Derrida, answering de Man, prefers to sacralize translation, or more exactly, to ‘sacralize’ the process of dissemination which renders translation at once necessary and impossible. Derrida points out that Babel, which means ‘confusion’, is also a proper name of God. The historical event of Babel is thus the moment at which God signs His creation.16 As will become apparent, Derrida’s meaning is in my view closer to Benjamin’s. These discussions turn not only on philosophical questions of the relations 14  I take ‘die reine Sprache’ [pure language] to mean much the same as ‘die wahre Sprache’ [true language], though not all commentators do so. 15  On the Hegelian framework of Benjamin’s terminology, see Thomas Pfau, ‘Thinking Before Totality: Kritik, Übersetzung, and the Language of Interpretation in the Early Walter Benjamin’, MLN 103, no. 5 (1988): 1072–97. 16  Jacques Derrida, ‘Des tours de Babel’, in Jacques Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, 2nd edn (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 203–35. On the debate between de Man and Derrida, see Eve Tavor Bannet, ‘The Scene of Translation: After Jakobson, Benjamin, de Man, and

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between the metaphysical and the historical, but also on issues of legitimacy and authority. In the quest for conviction, the translation of Benjamin’s text and the value of particular translations of his essay have been critical, notably in the dialogue between de Man and Derrida. Sovereignty, translatio, truth and the contingencies and imperfections of the actual are all in play around Benjamin’s essay, as also within it. What is at stake here is therefore a kind of political theology of translation; and, as I aim to show below, the same applies to the fifteenth-century prosifications. When we read the dérimages along with Benjamin’s essay, each throws onto or brings out from within the other a glow at once sacramental, material, historical, ethical and political. To explain: Benjamin’s ultimate language of truth and purity is God’s property, and human history constitutes a lengthy meandering, human languages lengthy periphrases, in the journey towards its realization. In Benjamin’s Hegelian parlance, this journey is ‘history’. However, transcendent, sacred history is best perceived not in the millennial evolution of natural languages towards a convergence unattainable in human time, but in translations, considered as probes recording at precise moments our relation to, and continued distance from, the ideal. More than original works of art, translations – because of their inherent reflexivity – make manifest the greater language beyond languages; they make manifest also the infinitely greater being that is God, and the incurable longing for Him and for His speech which animates our times and our tongues. By bringing this sacred dimension to consciousness, translations advance human progress in history: [U]nlike a literary work, a translation does not find itself, so to speak, in middle [sic] of the high forest of the language itself; instead, from outside it, facing it, and without entering it, the translation calls to the original within, at that one point where the echo in its own language can produce a reverberation of the foreign language’s work. Its intention is not only directed toward an object entirely different from that of the poetic work, namely toward a language as a whole, starting out from a single work of art, but is also different in itself: the poet’s intention is spontaneous, primary, concrete, whereas the translator’s is derivative, final, ideal. For the great motive of integrating the plurality of languages into a single true language is here carrying out its work. (159)

‘Derivative, final, ideal’: for Benjamin this seemingly paradoxical combination is a necessary correlation. These reflections open a specific perspective on translation in medieval texts, and especially on the translation of older verse into newer prose. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, prose was the medium of sermons and devotional works in Latin and then in the vernacular. It was also the medium of Derrida’, New Literary History 24 (1993): 577–95. For a different reading of Derrida’s essay, see Griffin’s chapter in this volume.



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history, conceived to be under God’s aegis and teleologically tending towards apocalypse at some future moment which is at once imminent and immeasurably distant.17 In the later Middle Ages, prose became normalized and generalized, nevertheless many fifteenth-century prosifications retain a sense that their medium is both sacrosanct and innovative. ‘Converting’ rhyme to prose is depicted as bringing it closer to God, and His domain importantly if infinitesimally closer to its looked-for realization. Late medieval literature, famous for its piety, is much concerned with good endings. Played out in many an ars moriendi, this concern is given a different inflection by Jehan Wauquelin, who opens the prologue to his rendering of La belle Hélène de Constantinople with an announcement that both mimics the trump of doom for its readers and invokes the trope of universal conversion, thus foreshadowing and hastening the end of time:18 Isydorus le philozophe nous dit en ses Auctoritez que on doit tousjours enquerir la fin de l’omme et non point le commencement, car Nostre Seigneur ne regarde point quelz nous avons esté en nostre commencement mais seulement quelz nous sommes en la fin de nostre vie. Et pour ce, à celle fin que tous cuers endormis par paresse ou wiseuse se puissent esveillier à commencier à faire batailles contre leurs adversaires pour en leur fin acquerir glorieuses couronnes de victoires, comme ceulx qui seront parcevans et sachans comment par excercite de bonne labeur on vient à telle remuneracion et loyer à l’onneur de Dieu, principalement et notamment au commandement de trespuissant et tresredoubté prince, mon tresredoubté seigneur, monseigneur Phelippe … je, Jehan Wauquelin, son humbe [sic] et obeïssant serviteur, indigne, foible de sens et de trespetite capacité, pour esmouvoir et inciter les cuers des endormis à aucune bonne incitacion et promouvement, me suis determiné de mettre en prose une hystoire nommee l’ystoire de Helayne, mere de saint Martin, 17  See especially Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Jeanette M. A. Beer, Early Prose in France: Contexts of Bilingualism and Authority (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1992). On prose in the later Middle Ages, see Jens Rasmussen, La prose narrative française du XVe siècle: Étude esthétique et stylistique (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1958); and especially Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey Kittay, The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), to which I am indebted throughout this chapter. My thinking about prose and verse has been further influenced by the essays in Rebecca Dixon and Finn E. Sinclair, eds, Poetry, Knowledge and Community in Late Medieval France (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008). Prose did not oust verse as a medium of knowledgeable discourse; see especially Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay, with the participation of Rebecca Dixon, Miranda Griffin, Sylvia Huot, Francesca Nicholson and Finn Sinclair, Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the ‘Rose’ to the ‘Rhétoriqueurs’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 18  A typical ars moriendi is that printed by Caxton: Here begynneth a lityll treatise spekynge of the Arte & Crafte (1490; repr. Amsterdam: Da Capo, 1970).

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evesque de Tours, d’aucuns empereurs et roys, comme son pere, son mary et autres, avec la destruction et conversion de pluseurs payens et Sarrazins par iceulx conquis, convertis et reduis à la sainte foy crestienne, selon le contenu d’un livret rimé, à moy delivré par le commandement de mondit resredoubté seigneur, et ce pour retrenchier et sincoper les prolongacions et motz inutiles qui souvent sont mis et boutez en telles rimes.19 [Isidore the philosopher tells us in his Authorities that one should always seek to know of a man’s ending and not his beginning, for Our Lord pays no attention to how we were at our beginning, but only to what we are at the end of our life. And therefore, to this end that all hearts which have fallen asleep through idleness or leisure may awake to begin to battle against their enemies, in order to win at their ending glorious victors’ crowns, as those who will be forewarned and well-advised how by the exercise of good labour one comes to such reward and wages, to God’s honour, principally and notably at the command of a very powerful and greatly feared prince, my greatly feared lord, my lord Philip … I, Jehan Wauquelin, his humble and obedient servant, unworthy, short on wit and of very small ability, to move and encourage the hearts of those who have fallen asleep to some good impulse and impetus, have determined to put into prose a history called the history of Helen, mother of Saint Martin bishop of Tours, and of some emperors and kings, such as her father, her husband and others, with the destruction and conversion of several pagans and Saracens by them overcome, converted and won over to the holy Christian faith, according to the contents of a little book in rhyme, delivered to me by the command of my aforementioned greatly feared lord, and to remove and cut the tardy augmentations and useless words which are often put and stuffed into such rhymes.]

As presented here, its status as translation is part of a network of elements placing the text under the sign of the Apocalypse, that end which will finally fix meaning.20 Wauquelin weaves together universal history, personal salvation and prosification to claim that his text combines literal, typological, moral and anagogical meanings.21 Exceeding the merely literary, it therefore reaches 19  Jehan Wauquelin, La belle Hélène de Constantinople (1448), ed. Marie-Claude de Crécy (Geneva: Droz, 2002), 13–14 (Prologue, lines 1–15, 23–37). 20  Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 21  Pursuing the view of translation as a variety of commentary, Buridant draws a further link to exegesis, quoting Augustine of Dacia’s famous distich on the four scriptural senses (‘Translatio medievalis’, 120–1). The significant Burgundian investment in the idea of crusading is discussed by Jacques Paviot, Les ducs de Bourgogne, la croisade et l’Orient (fin XIVe–XVe siècle) (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003). Nancy B. Black analyses the differing crusading connotations of the text and principal manuscripts of



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towards the status of scripture. Note particularly that the newly Christian Saracens are said to be ‘conquis, convertis et reduis’; the latter two terms are repeatedly used in prologues to describe the processes of translation-dérimage (the first is thematized in the endless prosified tales of conquest). Dérimage is in this sense not about the aesthetic superiority of one literary form over another, nor about fashion, nor about cultural sensibilities; it is about God’s plan for the cosmos and for the microcosm that is man. The dérimeur’s task is also the audience’s, indeed it is all of humanity’s. Prologues repeatedly insist that reception of these works, like their composition, is laborious.22 Moreover, the texts must be further translated into individual behaviour, the reader won to virtue by the examples presented; which behaviour acknowledges and even furthers the divine intention towards immanence in the world. Hence the strongly normalizing moral frameworks of the mises en prose. His kingdom come, His will be done: dérimage aimed to bring a sense of heaven to earth.23 In both Benjamin’s essay and the dérimeurs’ presentations, this orientation towards a cosmic vision of history is balanced by – or, more accurately, dependent on – the insistence that any translation is transient, bound to a specific moment within human time. Avoiding thereby archaisms and staleness, it nevertheless invites replacement by a more current version. It falls to the translator to capture both timeliness and transience, and thus make manifest history’s greater, sacred dimension. Imparting the sense of an ending does not mean extracting the text from what Kermode calls the ‘middest’, but adds definition and an ironic poignancy to the human situation in the middest.24

Wauquelin’s Belle Hélène in Medieval Narratives of Accused Queens (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 167–85. Along similar lines, see David J. Wrisley, ‘Burgundian Ideologies and Jehan Wauquelin’s Prose Translations’, in The Ideology of Burgundy: The Promotion of National Consciousness, 1364–1565, ed. D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton and Jan R. Veenstra (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 131–50. 22  Contrastingly, Jean-Jacques Vincensini discusses scholarly translations which emphasize their contribution to the lordly reader’s leisure, which fits him for government. See Vincensini, ‘Des valeurs qui légitiment de translater en françois des textes latins’, in La traduction vers le moyen français, ed. Claudio Galderisi and Cinzia Pigantelli (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 421–52. 23  Comparably, for Richard Ullerston, speaking in favour of translating the Bible into the vernacular in an Oxford University debate of 1401, whereas the literal meaning of translatio is physical displacement, its primary figurative sense is any attempt to render the divine logos into a humanly comprehensible medium. Translation for him therefore includes speaking in tongues and dream-interpretation, preaching and prophecy; rendering a sacred Latin or Hebrew text into English is justifiable on these analogies. See Roger Ellis, ‘Figures of English Translation, 1382–1407’, in Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness, ed. Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2001), 24. 24 Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 7. Compare the interaction of historical immediacy and

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Benjamin adapts the figure of a vessel, familiarly used to reflect on artistic creation, to emphasize the extent and limitations of the translator’s task: Just as fragments of a vessel, in order to be fitted together, must correspond to each other in the tiniest details but need not resemble each other, so translation, instead of making itself resemble the meaning of the original, must lovingly, and in detail, fashion in its own language a counterpart to the original’s mode of intention, in order to make both of them recognizable as fragments of a vessel, as fragments of a greater language. For that very reason translation must in large measure turn its attention away from trying to communicate something, away from meaning; the original is essential to translation only insofar as it has already relieved the translator and his work of the burden and organization of what is communicated. (161)25

The shards evoke but will never constitute the complete vessel. More pertinently for translation practice, Benjamin insists that similarity between the fragments is less important than their concordance. A translation worthy of the name will ‘fashion in its own language a counterpart to the original’s mode of intention [Art des Meinens]’ (161). Benjamin undoes the old dualism between freedom and fidelity in translation.26 Fidelity to the original requires handling that is free to the point of refashioning. For Benjamin (pace de Man), such freedom constitutes a higher fidelity because it illuminates, or even permits, the relation of both original and translation to the greater whole. Thus, in a creditable translation, source-language and target-language mutually transform each other; precisely when the source-language stretches the possibilities of the target-language to the point of alienating the latter, it enhances its own relation to the greater whole (Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles are a model). Benjamin quotes Rudolf Pannwitz: cognitive transcendence in late medieval prose historiography, as analysed by Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence of Prose, 151–73. 25  Zohn has: ‘Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel. For this very reason translation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate’ (quoted by de Man, ‘“Conclusions”’, 42). De Man perhaps overstates the contrast between a discontinuity implied by Benjamin’s text and a cohesion implied by Zohn’s; but I agree with his argument that Benjamin’s vessel never becomes whole, or not in human time. See also Carol Jacobs, ‘The Monstrosity of Translation’, MLN 90, no. 6 (1975): 755–66. 26  As Copeland emphasizes, this distinction in both late classical and medieval contexts is far from straightforward, moreover either approach could appropriate or displace the source text. See Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, esp. chaps 1, 2, 6.



the task of the dérimeur 175 The fundamental error of the translator is that he holds fast to the state in which his own language happens to be rather than allowing it to be put powerfully in movement by the foreign language … he must broaden and deepen his own language through the foreign one we have no notion how far this is possible to what degree each language can transform itself [sic]. (Quoted by Benjamin, 163–64.)

The dérimeurs too strive to transform language and mores in the service of transcendence, though their metaphysical and moral frame of reference is other, and Romantic dislocation not their goal. This effort at transformation must be set against the common view that the prosifiers effectively distort their originals, preserving only the bare facts of the narrative as a framework for extraneous moralizing or for wholesale reprogrammings. Benjamin’s essay argues that ‘distortion’ may be one way in which successful translation manifests itself. A concept of translation as faithful to some higher sense inhabits the dérimages. As the Savoyard writer Jehan Bagnyon puts it in ‘L’excusacion du facteur aulcune le dernier chappitre’ [The maker’s apology at the final chapter] of L’histoire de Charlemagne: Et ainssy est que, a la postulacion et requeste du devant dit venerable homme, messire Henry Bollomier, chanoisne de Lausane, ay esté incité de luy translater et reduyre en prose françoise la matiere devant desduicte. Tant comme il touche la premiere et la tierce partye, je les ay prins et estraitz d’un livre qui se dit Miroel Historial par la plus grant partie. Et la seconde partie j’ay tant seulement reduyt d’ung roman ancien en rime, aulcunement en lengaige estrange, et sans aultre informacion que de celluy, je l’ay reduyt en prose substancialement, sans faillir, par ordonnance de chappitres et selon la matiere en celluy contenue.27 [And thus it is that, at the demand and request of the aforesaid venerable man, my lord Henry Bollomier, canon of Lausanne, I have been induced to translate and render [reduire] into French prose for him the abovementioned matter. As far as the first and third parts are concerned, I took and extracted them mainly from a book which is called the Historical Mirror [Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum historiale]. And the second part I have translated [reduire] only from an 27  Jehan Bagnyon, ‘L’histoire de Charlemagne’ (parfois dite ‘Roman de Fierabras’) (1465– 1470), ed. Hans-Erich Keller (Geneva: Droz, 1992), 220–1 (book 3, part 2). (There are other prose Charlemagnes and other prose Fierabras.) The ‘substancialement’ should be linked to Bagnyon’s style (he refers to ‘lengaige substancieulx’ in the following lines) as well as to the ‘substance’ of the original or originals translated, edited and compiled by the dérimeur. See, for instance, Le roman du Comte d’Artois (1453–67), ed. Jean-Claude Seigneuret (Geneva: Droz, 1966), 1, line 24.

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ancient rhymed romance in somewhat strange language, and without drawing on any other information I have translated [reduire] into prose its substance, without omitting anything, with arrangement into chapters, and according to the matter contained therein.]

As Bagnyon’s later comments clarify, Vincent de Beauvais’s Latin encyclopaedia requires only ‘transportation’ into French. It is the older French ma­terial, comprising the bulk of the book, that needs interventionist treatment. The compilation as a whole is said to be called forth by the original material’s chaotic condition as well as by its alien expression; its ‘matiere desjoincte, sans grant ordonnance’ [‘disjointed matter without much ordering’] incites Bollomier to commission the reworking.28 The original in such a case does not relieve the translator ‘of the burden and organization of what is communicated’ (161), as Benjamin has it, except insofar as it invites those by its perceived disorder. It is difficult, in fact, to pin down what exactly the originals do contribute to the prosifications, according to the metatextual apparatus. Narratives are sourced from the verse works only up to a point, for the historical information they supply is supplemented by further antiquarian research. More significant (and much emphasized and clarified relative to the originals) are the examples that the verse originals are deemed to provide to edify the prosification’s readers. Combined with these examples are powerful moral lessons, so great that the older French verse originals are credited by Bagnyon with a salvific effect more commonly associated with religious or classical material: Saint Pol, docteur de verité, nous dit que toutes choses redigees par escript sont a nostre doctrine escriptes, et pour ce, Boëce fait mencion que diversement le salut d’un chescun procede. Puis qu’ainssy est que la foy crestienne est assés par les docteurs de Sainte Eglise corroboree, neantmoins les choses passees diversement a memoyre reduictes nous engendrent correction de vie illicite, car les ouvraiges des anciens sont pour nous rendre a vivre en operacion de salut en ensuivant les bons et en evictant les mauvais.29

28  ‘Et la matiere suyvant est d’un roman fait a l’ancienne façon, sans grant ordonnance, dont j’ai esté juste a le reduyre en prose par chappitres ordonnés’ [And the following matter is from a romance made in the old style, without much order, from which I have simply translated [reduire] it into prose into ordered chapters]; Bagnyon, L’histoire de Charlemagne, 27 (book 2, part 1). François Suard discusses prosifiers’ arrangement of their material into chapters and distinct paragraphs as a counterpart to the discontinuities that laisse structure introduced into verse chansons de geste. See Suard, Guillaume d’Orange: Étude du roman en prose (Paris: Champion, 1979), 604–5 (and longer discussion at 147–66). See also Jones, Vigneulles, 87–95, on prosification’s ‘bele disjointure’. 29 Bagnyon, L’histoire de Charlemagne, 1 (preface).



the task of the dérimeur 177 [Saint Paul, teacher of truth, tells us that all things that are drawn up in writing are written to our doctrine, and, moreover, Boethius observes that the salvation of each proceeds differently. Since, therefore, the Christian faith is fully confirmed by the Doctors of Holy Church, nevertheless things of the past, being variously recalled [reduire] to memory, engender in us correction of illicit life, for the works of the ancients are there to encourage us to live in the workings of salvation by following the good and avoiding the ill.]

No dérimeurs that I have encountered claim to transmit the exact spirit of the past, nor do they advocate direct imitation of ancestors. On the contrary, they stress historical discontinuities, and the relation to the recorded past that they encourage is not a mimetic one. Nevertheless they repeatedly hope that their prosified works will inspire redemptive spiritual and chivalric impulses, regenerating the present by an injection of ancient chivalry and piety. Their practice implies that these qualities are better realized in their own selective reconstruction of that past than in its unmediated presence, however much they insist that older texts underpin the modern ethical and political effort. The dérimages’ attitude towards the past is well described by Michel Zink, for whom the late medieval celebration of ancient chivalry: cherche moins à faire revivre dans ses fêtes un passé dont les romans garderaient la trace qu’à fonder une esthétique nouvelle sur le regret de ce qui n’a jamais existé, d’un état idéal et mythique de la chevalerie, et les romans … s’inspirent de cette éthique et s’installent dans cet imaginaire, bien loin de prolonger réellement, ou de défigurer, une esthétique passée.30 [seeks in its festivities not so much to bring back to life a past whose traces the romances supposedly retain, as to inaugurate a new aesthetic founded on regret for something that never existed: an ideal and mythical condition of chivalry. And the romances … draw inspiration from this aesthetic and establish themselves within this imaginary, rather than really prolonging, or deforming, a past aesthetic.]

Like Benjamin’s ideal vessel (mentioned above), the models to which late medieval chivalric culture aspires are composed from fragments which ‘correspond to each other in the tiniest details but need not resemble each other’: here, old verse and new prose. Indeed, the dérimages suggest that non-resemblance between original and translation may be an advantage in bringing about the greater correspondence that ideally sparks from their encounter. As elsewhere in Benjamin’s writings, creation’s teleology is fulfilled not through 30  Michel Zink, ‘Le roman de transition (XIVe–XVe siècles)’, in Précis de littérature française du Moyen Âge, ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 294; my translation.

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chronological sequence or evolution but by a discontinuous, dialectical process presented as flashes of electrical connection between phenomena or moments, connections animated by their unexpectedness.31 A model of translatio or cultural connectedness grounded in Benjamin’s work would therefore be quite different from one that focused on evolutionary modification or on similitude. The dérimeurs present their productions not as coherent wholes but as accumulations of miscellaneous fragments. Even when they vaunt their own learning, they fret over the quality of their expression and the accuracy of their information, over their perspicacity and their concentration. They submit their work to the correction of patrons and readers. By their rhetorical prowess these elaborate modesty topoi authorize the texts they introduce and conclude while positioning those texts as essentially not definitive. (A good example is the tessellating sequence of prologues and conclusions to the Angevin Ovide moralisé en prose.) Correspondingly – and surprisingly – according to Doutrepont, only a minority of mises en prose survive in more than one manuscript.32 It seems that they were not destined for cultural longevity in themselves, but as elements in a greater enterprise. We may compare Rita Copeland’s interpretation of those patristic translations of sacred texts which depict themselves as provisional and fragmentary contributions to the millennial project of communicating God’s word to humankind: ‘Under such a teleological hermeneutic, even the signified is subordinated to the ultimate referents, sacred history and the economy of salvation. Any progression towards meaning through the diversity of languages must, in fact, constitute a return to original meaning.’33 I shall return at the end of this chapter to consider the secular meanings encoded in the dérimages, but for the moment my point is that they work to project an analogous sense of subordination to ultimate referents: their politics are theological. Much of what I have written so far could be alleged also of the process of translation into French out of Latin. I now turn to the specific effects associated with intralingual translation out of older French and out of rhyme. In a powerful passage, Benjamin shifts the ground of his discussion from interlingual to chronological, and from alterations of meaning between foreign languages to alterations of meaning within the same language: 31  Compare, for instance, Benjamin’s ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ to his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. George Osborne, intro. George Steiner (London: Verso, 1998). 32 Doutrepont, Les mises en prose, 327–32; however, further manuscripts have been uncovered since, and more may come to light. It should also be noted that some of the Burgundian manuscripts, in particular, are of very high quality, endowing the texts contained in them with enduring material and artistic value. 33 Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 44. Hence, no doubt, the full meaning of reduire.



the task of the dérimeur 179 No translation would be possible if, in accord with its ultimate essence, it were to strive for similarity to the original. For in its continuing life, which could not be so called if it were not the transformation and renewal of a living thing, the original is changed. Established words also have their after-ripening. What might have been the tendency of an author’s poetic language in his own time may later be exhausted, and immanent tendencies can arise anew out of the formed work. What once sounded fresh may come to sound stale, and what once sounded idiomatic may later sound archaic. To seek what is essential in such transformations, as well as in the equally constant transformations of sense, in the subjectivity of later generations rather than in the inner life of language and its works, would be – even granting the crudest psychologism – to confuse the ground and the essence of a thing; or, putting it more strongly, it would be to deny, out of an impotence of thought, one of the most powerful and fruitful historical processes. (155–6)

After a delay, the original that the translator must translate is no longer accessible simply by reading the original words, for these will have changed their meaning. This gap has nothing to do with subjectivity, thus no effort of empathy or cultural understanding can bridge it. If interlingual translation permits historical process to come to human consciousness, then intralingual translation sharpens the reflexive element. It turns the spotlight onto what for Benjamin are complementary dimensions of history: history in the sacred sense; history as present transience and incompletion; and history as lightning flashes of connection and coincidence across estrangement. The rhymed works as described by the prosifications exemplify lengaige made estrange by history.34 By transforming it into a medium implying at once the sacred and the momentary or partial, the dérimeurs aim to endow present language with a connection both to the middest and to the ending. The verse texts as presented by the dérimeurs lack the revered status accorded to originals in modern publishing and also in Benjamin’s hierarchy. They invite correction as well as translation – thus, Bagnyon observes that chansons de geste are inconsistent over the identity of Charlemagne’s twelve peers.35 Poor subjects for translation (when compared with the classics), yet 34  Prosifications before c. 1500 note the strangeness of the earlier works’ expression, however they do not generally portray them as linguistically obsolete, whereas writing after that date often does. Arguing against the suggestion that the verse originals would have been incomprehensible, Zink, ‘Le roman de transition’, notes that all the surviving manuscripts of the thirteenth-century verse La belle Hélène de Constantinople were copied in the fifteenth century, contemporary with the de-rhymed versions (296). He contends that the idea that verse was more difficult is an ‘illusion’ (303), shown by the fact that Couldrette’s verse Roman de Melusine is at once more ‘popular’ and later than Jean d’Arras’s courtly prose version. 35 Bagynon, L’histoire de Charlemagne, 28 (book 2, part 1).

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urgently demanding transmission into the present idiom and promising to transform and redeem it, these Old French verse texts both contradict Benjamin’s theory of translation and exemplify it in an anomalous form which opens it to further development. As Zink makes clear, the ideals sought by the late Middle Ages are not to be found in the earlier works.36 However, converting or recalling these works to langaige maternel allows the newly translated productions to revive and reorient the mother tongue so that it can encapsulate the sought-after courtliness, chivalry and piety.37 For Benjamin, this operation remains ironic, in that it makes the maternal idiom not so much a vehicle of human improvement as an index of a transcendence that humanity can never attain. The theological dimension of history manifests itself in (and not in spite of ) the piecemeal record of material actuality, partiality and incompletion, while at the same time the former’s origin and finality remain essentially beyond the latter’s reach. The late medieval mises en prose, therefore, chime with Benjamin’s 1921 account of the complex historicity inherent in the project of translation. In closing I shall discuss briefly how this historicity relates to the political projects of sovereignty and legitimation within which the dérimeurs were writing. Like Benjaminian translation, late medieval conceptions of sovereignty require articulating the theological with the temporal while recognizing the ironic distance separating the two.38 According to Benjamin’s notions, translation does this better than original writing: ‘In the original, content and language constitute a certain unity, like that between a fruit and its skin, whereas a translation surrounds its content as if with the broad folds of a royal mantle’ (158). Translation is therefore a form of regalia. And the prosifiers’ prologues and conclusions operate an investiture of their patrons. This is clearest in the prosifications produced for the Valois dukes of Burgundy, who will stand here as both an individual instance and a representative of claims for sovereignty made on behalf of kings, nobles or towns by other dérimages. Many Burgundian mises en prose are connected to the political expansionism and self-promotion of the last two Valois dukes, Philip the Good and Charles the Bold. Both continued the policy begun two generations earlier by Philip the Bold, of acquiring wealthy territories by force, inheritance or marriage around Burgundy and in the Low Countries. The territorial potsherds accumulated by the most successful duke, Philip the Good, are 36  See p. 177 above. 37  See for example Danielle Quéruel, ‘Des mises en prose aux romans de chevalerie dans les collections bourguignonnes’, in Rhétorique et mises en prose au XVe siècle, ed. Sergio Cigada and Anna Slerca (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1991), 173–93. 38  Jacques Krynen, Idéal du prince et pouvoir royal en France à la fin du Moyen Âge (1380–1440): Étude de la littérature politique du temps (Paris: Picard, 1981); Jacques Krynen L’empire du roi: Idées et croyances politiques en France, XIIIe–XVe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1993).



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assembled in an orderly fashion in Jehan Wauquelin’s Belle Hélène, which he claims to translate:39 principalement et notamment au commandement de trespuissant et tresredoubté prince, mon tresredoubté seigneur, monseigneur Phelippe, par la grace de Dieu, duc de Bourgoingne, de Lothier et de Brabant et de Lembourg, conte de Flandres, d’Artois, de Bourgoingne, palatin de Haynnault, de Hollande, de Zeellande et de Namur, marquis du Saint Empire, seigneur de Frise, de Salins et de Malines, mon tresbenigne seigneur principant et regnant en ce present an, qui est l’an de l’Incarnacion Nostre Seigneur mil CCCCXLVIII.40 [principally and notably at the command of a very powerful and greatly feared prince, my greatly feared lord, my lord Philip, by the grace of God duke of Burgundy, Lothier, Brabant and Limbourg, count of Flanders, Artois and Burgundy, count palatine of Hainault, Holland, Zeeland and Namur, marquis of the Holy Empire, lord of Friesland, Salins and Mechlin, my very benevolent lord, ruling as prince and reigning in this present year, which is the year of the Incarnation of Our Lord 1448.]

Wauquelin’s precise dating gives the impression that this is an ongoing project, as indeed it was; the Burgundian domains would continue to grow for thirty years. Both Philip and Charles at various points pursued the possibility of becoming kings, thus the Burgundian project was in the full sense a sovereign one. These well-known historical manoeuvres have given rise to heated debate over the nature of the kingdom over which the dukes would rule and which their cultural programmes aimed to encourage. Did they aspire to produce a Burgundian identity comparable to a ‘national sentiment’ that would unify their diverse domains? Or was their goal a ‘composite monarchy’ whose parts could be held in harmony or even in tension, in submission to a single figure combining distinct authorities (duke of here, count of there)?41

39  On the Burgundian jigsaw, see especially Wim Blockmans and Walter Prevenier, The Promised Lands: The Low Countries under Burgundian Rule, 1369–1530, trans. Elizabeth Fackelman, translation rev. and ed. Edward Peters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 40 Wauquelin, La belle Hélène, 12 (Prologue, lines 13–23). These lines fill in the ellipsis in the quotation at p. 171. 41  Classic, and much contested works are Yvon Lacaze, ‘Le rôle des traditions dans la genèse d’un sentiment national au XVe siècle: la Bourgogne de Philippe le Bon’, Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 129 (1971): 303–85; Arie Johan Vanderjagt, ‘Qui sa vertu anoblist’: The Concepts of noblesse and chose publique in Burgundian Political Thought (Groningen: Miélot, 1981). Graeme Small has argued consistently against the idea of a unitary, ‘national’ ideology; see especially Small, ‘Of Burgundian Dukes, Counts, Saints and Kings (14 ce–c. 1500)’, in The Ideology of Burgundy, ed. Boulton and Veenstra, 151–94; Small, ‘Local Elites

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These questions cannot be answered only by reference to literary productions; however, the dérimages-translations sponsored by the Burgundian dukes are worth interrogating as witnesses. The tales they tell are of successful, theologically justified conquest and expansion, but this is only one side of the story. Translation as Benjamin conceives it is not a straightforward expression of power but, like the late medieval understanding of sovereignty, combines sacral power with human limitation while noting the discrepancy between them. This is more evident if we take the famous sentence quoted above in context: This essential kernel [the quality ‘more than a message’ that inheres in the original when seen through the lens of a translation] can be more precisely defined as what is not retranslatable in a translation. One can extract from a translation as much communicable content as one wishes, and this much can be translated; but the element toward which the genuine translator’s efforts are directed remains out of reach. It is not translatable, like the literary language of the original, because the relation between content and language in the original is entirely different from that in the translation. In the original, content and language constitute a certain unity, like that between a fruit and its skin, whereas a translation surrounds its content as if with the broad folds of a royal mantle. For translation indicates a higher language than its own, and thereby remains inappropriate, violent, and alien with respect to its content. This fracture hinders any further translation, and at the same time renders it superfluous. For every translation of a work at a specific point in the history of language represents, with respect to a specific aspect of its content, translation into all other languages. Thus translation transplants the original into an – ironically – more ultimate linguistic domain, since it cannot be displaced from it by any further translation, but only raised into it anew and in other parts. (158)

Translation makes sensible but cannot transmit the sacred quality of the original. It establishes the latter’s legitimacy by and at cost of making it ever more unattainable; therefore, the translation condemns itself to appear ‘inappropriate, violent, and alien’. Benjamin’s political theology thus turns translation into a battleground. And, in contrast to their expansionist thematics, the metatextual comments of the fifteenth-century dérimeurs (Burgundian and otherwise) suggest that they also perceive translation as a field of ongoing tension and conflict. Violence, alienation and impropriety are both a means and “National” Mythologies in the Burgundian Dominions in the Fifteenth Century’, in Building the Past/Konstruktion der eigenen Vergangenheit, ed. Rudolf Suntrup and Jan R. Veenstra (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), 229–45. The latter piece refers to Burgundy with or without a crown as a ‘composite monarchy’ (244) of the sort advanced by J. H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, Past and Present 137 (1992): 48–71.



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to sacred sovereignty and transcendent union, and also a price that sovereignty and union pay. The dérimages, I suggest, encapsulate this Benjaminian dialectic without resolving it.

9 The Translator as Interpretant Passing in/on the Work of Ramon Llull

William Burgwinkle The problem of translation, which is to say, a problem of passage …1 Ramon Llull (1232–1313) seems, at first, a promising figure to examine in relation to medieval translation. For a start, he was a multilingual Majorcan who wrote in Catalan, Latin and Arabic and travelled incessantly for more than forty years, supported by the Majorcan King Jaume II (1267–1327). He proselytized in Cyprus, Armenia, Tunisia, Rome, Genoa, Pisa, Paris, Lyon and Montpellier, halted only by his death at the age of eighty-one. He translated his own writings from and into these languages and, most importantly, by his own admission, transcribed (perhaps even translated as an act of xenoglossia) the word of God as he received it in a vision of 1264. Llull is in this sense an exemplary translator: one who passes on information, serves himself as a receptor and medium of the divine word, slips in and out of different cultures, places and languages – someone who ‘passes’ in other words – without calling attention to himself as an interloper or imposter.2 It is within this category of passing polymath that Llull made his name and ensured his reputation: by some estimates he was the most prolific author of the High Middle Ages. Even assuming that some of his works have now been lost, there are still 250 or so of them extant, ranging from short essays and logical proofs to massive, encyclopaedic tomes dedicated to the analysis 1  Peggy Kamuf, ‘Passing Strange: The Laws of Translation’, contribution to ‘Presidential Forum: The Task of Translation in the Global Context’, in Profession 2010 (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2010): 65. 2  This sense of passing is particularly associated with the gay world in which one can either pass or not pass as straight in the larger, often antagonistic, world.



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of other religious traditions (Book of the Gentiles and the Doctrina Pueril), the connections that exist between logic and theology, and the autobiographical work that I will be addressing here.3 Despite this promising portrait, however, there is something that ultimately disappoints in Llull’s work; and that, for me, is his failure to reflect on his own linguistic practice. His translations from and into Arabic are no longer extant, so he can be forgiven on that count, but he almost never identifies his sources and the most one can say of his theory of translation is that he never thought it worthy of comment. This may simply be because he saw his writings primarily as an act of revelation, a tireless effort to bring to mankind the truth that had been revealed to him alone. His part of that mission was to transmit the message to the largest number of people possible, especially non-Christians. Though he spent nine years studying Arabic and some Latin in order to reach this wider audience, he showed no sign of having considered language in a comparative sense, as did his slightly older and younger contemporaries, the Catalan Raimon Vidal de Besalù and Dante Alighieri. In discussing Llull’s notion of translation, then, one is forced to conceive of it in broad but also restrictive terms as a process of passing on, transfer and transport of material in which the role of the translator, including the body of the translator, is primordial. From that perspective, Llull can be seen as worldclass: an itinerant messenger, a floating signifier who never doubted his tie to the signified, a linchpin linking thirteenth-century Arabic and Judaic thought to Franciscan spiritualism and Parisian Scholasticism in the years following the Parisian condemnations of Aristotelian/Averroist thought (1277). Llull might therefore be seen as what Lawrence Venuti called a ‘protoempiricist’: that is to say, one who believes in ‘the reproduction or transfer of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text, whether its form, its meaning, or its effect’.4 Though not much else about Llull’s style or manner would necessarily call to mind an empiricist, his deep faith in his own ability to pass on the divine message in an unpolluted form links him with other such translators of sacred texts. The message is so important, or so goes the argument, that consideration of the medium gets, perforce, short shrift. While the process itself might attract little attention, however, the role of the translator does. In this respect Llull could be called a ‘faithful translator’, as Emily Apter terms it: one whose aim is literal translation, as one might expect, but who is ‘not faithful to the individual words of God’s Word’.5 Llull 3  See, for example, the Book of the Gentiles, Doctrina Pueril and Blanquerna. Passages from these works can be found in an Anthony Bonner’s excellent anthology, Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Llull Reader, with a New Translation of the ‘Book of the Lover and the Beloved’ by Eve Bonner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 4  Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation, Empiricism, Ethics’, in Profession 2010: 74. 5  Emily Apter, ‘Philosophical Translation and Its Untranslatability: Translation as Critical Pedagogy’, in Profession 2010: 52, citing Douglas Robinson, ‘Free Translation’, in

186 william burgwinkle would therefore be ‘a poet playing with translation loosely in imitation and pastiche’ – someone who serves as God’s agent, partner and plaything and is therefore licensed to weave from the divine words any text that might aid him in reaching his proselytizing goal.6 Llull clearly never doubted the existence of truth or the possibility of reproducing it in all its senses. To that end, he spent years refining his system of logic (the ‘Art’) in order to demonstrate to the Muslims of north Africa, through logic and rhetoric, the truth of Christian belief. The broadened view of translation that emerges from his example is thus almost contradictory: he believes in the possibility of the transfer of knowledge from one realm (geographic, political, religious, divine) to another and further believes that effecting that transfer might aid in the resolution of difference amongst the three religions of the book; but he is also convinced that this can be done more effectively through the logic of his Art than through literal translation of the sacred text. Ultimately, he trusts his own system – that involving the transposition of one set of data onto, or set in parallel with, another – over the careful transposition of word for word, language for language. Some have maintained that this simply reflects Llull’s borrowings from Middle Eastern sources – principally Sufi and Arabic logic and Jewish mysticism.7 To establish his own authority, he had to set himself up as what Venuti has called an intrepretant, ‘a “mediating representation” between a “sign” or signifier and its “object”, where the object is itself a presentation, a content or signified’.8 Llull himself is the bodily mediator between God, on the one hand, and his mediated Art, on the other; he becomes the fulcrum point from which truth points to both its divine and earthly, incarnated form.

Sources and Travels The Majorca that Llull knew in his youth had only recently been Christianized and was still deeply marked by its Islamic heritage. After a privileged youth at the royal Aragonese court, Llull became, after experiencing his visions, a wandering scholar, preacher and theologian. His early penitential travels to Rocamadour, Compostela and other holy sites led to his return to Palma,

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker (London: Routledge, 1998), 113–16. 6  Apter, ‘Philosophical Translation’, 52. 7  This is particularly notable in the case of his Liber de l’aman e l’amat, a work explicitly based on Sufi texts with which he was familiar. See Bonner, Doctor Illuminatus. 8  Venuti, ‘Translation, Empiricism, Ethics’, 75, citing Charles Peirce, The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, vol. 2: 1867–1871, ed. E. C. Moore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).



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where he began training in Arabic and theology.9 Nine years later, having heard that the slave who had been teaching him Arabic had blasphemed against Christ, Ramon struck him in the face. The slave struck back, for which he was subsequently condemned and imprisoned; then, unable to face further humiliation, he hanged himself. Llull’s response was to retreat to a monastery and it was there that his Art was visited upon him. Returning once again to Palma, he transcribed what had been revealed to him and built a hermitage on Mount Randa, the holy site of his visions. Shortly thereafter, he was called to Montpellier to join Jaume II, who had fled Majorca during a particularly difficult period, and his success during that visit led to the construction of a monastery (Miramar) on Majorca whose aim it would be to train thirteen Franciscan monks in Arabic and predication. In this first phase of his writings, Llull called repeatedly for the establishment of what we might today call schools of translation, ‘monasteries in which selected monks and others fit for the task would be brought together to learn the languages of the Saracens and other unbelievers’.10 His first entirely original work, the Libre de contemplació, was written in Arabic, shortly after he had completed his studies. In 366 chapters, Llull explains how the bodily senses, having received data from the intellect, can perceive the work and nature of God; and how the mind, once permeated with the divine truth distilled from this exercise, uses language to express that knowledge.11 In this sense, at least, Llull acknowledges the problem of moving from one language to another but the languages that concern him are not just human. As Mark D. Johnston puts it, the Libre de contemplació explains how the mind must constantly strive to interpret truth from the errors of language, just as one sifts wheat from chaff (155.12; cf. chapters 178 and 240). The disparity between material language and spiritual understanding causes the divergence between literal and spiritual signification (155.20).12

9  In returning to Palma to study, Llull was following the advice of Ramon de Penyafort, the confessor of Jaume I of Aragon (1208–76), compiler of the Decretals of Gregory IX and role model for Llull. At the time of the meeting depicted, Ramon de Penyafort would have been close to ninety years old. 10  ‘monasteria, in quibus electae personae religiosae et aliae ad hoc idoneae ponerentur ad addiscendum praedictorum Saracenorum et aliorum infidelium linguagia’; Ramon Llull, A Contemporary Life, ed. and trans. Anthony Bonner, Coleccion Tamesis: Serie B Textos 53 (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2010), 34. 11  Mark D. Johnston, ‘Ramon Llull’s Language of Contemplation and Action’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 37, no. 2 (1991): 101. 12  Johnston, ‘Ramon Llull’s Language’, 103, citing Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, latin 6443c, fol. 104r.

188 william burgwinkle Translation is thus never all that far from Llull’s mind but it is translation from the spiritual to the earthly realms that concerns him. As for relating that spiritual knowledge to the people he addresses, he tells us that love is the medium that allows for this passage into human communication, not intellectual rigour – a point that he will make forcefully in the Libre d’amic e amat. It is also clear that Llull must have studied theology during this time, as part of his Arabic training. What we might call his first ‘translation’ – that of Al-Ghazali’s Logic, prepared during these early years in Palma – would indicate that his training included reference to Islamic thought as well. Llull is often credited with being the first philosopher/theologian of the Middle Ages to compose his philosophical/theological texts in the vernacular. Blending his Christian references with what he had learned of Arabic and Jewish thinkers from the previous century, he concocted an unusual brew of theological references that were frequently called heretical and esoteric in the centuries following his death.13 His main concern throughout was, as he put it, to ‘translate’ his Art and the esoteric system of dignities and qualities that underlay his system – a notion likely inherited from both Arabic and Christian logicians – to suit a more popular audience. His aim was to lead his listeners to the realization that the world is governed by a ‘participated resemblance’, a system within which all creation speaks of the glory of God, and any comprehension of the divine message depends first upon there being a shared language that would underwrite and unite the perceptible world.14 Johnston has labelled this quality ‘superreal’ since it inheres in all matter and underpins the very language that we speak. The world as Llull saw it resembled therefore ‘a universal allegory, a kind of metaphysics of meaning’: ‘Insofar as Llull assumes that this meaning necessarily exists in reality prior to existing in thought or language, he never doubts that the world is always speaking, even if no human ears or hearts are listening.’15 Translating that ubiquitous and perplexing language became for Llull a lifelong mission and one that raised for his contemporaries a series of questions not unlike those raised by contemporary theorists of translation or designers of artificial intelligence. If we think of language as an always-prior phenomenon, a part of the fabric of the cosmos, and if that language is to be taken as a direct emanation of the divinity itself, then how can one gain access to it or translate it without debasing the original? Is hearing an originary language simply a reactivation of universals within the mind, such that 13  These Christian thinkers would include Richard of St Victor, Peter Lombard and Isidore of Seville. For more on his mixing of traditions, see Dominique Urvoy, Penser l’Islam: Les présupposés islamiques de l’ ‘Art’ de Lull (Paris: Vrin, 1980), 71. 14  Mark D. Johnston, The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 35. 15 Johnston, Evangelical Rhetoric, 34.



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every language is always already a translation? Is all sensory stimulation just a defective translation of the universal truth, a misplaced effect of mimesis claiming originality? How does grammar, or scholarship for that matter, misinterpret language by making it fit into pre-established rules and patterns that render listeners incapable even of intuiting what surrounds them? Must translation always move from one medium to another – from text to spoken word in the case of preaching, or from text to image, including mental image, in the case of reading? Or can a translation invoke both the original and the copy simultaneously, as in a multimedia or bi-textual event? Is Llull right in asserting that translation must always have as its aim the audience’s complete comprehension of the original, by whatever means possible, even when that means creative manipulation? Finally, and this is crucial in Llull’s case, how does one translate the input or interference of culture? Is a native Islamicized Christian culture to be seen as a necessary corruption of the divine message, a contradiction in terms, an accidental rather than an original form? In considering these questions, we must keep in mind that they were never a matter of simple curiosity for Llull. Like most mystics, he was compulsive and egocentric and he expected to be understood, appreciated and acclaimed by those who listened. It must have been difficult to accept that appreciation of his work, then as today, was very mixed. He found himself ignored by theologians on his first trip to Paris in 1272 as a curious relic of twelfthcentury thinking stranded in the thirteenth.16 Not only his provincial thinking but also his mode of expression would have struck his listeners as odd. As he admitted later in his life, his language was always tainted by what he called Arabisms, stylistic tics and ways of thinking that he was not willing to give up, even if he had been able to.17 Moreover that first ‘translation’, the Compendium logicae Algazelis, indicates that this Arabic colouring went beyond a mere mode of expression to penetrate his thinking as well. Like Al-Ghazali (1058–1111) a century and a half earlier, Llull denounced Aristotelian readings that challenged Christian theology and championed instead an Asharite-like theory of occasionalism that questioned whether any interference was possible between God’s act of creation and its results in the world; whether, in other words, any translation of God’s word was possible other than a mirroring of the system of logical emanations that Llull saw as structuring the universe. Dominique Urvoy concluded from his study of Llull’s borrowing and influence from Arabic that he must have been working from the beginning with concepts he had encountered early on in life. His post-conversion writings, and especially the Libre de contemplatió, are marked by a mixture of Zahirism 16 Urvoy, Penser l’Islam, 71. 17  In the Commentary to his Art (Ars generalis), delivered in Paris in 1311, Llull apologized for his ‘modus loquendi arabicus’ [Arabic manner of speaking]. See Llull, A Contemporary Life, ed. Bonner, 47 n. 36.

190 william burgwinkle (a school of Islamic theology which emphasizes all creation as an emanation from the divine) and Ash’arism (which, while not denying the power of reason, makes it subservient and incapable of piercing divine will or the secrets of the cosmos). Though Urvoy argues against a heavy debt to any one Islamic figure in particular, he argues that Llull’s work is coloured on every level by an amalgamation of elements acquired through his study and life in Palma, including his notion of the dignities as the exhalations of God in the world. Even the system of analogous pairings of concepts is credited to his knowledge of the zairja, a device used by Arabic astrologers to chart the stars through study of the twenty-eight letters of the alphabet, each one associated with a particular philosophical principle that could be combined with numbers and categories to arrive at definitive readings. Llull’s great Art involves a similar system, in which the dignities are combined with the three correlatives of each of these dignities to produce twenty-seven units that can be combined in any of an almost infinite number of formations. Infamously, Llull placed these two sets of iconic symbols on superimposed wheels that could be spun to land in ever-changing combinations, offering solutions to any theological question that should arise. This finite system, one that contained all of the possibilities of thought and all of the answers to any questions that should ever arise regarding God and his creation, fits neatly within the Scholasticism of his age, one of whose characteristics involved the construction of all-inclusive systems and compendia of knowledge. With the benefit of his divine revelation, he could work out every statistical combination to arrive at a system in which every element has a part to play in a larger system of logical order. This quasi-mathematical logic, in which all individual elements are subservient to their combination into larger patterns, pervades all of Llull’s treatises, including the Art, and has led to claims that it was his thinking that led eventually to the creation of the analogue computer.18 One might then agree that Derrida’s contention that there is no such thing as an original human language, that all language is always already translated (in this case from a divinely ordained system of mathematical universalism), finds strong support in Llull’s example.19 To return to the questions posed earlier, we might now add several others. When the Art was revealed to Llull, what language was God speaking? Did that language involve mathematical formulae, images or linguistic units? Was the message transmitted through sets and subsets, symbolic graphing or sentences laid out in semantic blocks? If God spoke to him in Catalan (in that we might assume that God always 18  See Eusebi Colomer, ‘De Ramon Llull a la moderna informàtica’, Estudios Lulianos 23 (1979), 113–35, reprinted in Eusebi Colomer, El pensament als països catalans durant l’Edat Mitjana i el Renaixement (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans/Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1997), 85–112. 19  Jacques Derrida, ‘Des tours de Babel’, in Jacques Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, 2nd edn (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 203–35.



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speaks in our maternal language), did Llull simultaneously translate it into Arabic as well as Latin, since both could be seen as sacred languages? Or was Llull’s attitude towards human speech already so disdainful that he saw it simply as a tool that could only aim at perfect understanding with no real hope of attaining it? If so, this would not mean that Llull ever gave up on communication per se, simply that it required his bodily presence in order to ground its meaning. Llull had no doubt that the message he had received on the mountain was transmissible to a wider public, but he knew that that would require his active intervention because of his affinity with the original source. Underlying all of his languages – Catalan, Latin, Occitan, French – is the belief that structure emanates from God and flows through creation and that he alone had been given the key. Language as we know it is, in other words, simply an epidermis for structure, a veil that keeps us guessing while allowing a mystic such as Llull to infer the structure beneath and pass it on. All human language is therefore, we could conclude, figurative and rhetorical, held at some remove from its referent and necessarily debased. It requires for its translation the mediation of a sacred body, in this case, that of Ramon himself.

Vita coetanea In this second part of the essay, I will look more specifically at how Llull the translator figures in the life story he dictated to the Carthusian monks in the Vauvert monastery in Paris in the year 1311 and how he is translated, sometimes ventriloquized, by his collaborator, Thomas Le Myésier. The Vita coetanea, supposed to have been dictated by Llull, is actually the product of Le Myésier’s efforts and it appears to have been translated almost instantaneously into Catalan and also into pictorial form – a graphic novel avant la lettre, planned and executed under Le Myésier’s direction.20 It is found in the first twelve folios of the Breviculum, a short manuscript composed by Le Myésier in Arras for which he also oversaw the artistic project and probably wrote the texts.21 Thomas Le Myésier was a canon in Arras who had some sort of association with the Sorbonne and also worked as a physician 20  A recent book by Robert Petersen, Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels (Oxford: Praeger, 2011), traces the speech bubbles of the modern graphic novel back to the swirling speech banners of the medieval image and further back to prehistoric art that narrates through images. No author for the Vita can be established, given the supposed circumstances under which it was composed, and most therefore refer to it as an anonymous work. 21  J. N. Hillgarth claims that the images of Le Myésier in the Breviculum were copied from life and that the Vita itself includes within it comments made in Le Myésier’s own hand. See Hillgarth, Ramon Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 463. All twelve images can be consulted at www.lullianarts.net/minia-

192 william burgwinkle to members of the French royal family. He presumably knew Llull through the latter’s stays in the Carthusian house in Paris during his trips to the city and he took it upon himself, following Llull’s death, to preserve and propagate his works by compiling three major collections, the Electorium magnum (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, latin 15450), the Electorium medium, a nowlost shorter version of the Magnum, and our Breviculum, the short and elegant book that contains the complete Vita coetanea (Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St Peter, perg. 92). This latter text, the Breviculum, still intact but for an eleven-folio lacuna, gives an account of Llull’s life and accomplishments and sets in motion what we might call the afterlife of Llullian reception.22 The final words of the Vita make it clear that Le Myésier was thinking about diffusion and encouraging others to take up where he had left off: ‘His [Llull’s] books were distributed throughout the world; but he had them collected principally in three places, namely, the Carthusian monastery in Paris, the house of a certain nobleman of the city of Genoa, and that of a certain nobleman of the city of Majorca’.23 I am going to describe very briefly six of the twelve images that accompany the Vita coetanea to illustrate how they carry forward Llull’s story and produce a co-authored master plan of how he worked and would be remembered. We begin with the first illustration (Figure 9.1), an account of the events leading to the conversion of 1264.24 On the left, Ramon is presumably composing secular love poetry when he is confronted with the five visions of the crucifixion. The tonsured, pink-robed poet is working in what appears tures/index.HTM (accessed 1 June 1 2010) and on the Ramon Llull database at http:// orbita.bib.ub.es/ramon/obres.asp (accessed 1 June 2010). 22  Next to nothing is known about the artist who illuminated the text. No one has been able to establish any similarities between the unusual decorative patterns of the miniatures and other manuscripts composed in Arras or Paris, though Hillgarth suggests a southern French artist, perhaps someone from Montpellier, a city to which Llull travelled and in which he stayed on several occasions. See Hillgarth, Ramon Lull, 467. Hasler referred to the ‘höchst unkonventionelles’ of the Breviculum miniatures and speculated that the painter was more likely a muralist than an illuminator: see Hillgarth’s review of Gerhard Röhmer and Gerhard Stamm, eds, Raimundus Lullus, Thomas Le Myesier, Electorium parvum seu Breviculum, vol. 1: Vollstandiges Faksimile der Handscrift St Peter perg. 92 der Badischen Landesbibliothek Karlsruhe; vol. 2: Kommentarzum Faksimile (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert, 1988), in Speculum 65, no. 4 (1990): 1040. 23  ‘Divvlgati quidem sunt libri sui per uniuersum; sed in tribus locis fecit eos praecipue congregari; uidelicet in monasterio Cartusiensium Parisius, et apud quendam nobilem ciuitatis Ianuae, et apud quendam nobilem ciuitatis Maroricarum’, quoted in Llull, A Contemporary Life, ed. Bonner, 84. Hillgarth identifies the nobleman in Palma as Llull’s son, Pere de Sentmenat, and the Genoese nobleman as Perceval Spinola. See Hillgarth, Ramon Lull, 142. 24  Transcriptions of the Latin text on these folios, as well as translations of the Latin into several languages, are provided at www.lullianarts.net/miniatures/index.HTM (accessed 1 June 2010). English translations are from this site.



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to be a domed Islamic-style building that contrasts with the recognizably Romanesque religious edifices of Rocamadour in the central image and the meeting with Ramon de Penyafort, Llull’s role model and confessor in Barcelona in the third. Notable here is not only the distinction drawn between the sacred space of Christianity and the other, presumably domestic, space of Islamic Majorca but also the consistency of Llull’s portrayal. His upward gaze, his pilgrim’s staff and the manner in which his spoken text is depicted distinguish him from the other figures. Speech moves upward in this Latin language original. It fits itself into available spaces, deforms its own shape to fit that of the sturdy architecture that precedes it, and issues and returns to the mouth of the speaker. These same elements strike us in the third illustration of the series (Figure

Figure 9.1. Conversion and pilgrimage of Ramon Llull. Thomas Le Myésier with Ramon Llull, Breviculum (1321–36). Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St Peter, perg. 92, fol. 1v.

194 william burgwinkle 9.2). Here Llull finds himself back home in Majorca, where he and his Arabicspeaking tutor (though here speaking Latin) debate, struggle and seek revenge. To the tutor’s objection that, having now learned Arabic, Ramon should have learned along with it the truth of Islam, Ramon responds with an accusation of blasphemy. The central scene portrays the attack and physical struggle, and to the right we see the suicidal tutor, gesturing towards Ramon in his last moments of life and Ramon’s self-exoneration. Once again, the depiction of the language spoken circles around itself, ornamental as well as communicational, as in many examples of Islamic calligraphy. Though there are too few examples of contemporary Islamic manuscripts to be able to hazard a conclusion as to influence one way or the other, J. N. Hillgarth suggests that the

Figure 9.2. Ramon Llull’s dispute with his Arabic-speaking tutor. Thomas Le Myésier with Ramon Llull, Breviculum (1321–36). Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St Peter, perg. 92, fol. 3v.



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artist might well be one who either knew Majorca or at least the Kingdom of Aragon and had travelled to the north to work on this manuscript.25 The fourth and fifth illustrations in the series provide a digest of the great Art, supposedly following Ramon’s own account. This includes an interesting address by the shepherd who appears to Ramon as he takes refuge on Mount Randa. Offering some thoughts on what translation might mean when dealing with sacred language, the mysterious young man explains in the accompanying text that the ‘principles of the first figure are real dignities in God, which mutually convert, simply and without confusion, as one most simple essence of Godhead, so that God’s goodness is great by itself and for itself, and that there is neither composition nor accident in God. Now each dignity must have its own intrinsic, essential, natural and substantial act, and all acts must convert into one simple, individual, infinite and eternal act leaving no emptiness, idleness or defect.’26 This insistence on the integrity of the sacred message, involving nothing so messy as translation or residue, is the topic of the fifth image (showing Ramon explicating the Art), while the sixth and seventh images (Figures 9.3, 9.4) present an allegorical battlefield and triumphal procession brimming with visual invention. The tower of falsehood stands at the left (Figure 9.3), inhabited by eighteen vices (including, along with the expected, such things as neglect, ignorance, weakness, confusion, frustration, nothingness, smallness, impossibility, contrariety, vacuum, malformation, superfluity and deterioration), but the army of Aristotle is approaching and the skirmishes have begun. Aristotle, armoured and mounted on his horse called ‘Reasoning’, carries the lance of ‘abundant syllogisms’ and leads a chariot in which we find the five predicables of the Aristotelian system: ‘the most general genus, the most specific species, general difference, property, and accident’.27 The ten predicates are stuffed into the back of the wagon, announcing themselves: ‘Substance exists first and foremost by itself and for itself. We, the accidents, do not exist for ourselves, but so that substance can exist in itself. Therefore, since we are dependent on substance, we are inherent to it.’28 Appropriately, 25  See above, n. 22. 26  ‘principia primae figurae sunt in Deo dignitates reales, quae sine confusione inuicem conuertuntur simpliciter in una simplicissima essentia deitatis, ut bonitas Dei sit magna de se et per se et propter se, ne in Deo sit compositio et accidens. Oportet etiam, quod quaelibet dignitas habeat actum suum intrinsecum, essentialem, naturalem, substantialem, et quod omnes actus conuertantur et sint unus actus numero simpliciter infinitus et aeternus, ne inde sit uacuitas, otiositas et defectus.’ 27  ‘Genus generalissimum, species specialissima, differentia generalis, proprietas, accidens.’ 28  ‘Per se, principaliter, primo, propter se subsistens. Non sumus propter nos, sed ut sit substantia in se. Ideo, quia ab ea dependemus, sibimet inhaeremus.’ Note that this warfare metaphor could apply as well to the process of translation. For more on translation as a form of philosophy, see Apter, ‘Philosophical Translation’.

Figure 9.3. The army of Aristotle. Thomas Le Myésier with Ramon Llull, Breviculum (1321–36). Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St Peter, perg. 92, fol. 6v.

Figure 9.4. Three trumpeters leading the army of Ramon Llull. Thomas Le Myésier with Ramon Llull, Breviculum (1321–36). Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St Peter, perg. 92, fol. 7r.

Figure 9.5. Ramon Llull crosses the Mediterranean to north Africa and is imprisoned for preaching to Muslims. Thomas Le Myésier with Ramon Llull, Breviculum (1321–36). Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St Peter, perg. 92, fol. 10r.



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Aristotle and his cart are followed by a second horseman, the formidable Averroës. His mount is named ‘Imagination’ and his lance reads, on one side, ‘Supreme bliss is attained by reaching perfection in speculative exercise’ and, on the other, ‘Averroës’s faith is heresy by any law. The intelligent man must speculate with phantasms.’29 Behind Averroës we find a final coach, this one ecclesiastical and carrying the pope and bishop, whose last words are: ‘Socrates is a friend, but the truth is an even better friend.’30 The seventh illustration (Figure 9.4) features Ramon himself, astride his mount ‘recta intentio’ (Right Intention), preceded by three trumpeters celebrating all things trinitarian. The banner that Ramon carries reads: ‘One who understands spiritual things must transcend the senses and the imagination, and transcend himself again and again.’31 Most of the text on this folio is overtly anti-Averroist. The eighteen figures in the wagon behind Ramon represent the eighteen figures of the Llullian Art, followed by what he calls the ‘principia respectiva’ [relative principles]. Llull is not dressed for battle, as are Aristotle and Averroës, because he is clearly in the right: his own powers of intellect allow him access to God’s system. Llull passes by, seemingly invincible, using words as a weapon rather than for protection. The tenth image (Figure 9.5) of the series again features Llull at the centre of an act of communication but the conditions are very different. On the left of the image we see him crossing the Mediterranean, en route to north Africa; in the centre he is being beaten and stoned by his unreceptive Muslim audience; and on the right he is engaged in a debate with his Muslim judge before being thrown into a prison tower for defiance. The dress and headdress of the audience and the banners flying from the tower clearly identify this as an Islamic culture and the image is again interesting for the integration of the script into the overall design.32 Its sinuous quality references Arabic sacred texts but it differs from the earlier scripts which figured always on the same plane – straight and linear even if written on their side. In this sense, the image attempts to depict (even translate) Llull’s integration into the very Muslim culture that he was seeking to influence. The chaos and violence of the scene are evoked through the rhythmic undulation of the line of script and the way that the red script, the dialogue supposedly spoken by Llull, is directed at the darker, dividing line of script that represents the judge’s sentence. 29  ‘Esse perfectum in speculatiuis et in eis exerceri summa est felicitas’; ‘Fides Auerrois haeretici in omni lege. Intelligentem oportet phantasmata speculari.’ 30  ‘Socrates amicus, sed magis amica ueritas.’ 31  ‘Hasta sua: intelligentem spiritualia oportet sensus et imaginationem transcendere et multotiens seipsum.’ 32  Hillgarth suggests that the fanciful Islamic hats depicted throughout the Vita might indicate that the artist had never seen a Muslim. I am not so sure and would suggest rather that parody is in play. See Hillgarth, Ramon Lull, 466.

200 william burgwinkle This same effect reappears in a rather spectacular form in the following image, the eleventh (Figure 9.6), the most overtly autobiographical of the illustrations, which depicts Llull’s mise-en-abîme meeting in Paris with his intellectual disciple, Thomas Le Myésier. Thomas is outlining what he will include in the collection of Ramon’s texts that he is preparing (the Electorium) and Ramon is carefully running through the precepts of his Art to be sure that Thomas has not missed anything essential. The elaborate textual layout emphasizes the form of the exchange: if not for Thomas’s deferential posture, this could be a legal debate or the meeting of two conmen. Just as

Figure 9.6. Ramon Llull meets Thomas Le Myésier in Paris. Thomas Le Myésier with Ramon Llull, Breviculum (1321–36). Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St Peter, perg. 92, fol. 11v.



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in the previous image, where failure to complete a communicative act in a successful manner resulted in swirling dialogue, raised fists and chaotic violence, this penultimate image could be taken as a pictorial representation of translation in the broad sense that I have been advocating: thoughts and systems of representation on the left, surrounding the first speaker, Ramon Llull; and swathes of spoken text floating above his collected works, holding the two speakers, Llull and Le Myésier, at bay. This image does not portray a lecture or debate, or even a scene of defence or penance, as in many of the other images. It represents instead a meeting between Llull and his most important theological and literary ally, the man to whom he entrusted his original manuscripts and to whom he dictated his final legacy, the Vita. Both parties seem equally active and engaged. Ramon gestures behind him, to the script on which he locates the more than sixteen figures of the Ars demonstrativa, whilst another set of precepts are inscribed across the top of the folio, surrounding the speakers and fashioning a sort of ideological base from which meaning can be inferred. At first glance, it appears that Llull is the centrepiece on display. The three nuggets of text that emanate from him to the right look more like pictorial/textual hands, pointing at their source. This is not language whose first duty is to transmit a message but language that figures its speaker as its interpretant – both source and end-point, signifier and signified. Though the text is in Latin, it is more than likely that at least one of these figures was speaking Catalan. Thomas’s speech swerves away from his body, at head and waist level while Ramon stands like the trunk of a tree from which branches sprout and point towards the system above him. As an image of medieval translation, then, this folio suggests a complexity of multilingual exchange that is not necessarily based on a shared set of precepts. While Llull’s language points towards the heavens and claims its roots in the divine as well, Thomas’s points towards both heaven and earth. None of these textual blurbs seems destined towards a speaker; instead they seem to be flung into the stratosphere in Ramon’s case, directed to their divine source, and towards an unreceptive listener in the case of Thomas. Ramon’s final blessing to his amanuensis smacks of the obsessive: So long as you do not distort the text, and if you select from all the books the things that are the most understandable, lovable, and memorable, given that the things I did not deal with in one book are covered in other books, you will do very well. And here are 155 books, small, medium and large, which I wrote for the love of God by the infusion of his grace.33 33  ‘Dum tamen textuem non laedas, ex omnibus eligas, quod est utilius et magis intelligibile, diligibile et recordabile, quare, quod praetermisi in uno libro, recuperaui in alio, ideo optime facis! Et ecce 155 libros tam paruos, mediocres quam magnos, quos amore Dei per infusionem gratiae suae feci.’

202 william burgwinkle This ‘infusion of grace’ is suggested not only by the graceful and swirling textual lines that surround Ramon but by the emanations rising like smoke above the impressive collection of books in the wheelbarrow as well.34 Thomas, in glancing at the load, utters the text’s one comic line: ‘Master, modern people like to keep things brief.’35 It is left to him to translate this unwieldy bounty – into Catalan, into image and into digestible propaganda. He continues: I have prepared to make, as much as possible, a good abridgement of the content of your books while keeping the sense intact, so as to alleviate the students’ eye fatigue, and the confusing meanings of the alphabet of the demonstrative Art and its sixteen figures that confuse the intellect. Therefore, master, without presumption, I intend to gather all into one selection, and make a first selection in keeping with your final intention, and from this I intend to make another, more concise selection, and then from the second I intend to select a third, even more abridged selection, which I intend to duly present to her Majesty, the Queen of France and Navarre.36

The final scene (twelfth in the series) reverts to a sumptuous Gothic interior, the chamber of the queen of France, Jeanne de Bourgogne.37 This esteemed patroness accepts from Thomas the Breviculum, the autobiographical text in which all of these illuminations appear, along with the Electorium Medium and the Primum Electorium (magnum). This last volume is still held in Paris (latin 15450), while the Breviculum is now in Karlsruhe 34  Petersen, discussing the forerunners of the graphic novel (Comics, 49), refers to speech bubbles, banners, wispy smoke, etc. that transmit text as ‘emanata’, a very apt description in the case of Llull. 35  ‘Domine, moderni gaudent breuitate considerabilium.’ 36  ‘ideo iam praeceptum est mihi, prout est possible bono modo, actuum librorum uestrorum abreuiare sententias, intellectu tamen integras, atque alleuiare studium et fatigationem oculorum, confusionem significatorum alphabeti demonstratiuae Artis et sexdecim eiusdem Artis figuras, quae confundunt intellectum. Ideo, magister, sine praesumptione ex omnibus intendo in unum colligere eligendo et ad uestram intentionem finalem deducendo et primam electionem, et ex eadem eligere secundam breuiorem; et ex secunda intendo tertiam eligere breuiorem, quam dominae meae, reginae Franciae et Nauarrae, intendo ut debitum praesentare.’ 37  Gerhard Röhmer and Gerhard Stamm, in the 1988 study of the manuscript that they edited (Raimundus Lullus, Thomas Le Myesier), confirm Hillgarth’s conclusion that the manuscript had indeed been composed in Arras under the direct supervision of Le Myésier and that it was presented to Jeanne de Bourgogne, queen of France, shortly before 1322. The Arras connection is confirmed through study of coats of arms in the illuminations that point to families associated with the Countess Mahaut of Artois, Le Myésier’s patron and mother of the queen. See Hillgarth, Ramon Lull, and his review of Röhmer and Stamm in Speculum 65, no. 4 (1990): 1039–40.



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(St Peter, perg. 92).38 Thomas’s task appears to have been a total success. The Breviculum, a translation in the literal and figurative sense, is presented as a courtly and religious offering that stands as the most reliable account of Llull’s remarkable journey. As we see in this portrait of two translators, one gesturing towards his works and posterity and the other to the speaker and text before him, both are originators and agents of transmission. Translation in the age before publication clearly involved complicated questions of aesthetics, packaging and self-fashioning if ever the text were to meet with the kind of popular acceptance that Llull so desired. Neither of these translators is much interested in simply replacing one text with another or with translation as a mechanical task: what drives them is the gilding of one multilingual text with a veneer of status in order to create another more hybridized and fetishized object, one that will ultimately pass into the world with authorial blessing and under full authorial control.

38  For a more complete transcription of the Breviculum as it exists and an attempted reconstruction of the sections that are missing, see Charles Lohr, Theodor Pindl-Büchel and Walburga Bücheli, eds, Raimvndi Lvlli Opera Latina: Supplementi Lulliani, vol. 1: Brevicvlvum Sev Electorivm parvvm Thomae Migerii (Le Myésier) (Turnhout: Brepols, 1990). Anthony Bonner’s review of this book, in Speculum 68, no. 1 (1993): 194–6, provides a very useful summary.

10 Rough Translation Charles d’Orléans, Lydgate and Hoccleve*

Ardis Butterfield

Equivalence and Competence Translation is often associated with equivalence.1 The goal of the translator in modern times is to create a seamless transition between a text and its translation, which is supposed to be marked by the ‘absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities’.2 ‘All that is foreign or strange’ should be ‘deleted, every rough corner smoothed’.3 Such an emptying out of the translator’s role as a writer brings the reward of a reader who imagines that he or she is actually reading the original work. But this assumed achievement is impoverished by what many perceive as vitiating costs. Nabokov, while he was engaged in translating Pushkin, passionately exclaimed that the claim that ‘so-and-so’s translation reads smoothly’ sent him into ‘spasms of helpless fury’. A ‘readable’ translation has merely ‘substituted easy platitudes for the breath taking intricacies of the text’.4 As well as Nabokov’s amour propre about the kind of *  I am grateful to Jeremy Smith, James Simpson and the editors of this volume for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 1  Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004), 147. 2  Jane Taylor, ‘Introduction: Beyond Equivalence’, in Double Vision: Studies in Literary Translation, ed. Jane Taylor (Durham: University of Durham, 2002), 1–12. 3  Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2008), 1. 4  Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Problems of Translation: Onegin in English’, in Translation Studies Reader, ed. Venuti, 115.

rough translation 205 respect that should be offered to a great writer’s work, there has been much passionate objection on ethical grounds. No translation is innocently neutral, nor should seek to be. Every lexical choice, every syntactic choice, is freighted with social and cultural assumptions that shape the resulting prose or poetry, sometimes in ways that work against or even betray the original text: traduttore/traditore [translator/traitor]. Lawrence Venuti’s co-option of such suspicions within a modern framework of postcolonial translation has been particularly influential (though as the Italian proverb just mentioned indicates, to be wary of equivalence is hardly a new position). The lesson has been so well learnt, in fact, that it may seem surprising that difficulties over equivalence remain. Perhaps the fundamental difficulty concerns the spectre of incompetence. For seamlessness or invisibility are achieved only through accuracy – not necessarily cultural or aesthetic accuracy, as we have observed – but certainly linguistic skill, of a kind. The ‘readability’ over which Nabokov shudders is at least the result of fluency. There are many ways of defining a bad translation, but having an inadequate grasp of the language of the original text would be regarded by most people as a central handicap. It takes one beyond matters of culture or aesthetics and into the field of education. A translator may have deep insider knowledge of the culture of his text but, with poor linguistic tools with which to receive or express that knowledge, he will usually be excoriated, whereas unobtrusive fluency is admired.5 In postcolonial writing, notions of linguistic incompetence are recognized as being less easy to dismiss, although the tensions they create are no less significant. Dipesh Chakrabarty describes rough translation as the type of approximate glossing provided by colonial translators of local customs and terms. It is symptomatic of the ‘rough and ready’ methods of colonial rule, and a model of translation that he thereby wishes to challenge.6 But roughness might be a deliberate strategy on the part of a postcolonial writer whose position is at the opposite pole from a colonial translator. Citing ‘the strange case of the Indian English novel’, G. J. V. Prasad, for instance, argues that the notion of roughness in a text is one that underscores ‘the otherness of the language used as well as the culture depicted’.7 Neologisms, errors and non-standard language use all become tactics for drawing the reader’s attention to the differ5  ‘of a person … who had recently turned her or his hand to translating from the Bengali. Upon repeated questioning about her or his proficiency in Bengali, this would-be translator has given the same answer: “bangla porte jani” (I can read Bengali). We all know of such cases’; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Translating into English’, in Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 95. 6  Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 17. 7  G. J. V. Prasad, ‘Writing Translation: The Strange Case of the Indian English Novel’,

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ences between Indian English and English, not to provoke a dismissive reaction but rather to educate the reader into grasping numerous small shocks of linguistic difference. Contemporary Asian or African writers composing in English have the complex and ethically sensitive task of translating their own culture’s use of language without collaborating in a rough colonialism of their own.8 It is especially difficult when their highly polished, standard English is being used to express the non-standard Englishes that are the result of a previous history of colonial rule. There are conflicting responses to this dilemma. Prasad’s interesting analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in the same essay remarks on Rushdie’s use of Urdu to interlard his text. Rushdie has been admonished for doing so by some commentators on the grounds that this creates a muddy, confusedly hybrid text in which the Urdu is not functioning as Urdu to an audience who knows the language, but rather as an opaque sign of foreignness to a monolingual English audience. Urdu here is used to block communication rather than to speak for itself. Such commentators prefer the passages where Rushdie ‘translates’ the speech, for example, of an uneducated woman, into a form of heavily marked English, full of gaps, mistakes and garbled syntax. This, for them, is a purer use of language.9 Bad English, here, becomes a strategy of translation. Errors, neologisms, non-standard forms and phrases are deliberately cultivated by a translator to avoid the dishonesty of a homogenized, airbrushed transfer from one culture to another. This essay is engaged in such issues on more than one front. One is to bring together two different senses of ‘rough’: those elements in a translated text that signal its otherness, and the feeling that a language is being used without sufficient knowledge of, or facility in, its formal properties and idioms. I want to consider what happens, first, when we put the two senses together and, second, when we do so in relation to some medieval examples of Anglo-French translation. Might there be strategies of bad English in this much earlier period? In asking this, I do not wish to imply that medieval contexts for discussing language use are straightforwardly ‘equivalent’ to postcolonial ones. The work needed to think through the potential links between modern reflection in this area and medieval texts is considerable.10 One of the most productive ways forward, in my view, is to think bilingually, both in terms of comparing different cultures and traditions, and also in examining the very processes of in Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (London: Routledge, 1999), 42. 8  Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Thick Translation’, in Translation Studies Reader, ed. Venuti, 389–401. 9  Prasad, ‘Writing Translation’, 46. 10  See Simon Gaunt, ‘Can the Middle Ages Be Postcolonial?’ Comparative Literature 61, no. 2 (2009): 160–76.

rough translation 207 contact. Relationships between English and French in the medieval period are a central instance. Just as the postcolonial situation encompasses a tension between notions of competence and incompetence in language use, so the three late medieval writers I shall examine here – Charles d’Orléans, Lydgate and Hoccleve – have also been caught within a morass of conflicting and often only semiarticulated cultural and literary judgements of their competence. The issues are particularly stark in the case of Charles, where command of a foreign language is in question, but they also run deep in the modern understanding and appreciation of fifteenth-century English poets, whose linguistic competence in their own language has persistently been challenged.

Charles d’Orléans, Lydgate and Hoccleve and the Problem of Language In the top rank of French nobility, the grandson of Charles V and father of Louis XII, Charles d’Orléans was captured by the English at Agincourt and, along with several other high-profile hostages, kept in exile in England for twenty-five years. During this time and on his return to France in 1440, Charles produced a substantial body of French lyric verse. This was copied into his personal manuscript.11 A further manuscript survives – London, British Library, Harley 682 – which contains a large-scale version in English of his French lyric collection. After decades of debate, it is now widely accepted by anglophone scholars that Charles authored these English poems.12 Nonetheless, the cultural awkwardness of their production lingers in ways that continue to affect his status in literary histories. For instance, the question of attribution divides neatly across the Channel: French scholars continue to consider them the work of an inferior anonymous translator.13 On the English side, the English poetry in Harley 682 has received little direct comparison with other contemporary English writing. This is presumably because the Harley 682 material falls somewhere between anonymous and ‘French’. Anonymity, especially of a collection of poetic items rather than a single long work, is always hard to sell as ‘major’. But the collection’s opposite tag – the work of a Frenchman – unsurprisingly does not readily give it a place in a modern English literary history.14 11  Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 25458. 12  For a detailed account, see Mary-Jo Arn, ‘Charles of Orléans and the Poems of BL MS Harley 682’, English Studies 74, no. 3 (1993): 222–35. This is supplemented in Charles d’Orléans, Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of Orleans’s English Book of Love: A Critical Edition, ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 29–37. 13  Arn, ‘Charles of Orléans’, 223 and 223 n. 5. 14  The two most recent histories mention Charles appreciatively, albeit briefly: James

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Charles’s place in the English canon is marginal because it is entirely ambiguous. The writings in English which are ascribed to him by modern scholars are in an uneasy position; less English, somehow, because of their association with him, but in any case in an English that has struck readers as strange, whether they think it was his or some other translator’s. And yet the anonymous body of work contained in Harley 682 is by far the most substantial single-author collection of English lyric verse to survive before print. It is tempting to speculate how far it would have entered into the mainstream rehabilitation of fifteenthcentury poetry had it had an English author’s name attached. To situate Charles within an English literary history thus runs up against various forms of resistance. However, in the wake of new scholarly recognition of the importance of French as a vernacular in England alongside English until well into the early modern period, it may be timely to reconsider his role. As I have recently argued elsewhere, we cannot understand the undoubted rise in English without taking into account ‘how deeply it was pressured, enveloped, and stimulated by the concurrent changes in the status of French’ both in England and on the continent.15 Looking at the two vernaculars together gives us a much richer context for understanding vernacularity in England than a focus on English alone. This essay seeks to develop this perspective by arguing that Charles is ripe for integration within a larger discussion of fifteenth-century English precisely because his writings embody this double vernacularity.16 John Lydgate (c. 1370–1449), a monk at Bury St Edmunds whose prolific and esteemed output enabled him to move in metropolitan and Parisian circles, and Thomas Hoccleve (1367–1426), a clerk in the bureaucratic heart of Westminster, although both now enjoying a more respected place in English medieval studies than ever before, have also suffered from disapprobation. Most notably, the ‘historicist turn’ that has recuperated Lydgate has left to one side the grounds for appreciating Lydgate’s writing as ‘literary’, haunted by the older dismissal of his literary status that set in soon after his death and was greatly reinforced in the twentieth century by ‘new critical’ readers.17 What anyone means now by fifteenth-century literary English is remarkably unclear. For most readers, this period of English is identified by the term ‘aureate’, first invented, it seems, by Lydgate.18 It refers to the practice of Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 185–7; David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 58–9. 15  Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 319–20. 16  For some prior discussion of this point, see Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, 304–7. 17  Larry Scanlon and James Simpson, eds, John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture and Lancastrian England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 9. 18 See Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath and Sherman M. Kuhn (Ann

rough translation 209 coining Latinate words to gild and ‘enlumyne’ English, a widespread stylistic characteristic of some of the work of Lydgate himself, Hoccleve, Hawes and many other post-Chaucerian writers. This sense of elevated literary activity, compounded by Lydgate’s favourite rhyme ‘aureate/laureate’, has never had an automatic connection in readers’ minds with literary skill. Post-Chaucerian English poetry has lived in an uneasy tension between the high-flown froth of aureate diction and what has been routinely castigated as poor versifying.19 Seth Lerer finds a subtle way of explaining this tension by finding Lydgate’s aureate/laureate rhyme a deliberate obfuscation, a way of mythologizing poetry and its production in an imagined rather than technically specific act of golden poetic inspiration.20 But Lerer’s explanation falls short of describing Lydgate himself as a master stylist. The carefully modulated damning praise of Derek Pearsall (‘He was much admired in his day, but his verbosity, the inflation of his diction, the uneasiness of his syntax, and the unevenness of his metre are obstacles to pleasure’) continues to reverberate.21 We need fresh ways of appreciating the literary language of Lydgate and his English contemporaries that do not fall back on the very critical models that were responsible for discrediting them. This essay attempts a step in this direction, but prompted by Charles d’Orléans rather than Lydgate. Charles has the potential to transform the issues because he provides the singular instance of a French writer approaching English from French, rather than an English writer approaching French from English. Even without prejudice as to his authorship of the Harley 682 poems, the possibility that these poems are the work of a French translator gives us a fresh basis on which to assess the kind of English they represent. The status of Charles’s English has revolved around the tricky question of whether its features imply a native or a foreign use of English, ‘genuine’ idioms or incompetent, outlandish phrases that signal a lack of assurance about someone else’s vernacular. Although Arn has presented an overwhelming case for his authorship,22 the issues themselves have perhaps contributed to a general hesitancy to admit the poems

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956–), s.v. ‘Aureat’ (adj.); Lois A. Ebin, Illuminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 25–7. Ebin goes on to discuss in detail a cluster of related terms in Lydgate: ‘enlumyne’, ‘adourne’, ‘enbelissche’, ‘goldyn’, ‘sugrid’, ‘rethorik’ and ‘elloquence’. 19  For example: ‘The prevailing fault of English diction, in the fifteenth century, is redundant ornament, and an affectation of anglicising Latin words’: Thomas Campbell, ed., Specimens of the British Poets, 7 vols (London: John Murray, 1819), 1, part 2:93. 20  Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 38. 21  Derek Pearsall, ed., Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology of Writings in English, 1375– 1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 343, cited in Phillipa Hardman, ‘Lydgate’s “Uneasy” Syntax’, in John Lydgate, ed. Scanlon and Simpson, 12. 22  Arn, ‘Charles of Orléans’; Charles d’Orléans, Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, 29–37.

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into ‘genuinely’ English company. My purpose in bringing Charles d’Orléans, Lydgate and Hoccleve together is to argue that the questions of attribution that have dominated discussion of Harley 682 are not merely local to Charles, but link to central questions about fifteenth-century English. The conjunction raises interesting issues about the character of their English – more sharply, the quality of their English. Is the English verse of Harley 682 a different kind of English from that of Lydgate and Hoccleve? Is it Anglo-French or perhaps franco-anglais?23 Or just inferior English? Between them they provide the kind of English that results from an English writer translating French; from a French writer (perhaps) translating French into English; and from a fifteenth-century post-Chaucerian, French-influenced, English writer writing English. By comparing texts in which the direction and ground of translation shifts from instance to instance, it may be possible to frame new questions about fifteenth-century literary vernacularity in England. To do this we also need a new model of translation. We need an approach that can accommodate not only how fully the English literary environment was saturated by French but also that we cannot get closer to the values, ambitions and achievements of fifteenth-century literary English without recognizing this. This approach needs to be supple enough to account for many factors that are currently left out of consideration in late medieval Anglo-French translation. For instance, we need a way of contemplating the difference between kinds of linguistic fluency: the fluency of translators with different competences, shaped by different political constraints. I suggest ‘roughness’ offers such a model. Developed in sophisticated ways by modern postcolonial writers, the notion of rough translation has the potential to help us reconsider the character of medieval vernaculars as places of multiple but variable contact between a wide range of linguistic, political and social cultures. ‘Francization’24 in Fifteenth-Century English Culture The poetry of Charles d’Orléans – in both English and French – invites us to contextualize fifteenth-century literary English by way of France. Before considering some examples in detail, it may be useful to recall the extent to which writings in French, French manuscripts and French authors, both 23  For discussion of the cross-cultural freighting of these terms, see Ardis Butterfield, ‘Guerre et paix: L’anglais, le français et “l’anglo-français”’, Journée d’études anglo-normandes, organisée par l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, Palais de l’Institut, 20 juin 2008: Actes, ed. André Crépin and Jean Leclant (Paris: De Boccard, 2009), 7–23. 24  I take the term from Jacques Derrida, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’ in Quinzième assises de la traduction littéraire (Arles 1998), ed. Claude Ernoult and Michel Volkovitch (Paris: Actes Sud, 1999), 24.

rough translation 211 insular and continental, were a highly active presence in English fifteenthcentury culture.25 It scarcely needs rehearsing here except that its implications remain oddly sidelined in discussions of English public poetry. The sheer scale of personnel and the dominance of French in England’s vernacular culture gives factual life to the varying but vivid bilingualism that is part of, and a generating impulse for, much ‘courtly’ writing. To give just one example, the surviving book lists from the late fourteenth century of such figures as Simon Burley, Richard II himself, Thomas Woodstock, his wife Eleanor Bohun, Isabel duchess of York and Margaret Courtenay show that, out of some 130 volumes, there were over ninety in French, over thirty in Latin and just four in English.26 Modern anglophone readers have liked to make an English genealogy of poets of central importance to an English medieval literary environment, but the circulation of books points to a far wider and deeper obsession with French as a written vernacular than with English. The first librarian known to be appointed to an English royal library (that of Henry VII) was the French-speaking flamand Quentin Poulet (1492).27 The fifteenth century saw a new drive towards translation from contemporary French writers. Hoccleve’s rapid Englishing in 1402 of Christine de Pizan’s 1399 L’epistre au dieu d’amours is a remarkable instance: his first datable work, it introduces a fashionable Parisian female writer to English circles, along with the hotly current quarrel in which she was engaged about the Roman de la rose. A poem of Christine’s occurs in an English version in Charles’s manuscript of English poems (Harley 682); Charles also possessed a number of manuscripts of her work.28 Lydgate, who was in France in 1426– 29, translated Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, the Danse macabre, Les échecs amoureux and many shorter pieces and lyrics (his huge work the Fall of Princes and the somewhat shorter Siege of Thebes were also drawn from French).29 Another genre of such Anglo-French material comprises 25  For example, Julia Boffey, Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985); William Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne, eds, English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (London: Duckworth, 1983); Butterfield, Familiar Enemy. 26  V. J. Scattergood, ‘Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II’, in English Court Culture, ed. Scattergood and Sherborne, 32–6; Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, xxi and xxi n.6. 27  J. J. G. Alexander, ‘Painting and Manuscript Illumination for Royal Patrons in the Later Middle Ages’, in English Court Culture, ed. Scattergood and Sherborne, 153. 28  Charles d’Orléans, Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, 45 n. 115. 29  Guillaume de Deguileville, Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall, with introduction, notes, glossary and indexes by Katharine B. Locock, Early English Text Society extra series 77, 83, 92 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1899–1904) – the attribution of this work to Lydgate is accepted, but not certain; Florence Warren and Beatrice White, eds, The Dance of Death, Early English Text Society original series 181

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collections of French lyrics: John Shirley’s manuscripts contain more courtly love verse in French than in English.30 Cambridge, Trinity College, R.3.20 has thirty-one French rondeaux and ballades (most are anonymous).31 The big French lyric anthologies, so in vogue from Machaut’s Louange des dames right through to the sixteenth century, were the result of a great deal of human interchange, friendly poetic competition and social politicking that took place during and in spite of the renewed Anglo-French hostilities of the fifteenth century and English occupation. These circles were Anglo-French in the sense that they included people who were French-speaking on both sides of the Channel. They were not, however, any more part of a closed coterie than those circles in which Hoccleve and Lydgate moved: they were overlapping. We have known all this for a long time. The difficulty is to bring it properly to bear on our understanding of the workings, assumptions and practices of vernacular culture in England. My point is that the interlocking social and literary culture of the Anglo-French Middle Ages permeated English literary habits at a deep, even instinctive level. We are not talking about foreign influence or transient tastes. The substratum of language, the way educated vernacular language use in England functioned, was to make constant, often unconscious negotiations across a broadly bilingual terrain. Distinctions between English and French sometimes mattered a great deal politically, but more often they were irrelevant to the workings of international courtly (by which I also mean bureaucratic) conversation. (London: Oxford University Press, 1931); Ernst Sieper, ed., Reson and Sensuallyte, 2 vols, Early English Text Society extra series 84, 89 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1901–3) – which is a translation of Les échecs amoureux; John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, Early English Text Society extra series 121–4 (London: Oxford University Press, 1924–27); John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, ed. Axel Erdmann and Eilert Ekwall, Early English Text Society extra series 108, 125 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1911; Oxford University Press, 1930). Lydgate’s authorship of Les échecs amoureux is uncertain. For a survey of the question see James Simpson, ‘The Economy of Involucrum: Idleness in Reason and Sensuality’, in Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee, ed. Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 390–414. For a recent discussion of Lydgate’s indebtedness to French poets, see Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath, ‘John Lydgate and the Curse of Genius’, Chaucer Review 45, no. 1 (2010): 32–58. 30  Julia Boffey, ‘The Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics’, in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), 6. For a discussion of the French poems see Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in FifteenthCentury England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 88–94. 31  Julia Boffey, ‘French Lyrics and English Manuscripts: The Transmission of Some Poems in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.20, and British Library MS Harley 7333’, Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 4 (1988): 138.

rough translation 213 Rough Translation Trinity R.3.20 holds all three authors – Lydgate, Hoccleve and Charles d’Orléans – in a way that might encourage us to link them. There are thirty-two items by Lydgate, including mummings as well as shorter lyric pieces; Hoccleve’s Epistre; some Chaucer; and the thirty-one French poems mentioned earlier, five of which Shirley attributes to Charles’s jailor, Suffolk. The first point is a simple one: that Shirley mixes languages and authors with such ease. The French pieces are interwoven with Lydgate’s without ceremony, near the start. Later, there is an uninterrupted sequence of twenty-three French items, but this does not so much separate off the French as smoothly introduce pieces in English that have a close relationship to a French source: Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite, Hoccleve’s Epistre and Chaucer’s Mars and Venus complaints, with the strong underlay of Oton de Graunson in the latter. But I would like to go further and suggest that this manuscript is not merely multilingual (there are some Latin items as well) in the sense that it contains separate languages but plurilingual since it is a place where the two vernaculars mutually translate each other. One clue to Shirley’s attitude towards his material occurs in the rubric set by one poem that he presents in both an English and a French version. The French ballade is headed: ‘vn balade ffrauncoys fait par le plus grande poetycal clerk du parys. Regardez & lysez je vous en pry’ (49) [a French ballade composed by the greatest poetical clerk in Paris. Please look and read].32 Adjacent is a piece by Lydgate ‘So as the Crab’. By this Shirley has written: Takeþe heede my lordes for heere foloweþe a balade of þe same sentence made in oure englisshe langage by daun johan lidegate of Bury þe munke. Now jugeþe yee þat beoþe kunyng [knowledgeable, discerning] which yow lykeþe þe beter, þe fffrensh or þenglisshe. (50)

It is an unexpected instruction, and has the air of a demande d’amour: which language do you prefer? Shirley does not give much away about the implied audience except that they are ‘kunyng’ and clearly bilingual.33 We remember that Hoccleve wrote more French than English throughout his professional life. But the very question also seems to suggest that there is an interchangeability between the languages. Apart from this rubric, Shirley does not comment on the language of the pieces; whether they are French or English the titles are usually French: ‘Balade bon et notable’ or ‘Balade de bon counselle’. Identifying the languages does not seem important; collecting material which passes easily from one language to the other is of more value. 32  Page references are to Trinity R.3.20, provided in parentheses. 33  For the possibility that the ‘clerk du parys’ may be a reference to Deschamps, see Connolly, John Shirley, 90–1.

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The rubrics that mention Suffolk are interesting in this respect because they present him as a reverse Charles d’Orléans: where Charles wrote poems in English as a prisoner in England, Suffolk wrote French poems while a prisoner in France. The conclusion we might draw from Trinity R.3.20 is that it gives no sense that Charles belongs in separate linguistic company from the English poets. All three, and others too, are part of a wider courtly conversation in which translation is a pleasurable form of intellectual and social trading. Manuscripts such as this suggest that the bilingual fluency of the English audience enables them to pass from one language to the other consciously but not self-consciously. Any sense of strain in the exchange, which in Trinity R.3.20 is slight and amounts merely to the decorous counterpoising of prison poetry, is not about linguistic competence but political context.34 What do other works suggest about the nature of Anglo-French linguistic competence? The use of French mottos and song citations in English poetry, such as the two fifteenth-century anonymous courtly narratives The Assembly of Ladies and The Floure and the Leaf, provides some complex examples. Here is one: And she began a roundel lustily, That Sus le foyl de vert moy men call, Seen, et mon joly cuer endormi; And than the company answered all With voice[s] swete entuned and so small, That me thought it the sweetest melody That ever I herde in my lyf, soothly. (176–82)35

We know from a variety of evidence that French is not opaque for this medieval audience but a readily available second language. Yet here the French, in the exact form in which it is cited, is not entirely transparent. Editors of the poem have pronounced it incorrect. Walter Skeat remarked impatiently ‘I see little good in guessing what it ought to be, so I leave it alone, merely correcting Suse and foyle to Sus and foyl as the OF foil was masculine.’36 He describes it as an ‘unintelligible scrap of French’ and Derek Pearsall, who tracks down the song from which it is cited, uses the word ‘garbled’: ‘The 34  Of course, there were many occasions when written and oral exchanges, especially among diplomatic lawyers across Europe, forced an intense political scrutiny upon matters of linguistic competence. See Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, passim, and especially chapters 5 and 10. 35  The Floure and the Leaf, in Supplement to the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Walter W. Skeat, vol. 7: Chaucerian and Other Pieces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1897), 361–79 at 366–7. 36  The Floure and the Leaf, ed. Skeat, 532.

rough translation 215 lines quoted here are a garbled version of the opening of a fifteenth-century song from Normandy: “Dessoubz la branche d’ung verd moy, / S’est mon jolli cueur endormy” (Beneath the branch of a green May-tree / My joyful heart has gone to sleep).’37 But this seems too hasty. Faced with a disjunction between modern notions of correctly spelled and formed French and the citation, both editors leap to an assumption that they are dealing with incompetence. I see it instead as a perfectly recognizable allusion in which the song and its language perform in the text like the rich jewels described a few stanzas earlier adorning the clothes of the ladies in the garden. The French is quite comprehensible (though not metrically regular) as ‘Sus le foyl de vert may / S’en est mon joly cuer endormi’. It is no more garbled than any line one might find of French or English verse in manuscript. This example is cautionary because it demonstrates that smoothness can look rough. Code-switching in medieval texts has to be interpreted by modern readers through many filters in the process of linguistic transcription. One such filter is the powerful notion of ‘correctness’ acquired from modern foreign language training but largely inappropriate (in those terms) within the context of medieval language contact. Learning to discard this filter can sometimes be a vital element in recognizing the smoothness of a medieval linguistic transition. Charles’s English lyrics are a test case in reverse. They present the opposite kind of opacity. As Steele and Day, and more recently Arn, have pointed out, the language of these lyrics is full of startling colloquialisms and radical neologisms.38 But (to quote Arn) ‘far from making the poetry more accessible (because it renders it more down to earth), these words and phrases are in many cases the ones that cause us the most trouble because they are opaque and otherwise unrecorded’.39 Examples of these words and phrases would be: ‘be nyse … as purse is of an ay’ (4193); ‘cast me a kayle’ (371); ‘jape a glose’ (2859); ‘y sett me vp a-foot’ (5195); ‘arave’ (5825); ‘arent it dear’ (3499); ‘clight’ (1924); ‘currishness’ (1796, 3638); ‘keverkope’ (4344); ‘oxyan’ (1382); ‘dislust’ (14); ‘dispraue’ (5833); ‘enjape’ (5645).40 Such terms, evidently far from aureate, have been employed in the service of contradictory arguments about Charles as an alleged writer of English. It is revealing that the perception of them as 37  Derek Pearsall, The Floure and the Leafe (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1990; repr. 1992) at www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/flourfrm.htm (accessed 12 December 2011), note to lines 177–8. 38  Robert Steele and Mabel Day, eds, The English Poems of Charles of Orleans, 2 vols reprinted as one, Early English Text Society original series 215, 220 (London: Oxford University Press, 1941; repr. 1970), 302–6; Arn, ‘Charles of Orléans’, 224–7. 39  Arn, ‘Charles of Orléans’, 225. 40  For a full list, see Steele and Day, eds, English Poems of Charles of Orleans, 302–6, xli–xliii; Arn, ‘Charles of Orléans’; Charles d’Orléans, Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, 96–9. Arn provides much additional commentary in the notes to the poems and the glossary.

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idiomatic or unidiomatic, literary or non-literary English makes little difference: all the deductions are reversible. As early as 1904, it was pointed out that these poems must have been written by an English native, since they are written ‘in strong vernacular’ and contain ‘plenty of homely words and phrases of genuinely English origin’.41 The reply came that ‘as for “strong vernacular” and “homely phrases”, they are the first things a foreign prisoner would learn in England’.42 Here we find a disagreement that is fascinatingly replicated in subsequent debate where idiomatic English can apparently prove the writer’s foreignness as much as his native homeliness. Either Charles is displaying a highly fluent knowledge of English and pressing the boundaries of the literary in his use of such unexpected colloquialisms. Or, as Arn herself suggests, he is seeking to use an English so colloquial, so idiomatic that it jars: it must be the work of a Frenchman trying to sound more English than the English. It is too hypercorrectly fluent to be fluent. This is a sophisticated form of incompetence. Yet, in arguing for Charles’s authorship, Arn includes more straightforward incompetence as well: our failure to find many of these colloquialisms attested in other writings could indicate that they are simply a foreigner’s misunderstandings of English. Several of the advocates for Charles’s authorship have based their case on the claim that ‘no Englishman could have written this’. One can add in the scribe as well to this presumed sense of foreignness: strange spellings are a sign of a scribe’s effort to make sense of ‘un-English’. Arn has made by far the most meticulous study to date of the Englishness or otherwise of these Harley 682 poems.43 The examples she adduces are numerous and cumulatively persuasive. One cannot help wondering, though, at the evident cultural filters that appear to make one side of the argument so much more attractive to anglophone readers than to their French counterparts. The latter are more inclined to see these as instances of rough English, chosen by an English translator without literary pretensions and only mediocre competence in literary English.44 The larger point is that definitions of competence are highly variable and influenced by many social and cultural factors. In ‘ordinary’ rather than highly educated contexts, the distinction between native fluency and foreign incompetence can be surprisingly hard for the outside observer to determine. These issues cannot be resolved without a much broader study of fifteenth-century English. An instance of the potential for future research is the recent discovery of a unique version of chapter 6 of The Seven Poyntes of Trewe Wisdom in Cambridge, St John’s College, G.25.45 This contains 41  42  43  44  45 

J. Hamilton Wylie, cited in Arn, ‘Charles of Orléans’, 224. Arn, ‘Charles of Orléans’, 225. Arn, ‘Charles of Orléans’; Charles d’Orléans, Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, 29–37. Pierre Champion, ed., Charles d’Orléans: Poésies, 2 vols (Paris: Champion, 1923), 2:606–7. The discovery has been made by Sarah James (in her article ‘A Previously Unnoticed

rough translation 217 the word ‘oxyan’; Ballade 39 in Harley 682’s version of Charles’s Chanson 59 had hitherto provided the only attestation of this spelling. Other manuscripts of the Seven Poyntes have ‘see’, ‘grete see’ or ‘greet see’ instead of ‘oxyan’; since G.25 also has ‘myrour’ where all the others have ‘glasse’ or ‘glas’, it is possible that the translator was working either with a French source or by means of his own knowledge of French. This is particularly intriguing since it could imply that the idioms peculiar to Charles were actually, in part, the kind of English used by bilingual non-courtly English writers, rather than either otherwise unrecorded monolingual English native idioms or aberrant ‘foreign’ usages. This moves the argument on from a polarity between incompetence and competence: we should be alert to the ways in which different educational and social backgrounds shaped a writer’s choice of lexis, spelling and perhaps even syntax. Such differences might then be a sign less of how ‘native’ the language use is and more a matter of the calibrations caused by differing degrees of plurilingualism applied within different communities.46 The poems in Harley 682 suggest that one of the most fruitful ways of understanding the normative qualities of fifteenth-century literary English is to work closely with the bilingual translations from French. Works such as Quixley’s translation of Gower’s Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz, and the many English translations of fifteenth-century French texts by Chartier, Christine de Pizan and others, have the potential to yield important evidence of the variable articulacy of plurilingual writers of English.47 Yet the case of the Harley colloquialisms reminds us that such texts are by definition incomplete registers of non-literary English. Ironically, it takes an investigation into

Extract of Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae in English’, Notes and Queries 59, no. 1 (2012): 28–30). I am indebted to Sarah for alerting me to this reference, and generously sharing with me her transcription of the relevant passage and further details of the version’s lexis. 46  The further factors of gender and region are highlighted by this example, since Seven Poyntes was composed for a female patron (according to its preface) and two manuscript colophons situate it in Mount Grace Charterhouse, Yorkshire, 1419. 47  Henry Noble MacCracken, ed., ‘Quixley’s Ballades Royal (?1402)’, Yorkshire Archeological Journal 20 (1908–9): 33–50. See also Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler, eds, Poems of Cupid, God of Love: Christine de Pizan’s ‘Epistre au dieu d’Amours’ and ‘Dit de la Rose’: Thomas Hoccleve’s ‘The Letter of Cupid’: with George Sewell’s ‘The Proclamation of Cupid’ (Leiden: Brill, 1990); Curt F. Bühler, ed., The Epistle of Othea Translated from the French Text of Christine de Pizan by Stephen Scrope, Early English Text Society original series 264 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970); Margaret S. Blayney, ed., FifteenthCentury English Translations of Alain Chartier’s ‘Le Traité de l’Esperance’ and ‘Le Quadrilogue Invectif ’, Early English Text Society original series 270 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974); Paul Meyer and Frederick J. Furnivall, eds, The Curial made by maystere Alain Chartier translated thus in Englyssh by William Caxton 1484, Early English Text Society extra series 54 (London: Trübner, 1888).

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‘foreign’ English to throw into relief the uncertain boundary between halting literary and fluent colloquial English. Any individual example discussed here will have limited reach within these larger questions. However, there may be some value in looking (inevitably briefly) at the processes of linguistic contact in examples that range across different kinds of linguistic relationship, from French to English via English and French routes. The following is the first stanza of one of Charles’s French poems and its English counterpart, chosen without any particular care from the Harley 682 collection: Venés vers moy, Bonne Nouvelle Pour mon las cueur reconforter. Contez moy comment fait la belle. L’avez vous point oÿ parler De moy et amy me nommer? A elle point mis en oubly Ce qu’il lui pleut de m’acorder, Quant me donna le nom d’amy?48 O Come to me, sum Gladsum Tidyng newe, My faynty hert to comfort in distres! Say me how farith the Goodly Fayre and Trewe? Herdist thou hir speke of me oft – moch or lesse? – Me calling ‘loue’ of hir gret gentilnesse? Hath she forgete? O nay, bi God aboue! I trust as that she made me of promys When she me gafe this name, as loo, ‘My loue’.49

The English expands the octosyllabic French lines into decasyllables, a common procedure throughout the manuscript. This necessitates some expansion, which is readily achieved with (for instance) the translation of ‘la belle’ to ‘the Goodly Fayre and Trewe’. The question in French of whether she has ever spoken of him becomes in the English a matter of frequency and quantity: ‘Herdist thou hir speke of me oft – moch or lesse?’ The quieter third-person questions in French are turned into an active quoted dialogue which sketches a quick scene of conversation between lover and lady. There are plenty of instances like this in the Harley collection where a comfortableness is achieved in the English dialogue. All the rhyme sounds in French are

48  B31 in John Fox and Mary-Jo Arn, eds, Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and His Circle: A Critical Edition of BnF MS. Fr. 25458, Charles d’Orléans’ Personal Manuscript, trans. R. Barton Palmer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 74–6. 49  B31 in Charles d’Orléans, Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. Arn, 177–8.

rough translation 219 different in English, but remain within a French sound pattern, notably ‘-esse’ (‘distress’, ‘lesse’, ‘gentillesse’, ‘promys’). There are two moments of possible roughness. The first is ‘faynty’. This may be an instance of what Venuti calls (after Jean-Jacques Lecercle) a ‘domestic remainder’: the elements in a text that are local and colloquial, and act as a distinctive surplus to the basic core of meaning being translated.50 ‘Faynty’ has not been found cited elsewhere at or before this date, according to the Middle English Dictionary;51 interestingly, however, the term is common in the sixteenth century in contexts that suggest not a neologism or rare coinage but a long-established word.52 It does not seem impossible that it represents an example of fifteenth-century English that was standard enough, but did not happen to be cited by other English secular authors. The second instance of potential roughness is ‘of promys’. This (freely) renders ‘Ce qu’il lui pleut de m’acorder’, but its unusual grammar suggests a French construction, comparable to ‘en oubly’. The ballade as a whole comes at the smoother end of the Harley 682 poems in its easy dialogue. Yet even here roughness emerges, however delicately, as a feature of diction and grammar. Compare this pair of stanzas. The second is Hoccleve’s translation of a French poem found in a manuscript at St John’s College, Cambridge, and in two further manuscripts in the British Library:53 En mon deduit a moys de may Pensant aloy iuxt vne boscage Les floures diuers diuisay Oseux chauncheantz a lour vsage De cele disport me confortay Mes vne pense point mon corage Que morir mestoit mes quant ne say Ne ou deuenir a quele ostage.

50  Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’, in Translation Studies Reader, ed. Venuti, 484. 51  Middle English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Faynty’. 52  Early English Books Online provides forty-seven citations from a total of twentyeight records dating from 1473 to 1600: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home (accessed 12 December 2011). The earliest occurs in a 1486 edition of John Mirk’s Liber Festivalis (composed before 1410); the citations include Tyndale’s Practice of Prelates (1530), and biblical translations from the Great Bible of 1540 on, Matthew Parker’s translation of the Psalms, and also secular texts such as Skelton’s Elynour Rumming. The Mirk citation was evidently overlooked by the Middle English Dictionary: it hints at wider usage in the fifteenth century. 53  St John’s College, Cambridge, G.5, fols 163r–163v; London, British Library, Royal 20.B.III, fols 96r–98r; London, British Library, Additional 44949 (Tywardreath Psalter), fols 9v–10r.

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ardis butterfield As that I walkid in the monthe of May Besyde a groue in an heuy musynge, Floures dyuerse I sy, right fressh and gay, And briddes herde I eek lustyly synge, That to myn herte yaf a confortynge. But euere o thoght me stang vn-to the herte, That dye I sholde / & hadde no knowynge Whanne, ne whider, I sholde hennes sterte.54

The French rubric in the manuscript in which Hoccleve’s translation of the poem is found states that ‘Ceste balade ensuyante feust translatee au commandement de mon Meistre Robert Chichele’ [the ballade which follows was translated at the behest of my master Robert Chichele].55 Brother of Henry Chichele, the archbishop of Canterbury, Robert was a prominent figure in the City of London, a wealthy grocer, alderman, and twice mayor in 1411 and 1421. In contrast to the Harley 682 poems we have evidence of a direct commission to translate. As far as one can judge from the surviving copies, the French poem had some independent circulation as a verse prayer, suggesting a reason for Robert’s interest in it.56 As is standard, the French octosyllabic lines are turned into decasyllabics. Compared to the Harley example more of the French diction and even word order is taken over directly into the English: a moys de May in the monthe of May les floures diuers diuisay Floures dyuerse I sy me confortay a confortynge. Que morir mestoit That dye I sholde.

Yet if this gives the impression of a functional approach to the task, there are moments where Hoccleve provides a poetic lift. Take the shift from ‘Pensant aloy iuxt vne boscage’ to ‘Besyde a groue in an heuy musynge’. The only known prior use of the word ‘musynge’ occurs in Gower’s Confessio amantis.57 ‘Hevy’ as

54  Both texts cited from Helen E. Sandison, ‘“En mon deduit a moys de may”: The Original of Hoccleve’s “Balade to the Virgin and Christ”’, in Vassar Mediaeval Studies, ed. C. F. Fiske (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1923), 235–45. 55  San Marino, California, Huntington Library, HM 111, fols 43v–47r. 56  Additional 44949 (Tywardreath Psalter), fol. 9v. 57  ‘With musinge of min oghne thoght … So drunke I am, that mi wit faileth’; John

rough translation 221 applied to thought is reasonably common:58 it seems to be Hoccleve’s inspiration to put ‘hevy’ with ‘musynge’ in order to create an elegant and potent English courtly counterpart to the more straightforward French ‘pensant’. Similar moments come towards the end of the stanza with his use of the verb ‘stang’ to render ‘point’ and ‘whanne ne whider’. The latter, by placing ‘mes quant ne say / Ne ou’ at the start of the final line, nicely intensifies its hint of morbid anxiety. Although these moments work well, the more usual structure of direct transference between the two languages is also very successful. It perhaps shows that Hoccleve’s aim was indeed to provide equivalence, in terms not merely of transferring the core meaning of the poem, but of presenting an experience in English that was very little different from French (compare ‘Vne crois paynte de bele ymage’ and ‘A crois depeynted with a fair ymage’ in the second stanza). And, even though he does change the rhyme scheme, he uses many of the same rhyme sounds (–ay, –age, –eyne) or else new rhyme sounds that are also transferable from French to English (–ance, –able, –ure, –esse). This is skilled, smooth translation that shows off the close relationship between the two languages in this kind of discourse. To call it ‘smooth’ is not to insinuate that Hoccleve has substituted easy platitudes for an intricate text. It is rather that he is skilfully taking advantage of the substitutable character of the discourses involved. His ease of movement from French to English implicitly also relies on his bilingual audience’s ability to share that lingual ease. Turning now to Lydgate, I have chosen a passage from the Troy Book: Vp-on the tyme of Ioly grene May, Whan that Flora with hir hewes gay Hath euery playn, medwe, hil, & vale With hir flouris, quik and no thing pale, Over-sprad & cladde in lyuere newe, And braunchis blosme with many lusty hewe, And bit vs fully to be glad & liȝt – For by assuraunce thei haue her frute be-hiȝt Ageyn autumpne, who so list hem shake, Whan on vynes ripeth euery grape – And thus this sesoun, most lusty of disport, Enbrasith hertis with new recounfort, Only of hope by kynde as it is dew, Gower, Confessio Amantis 6.126, in G. C. Macaulay, ed., The English Works of John Gower, 2 vols, Early English Text Society extra series 81–2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900–1). 58 Chaucer, Franklin’s Tale, line 822, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 179; Rev. Richard Morris, ed., Cursor Mundi: A Northumbrian Poem of the XIVth Century in Four Versions, 7 vols, Early English Text Society original series 57, 59, 62, 66, 68, 99, 101 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1874–93), 1:182, line 3035; Middle English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Hevy’, 4.a.

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ardis butterfield That holsom frute schal the blosmys swe, Whan tyme cometh by reuolucioun. And thus in May, the lusty fresche sesoun, Whan brides syngen in her armonye.59

This comes near the start of book two where Paris and Deiphebus set sail for Greece. I selected it because, like Hoccleve, Lydgate is reworking the spring/ May topos so central to French troubadour and trouvère lyric openings. Here, though, he is not translating from French: his much amplified source is Guido delle Colonne’s prose Latin Historia destructionis Troiae. It would be hard, I think, to distinguish this from Hoccleve on the grounds that one was a close translation from French and the other not. It is equally saturated in the springtime elements that have become native to English courtly writing: ‘Flora’, ‘hewes gay’, ‘blosme’, ‘disport’, ‘recounfort’, ‘fresche’, ‘brides’, ‘armonye’. Some of them are direct transpositions form French (‘braunche’); others are set equivalents (‘blosme’). In terms of diction there is no obvious domestic remainder. But one feature does stand out: the syntax. As Phillipa Hardman has recently remarked, Lydgate’s syntax has been regarded as one of his major poetic faults. It has been unremittingly criticized as formless, irresolute, laborious, diffuse and negligent.60 Hardman makes a convincing and important case that, on the contrary, his long, flowing passages have a specific stylistic purpose. I would like to reinforce this by drawing attention also in this passage to the repetition of ‘Vp-on the tyme of Ioly grene May … And thus in May, the lusty fresche sesoun’. Lydgate does not limit himself to one spring opening, but provides the reader with two. Here, I suggest, is the element of excess or surplus that Venuti describes: the effort to translate the Troy narrative into a homely Anglo-French spring landscape requires a redoubled form of narration.

Conclusion Several conclusions are possible. There certainly are strategies of translation in these examples of fifteenth-century English; yet it is not always easy to be confident of recognizing the differences between them. My very prelimi59  John Lydgate, Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols, Early English Text Society extra series 97, 103, 106, 126 (London: Kegan Paul, 1906–20), 1:240 (book 2, lines 3339–55). 60  For references, see Hardman, ‘Lydgate’s “Uneasy” Syntax’. Newer approaches to historical syntax take account of the way in which closer attention to medieval punctuation demonstrates overlapping categories of linguistic form and function in Middle English texts. See Jeremy Smith, ‘Middle English Syntax’, in English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook, 2 vols, ed. Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 1:435–50. I am grateful to him for kindly sending this essay to me in advance of its publication.

rough translation 223 nary analyses have aimed not so much to show clear ways of identifying such strategies as to draw attention to the deep and often obscure characteristics of linguistic exchange in a bilingual culture. I have deliberately talked of the Harley 682 poems anonymously as a strategy of my own to allow the comparisons more room, although I am persuaded that they are the work of Charles d’Orléans himself. One conclusion we might draw from this limited sample is that both Charles and Lydgate work with slightly more freedom linguistically than Hoccleve. Hoccleve manages a smooth translation; Charles and Lydgate, in different ways, use a more experimental English open to the charge of roughness. In what ways might this roughness be strategic? Unlike modern postcolonial writers, neither author has access to a highly polished standard English. For both, this was probably represented most closely by Chaucer’s poetry; yet not in a way that was straightforward for either to emulate. In seeking a public voice, Lydgate, along with his contemporaries, was acutely conscious of the limitations of English as an appropriate choice of vernacular. Charles can only have been more so. The roughness that they manifest, however, springs from opposite causes. Their audiences (for their writings in English) were similar: elite, bilingual and English. Yet, politically, their circumstances were entirely divergent. Lydgate, a favoured spokesman for the English aristocratic patrons who commissioned his most lengthy and ambitious works, was under pressure to produce more English than any writer before him. Charles, as far as we can tell, wrote for private amusement, with an intellectual curiosity in the task of employing English tempered by deep political antipathy towards it. They meet in a curiously overlapping zone of experimental English: one reaching for articulacy in a context of political power and cultural weakness, the other in a context of political weakness and cultural power. Charles’s extraordinary French rondeau on translation and deception offers some insight into his strategies: Le trucheman de ma pensee, Qui parle maint divers langaige, M’a rapporté chose sauvaige Que je n’ai point acoustumee. En francoys la m’a translatee.61 [The interpreter of my thought, who speaks many different languages, has brought me back something strange (wild) to which I am completely unaccustomed. He translated it into French for me.] 61  Rondeau 178, lines 1–4, in Fox and Arn, eds, Poetry of Charles d’Orléans; my translation.

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As I have argued elsewhere, these words, which play on the meaning of ‘trucheman’ as interpreter, ambassador and trickster, sum up Charles’s multiple and uneasy relationship to English and French.62 An exile to his own language, he needs to translate his own thoughts to himself. In an extra twist, it is worth remembering that these lines have, in turn, been passed from poet to poet in the ballades added to the French manuscript of his own oeuvre (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 25458): they are not even ‘his’, he merely lays passing claim to them.63 He does not possess even this statement of dispossession. In this respect he can be compared to the Quebecois poet Gaston Miron. Miron was deeply and plangently aware that translation was no longer a definitive enterprise of cultural transfer for him. Instead, he saw translation not only as negotiating between languages, but as coming to inhabit the space of language itself. He wrote ‘non-poems’ in an effort to write non-translations, to indicate the ‘radical insignificance of the poet’s name’.64 Charles at times could be said to write ‘non-poems’, or at least ‘non-translations’ as an expression of the ‘radical insignificance’ of his name as the years passed in England and his domain was ransacked. The moments where his English stands out as rough could be said to point to the place of contact between English and French in the fifteenth century – a place full of pressure, radical redefinition and cultural uncertainty. His use of English is thus strategic but not necessarily ‘bad’. The lack of standardization in this period can liberate us from the straitjacket of correctness. More importantly, the case of Charles d’Orléans, in its very complexity, warns us away from equating ‘bad’ with ‘foreign’ in insular vernacular usages: in a bilingual culture, notions of foreignness and familiarity are constantly under negotiation and liable to misinterpretation by modern readers. I take him, further, as demonstrating, through his anomalous exiled situation, something about the condition of fifteenth-century English more broadly. Some of its problems of roughness are our own. We simply do not know the language well enough. But others are part of the cultural moment in which these poets were writing. Charles is not the only writer whose English is exploring its place in a new vernacularity, somewhere alongside French. This is also happening to English fifteenth-century poets, caught as they are between a place after Chaucer and one where French is as dominant as ever. The sophistication of literary French both hampered and empowered English. One might even say that both sides practise a kind of rough coloni62 Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, 304–7. 63 See Rondeaux 179 and 181 in Fox and Arn, eds, Poetry of Charles d’Orléans. 64  Quotations from Sherry Simon, ‘Translating and Interlingual Creation in the Contact Zone: Border Writing in Quebec’, in Post-colonial Translation, ed. Bassnett and Trivedi, 62, 64. Miron’s friend Jacques Brault developed the theory of ‘non-translation’. See Brault’s Poèmes des quatre côtés (Saint-Lambert: Éditions du Noroît, 1975).

rough translation 225 alism: Lydgate and Hoccleve in transmuting French into an emergently public English, Charles in demonstrating the stylistic unevenness of current literary English compared to French. It can lead on both sides to awkwardness, even incompetence. But it can also lead to the easy smoothness of Hoccleve and comfortable colloquialism of Charles, or, more challengingly, to open-endedness, to the linguistic excess of a Lydgate, who is searching for, and creating, an unstoppable fluency.

11 Bueve d’Hantone/Bovo d’Antona Exile, Translation and the History of the Chanson de geste Luke Sunderland This chapter seeks a dialogue between the chansons de geste and the modern translation theories of Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti, to ask questions about the ethics and politics of translation in the medieval and modern periods. Does translation enable an encounter with the ‘foreign’,1 or does it rather foreclose this possibility by domesticating all that is unfamiliar? Is translation an act of hospitality, a welcoming of the foreign, or is the foreign used as a commodity? Or, to put the question another way: is translation an ethical encounter with alterity, or does it seek to exploit alterity for pragmatic, political ends? I choose to focus on the chanson de geste here as it is arguably the most ‘nationalized’ medieval genre, considered quintessentially ‘French’. Putting the genre into contact with modern translation theory has the potential to free it from this nationalizing straightjacket and to reveal its ability to cross frontiers and to appeal to publics of differing tongues and persuasions. I hope, in the same movement, to integrate this popular and diverse medieval genre into contemporary debates about the practice of translation. I start, then, from a governing assumption of much chanson de geste criticism: the idea that home of the genre is ‘France’. This categorization draws on the medieval author Jehan Bodel’s division of literature into three materes – those of France, Bretagne and Rome – the first being associated with the 1  The notion of the ‘foreign’, as used by Berman and Venuti, arguably presupposes the linguistic and political boundaries of modern nation states. I deploy the term here in a more general sense, to denote the strangeness of medieval texts associated with other tongues and/or other territories, a strangeness which was then attenuated by the translating act. See Antoine Berman, La traduction et la lettre, ou L’auberge du lointain (Paris: Seuil, 1999); Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998).

bueve d’hantone/bovo d’antona 227 chanson de geste.2 In line with this, most texts of the genre have as their subject kings of France: Pepin, Charlemagne and Louis. Moreover, the chansons de geste allegedly take inspiration from the mythology of the Franks and from deeply rooted oral storytelling traditions; thus François Suard discerns strong links to Frankish collective memory.3 For the same critic, the chanson de geste represents France’s own great literature: ‘elle est en France la seule réalisation épique qui puisse se comparer aux poèmes homériques, à l’épopée anglo-saxonne, germanique ou scandinave’ [it is the only epic production in France which measures up to the poems of Homer, or to the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic or Scandinavian epic].4 Each of the above ideas links the genre to France, but each is highly problematic. Firstly, we cannot accord decisive importance to a classification provided by just one medieval author, who may not have known all of the extant texts; moreover, the matere de France refers to a subject matter much more than it does to a specific place. Secondly, Pepin, Charlemagne and Louis might be kings of France, but in many chansons de geste, they are also Holy Roman Emperors with broad pan-European power associated with loci outside the boundaries of modern France, notably Germany and Italy. And thirdly, the term ‘Franc’ in the poems often denotes the crusade identity of western Christians, meaning simply ‘away from home’. Of most concern, however, is the notion that the chanson de geste is France’s genre, that it originated amongst the Franks before spreading, and the concomitant equation of Frankish with French (the two function as synonyms in Suard’s argument). From this point of view, French chansons are original; everything else is an offshoot. The extant manuscript tradition of chansons de geste, however, casts doubt on this. The three earliest surviving poems – the first part of La chanson de Guillaume, the Oxford Chanson de Roland and Gormont et Isembard – are in Anglo-Norman and can be located to England. A substantial Italian tradition survives, and evidence suggests that Carolingian material circulated there from an early stage.5 Most intriguingly, supposedly peripheral groups are linked: the closest version to the Oxford Roland is the assonanced Venice 4;6 the Venetian version of Aliscans 2  Jehan Bodel, La chanson des Saisnes, ed. Annette Brasseur (Geneva: Droz, 1989), lines 6–11. 3  François Suard, ‘La chanson de geste en France’, in François Suard, Chanson de geste et tradition épique en France au Moyen Âge (Caen: Paradigme, 1994), 65. 4  François Suard, La chanson de geste: Que sais-je? (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1993), 121. 5  See Giovanni Palumbo, ‘Per la storia della Chanson de Roland in Italia nel medioevo’, in Giovanni Palumbo, Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti and Marco Villoresi, ‘Tre volte suona l’olifante’: La tradizione rolandiana in Italia fra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Milan: Unicopli, 2007), 11–55. 6  See Thomas S. Thomov, ‘Le manuscrit V4 dans les rapports avec la version oxonienne de la Chanson de Roland’, Annuaire de l’Université de Sofia 58 (1964): 227–83.

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is tightly related to the ‘original’;7 and there may have existed a lost version of that poem from Norman Sicily.8 Moreover, Aspremont, widely diffused in Italy and extant in no fewer than four Anglo-Norman versions, was arguably composed in Sicily by a Norman writer (Normandy features prominently in the plot).9 Critics have also posited a precocious Occitan tradition of epics, now lost.10 And finally, for Joseph Bédier, the chansons de geste grew from Latin chronicles kept in monasteries found along the pilgrimage routes of Europe, which claimed to possess relics of heroes; he summed up this conjecture in his famous phrase ‘au commencement était la route’ [in the beginning was the road].11 Each of these theories casts the songs as meandering products, whose precise origins cannot be pinpointed. Although virtually nothing is known about the circulation of the chanson de geste before the twelfth century, it was undoubtedly spreading from an early stage outside its putative home. Furthermore, even amongst the texts produced in what is today ‘France’, we find songs associated with regions which were independent of the king of France for much of the Middle Ages: thus three germane poems – Aspremont, Girart de Roussillon and Girart de Vienne – discuss claims for Occitan or Bourguignon independence.12 Surviving ‘French’ versions of many chansons date to the thirteenth century, and may be secondary rewrites: for example, the Paris Roland arguably recasts the Roncesvalles legend to make a ‘national’ epic.13 So how many epics have ‘France’ as their true home? ‘France’ often only means the home of the king, and that home moves: the king resides, variously, at Saint-Denis, Orléans, Aix-la-Chapelle and Laon. Thus ‘France’ in the chanson de geste represents either the amalgamation of geographical data

7  Philip E. Bennett, Carnaval héroïque et écriture cyclique et dans la geste de Guillaume d’Orange (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006), 315. 8  Karla Mallette, The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100–1250: A Literary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 189 n. 9  François Suard, ed., Aspremont: Chanson de geste du XIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2008), 11, 52. 10  Rita Lejeune, Recherches sur le thème: Les chansons de geste et l’histoire (Liège: Université de Liège, 1948); Robert Lafont, La geste de Roland, 2 vols (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991). 11  Joseph Bédier, Les légendes épiques: Recherches sur la formation des chansons de geste, 4 vols, 3rd edn (Paris: Champion, 1926), 3:367. Giovanni Palumbo reactivates the link with pilgrimage routes in Italy and Paula Leverage has recently reinvented Bédier’s theory as an account of dissemination. See Palumbo, ‘Per la storia’; Paula Leverage, Reception and Memory: A Cognitive Approach to the Chansons de geste (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010). 12  See Luke Sunderland, ‘Entre résistance et révolte: Les enjeux du territoire’, Revue des Langues Romanes 112 (2008): 465–90. 13  See Jane Gilbert, ‘The Chanson de Roland’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 21–34.

bueve d’hantone/bovo d’antona 229 about more than one historical France,14 or a mythical, legendary place. The tradition does not derive from any securely defined land known as ‘France’; nor can such a location be found within the texts. If the chanson de geste hails from ‘France’, then it was born and lived long in exile. Translation theory provides a valuable optic for analysis of this kind of movement, and of manuscript culture where many texts exist in multiple versions sprawled across differing linguistic and political spaces. In this piece, I first deploy Berman’s concept of translation as hospitality: translation must make a space within the translating language to welcome the foreignness of the text that is being translated. Second, I turn to Venuti, who takes inspiration from Berman, but whose ideas work through a logic of commodity: he examines the problem of the marketability of translated texts, and the transformations made to adapt them to foreign climes. The ideas of both thinkers have the potential to reshape the way in which we think about medieval translation. Here, I relate these notions to the recastings of one chanson de geste, that of Bueve d’Hantone (known, in differing incarnations, as Bevis of Hampton and Bovo d’Antona). I first survey the textual tradition, and then discuss plot elements common to all versions of Bueve in relation to Venuti and Berman’s concepts, before offering analysis of four individual versions of Bueve, scattered across time and space. I shall not accord the non-Old French versions of chansons de geste priority over the Old French ones, or venture into speculation on lost traditions, but rather highlight the importance of dissemination, rewriting and translation in the history of the genre. After all, stemmata of chansons de geste always demonstrate that originals are lost; only a series of reworkings remains. In relation to the manuscript history of Bueve d’Hantone, Berman and Venuti’s ideas lead us to ask how the material changes as it moves from context to context. Are there universal elements that stay fixed? Does it remain, in each case, a ‘foreign’ text, welcomed into a new context? Or is it domesticated, given new meanings and resonances to suit the sensibilities of new audiences? Translation theory becomes a paradigm for the text’s movements, but also for events within it: Bueve is exiled and sold overseas, repeatedly adapting to new environments. Both character and text are uprooted. Exile enables Bueve’s narrative, and translation ensures its longevity.

The Versions of Bueve: Differences, Constants and Translation Theory Bueve d’Hantone was frequently translated. There are a large number of versions; a selection appears below, in rough chronological order:15 14  Girart de Roussillon’s spatial world, for example, combines features of Carolingian and Capetian France. 15  I draw principally on Leslie Zarker Morgan, ed., La Geste Francor: Edition of the

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Anglo-Norman, c. 120016 Old French – three versions17 Continental I, c. 1200 Continental III, c. 1220 Continental II, c. 1225 Welsh, thirteenth century Franco-Italian (Geste Francor), early fourteenth century Icelandic/Norwegian (Bevers saga), fourteenth century Middle English (Sir Bevis of Hampton), fourteenth century Franco-Italian (Buovo udinese), late fourteenth century Venetian (Buovo laurenziano), second half fourteenth/first half fifteenth century Tuscan – five versions I Reali di Francia, late fourteenth/early fifteenth century Florence, Riccardiano, 2080, early fifteenth century Buovo toscano, fifteenth century Buovo ‘di Gherardo’, fifteenth century Buovo palatino, late fifteenth century Irish, fifteenth century Spanish (Gaiferos), fifteenth century Emilian (printed texts) Buovo d’Antona, 1480 Buovo d’Antona, 1497 Yiddish, early sixteenth century Slavic, sixteenth century ‘chansons de geste’ of MS. Marc. Fr. XIII (=256), 2 vols (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2009), 104–5; Daniela Delcorno Branca, ed., Buovo d’Antona: Cantari in ottava rima (1480) (Rome: Carocci, 2008), 19. 16  Stimming dates this version to the first half of the thirteenth century but Martin terms it the earliest version; hence my date of c. 1200. See Albert Stimming, ed., Der anglonormannische Bueve de Hantone (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1899), lvii; Jean-Pierre Martin, ‘Beuve de Hantone entre roman et chanson de geste’, in Le romanesque dans l’épique, ed. Dominique Boutet (Paris: Université Paris X-Nanterre, 2003), 98. 17  The three Old French versions pose questions of their own about linguistic frontiers: Stimming locates each one to a Grenzgebiet (border zone) between Picard and either Francien or Norman or Champagne dialects, depending on the version. See Albert Stimming, ‘Der festländische Bueve de Hantone’, Gesellschaft für romanische Literatur 25 (1911): xxviii; 41 (1918): 64; 42 (1920): 64.

bueve d’hantone/bovo d’antona 231 Is France the home of this epic? The French versions do not constitute the originals; the Anglo-Norman text is the earliest and perhaps closest to the original. Moreover, the Franco-Italian versions are not subordinated to the French ones.18 In fact, the bulky French versions had little impact on literary history, whereas the Anglo-Norman Bueve became the source for the Middle English text, an Irish prose version, the Bevers saga and the Welsh rendering; conversely, the Italian versions were the source for the Slavic and Yiddish tellings. All versions share the same broad plot: Bueve’s father Gui is murdered by Doon de Mayence at the instigation of his mother, who then marries Doon. Bueve flees to Little Armenia where he serves the king. The king’s daughter Josiane falls for him; he saves her and her father from their enemies. Betrayed, Bueve is imprisoned by the evil pagan Soldan. In jail, he is fed by Soldan’s daughter who also becomes enamoured of him. He eventually flees and rejoins Josiane, who has magically remained chaste. They run away together but are separated. Bueve recaptures Hantone from Doon and Josiane arrives with their two sons just in time to stop Bueve marrying another queen. They live happily until Bueve’s horse kills the son of the king of England: Bueve is disgraced and again exiled, but after further eastern adventures he returns home and makes peace with his king. To think about constants across the versions of Bueve, I turn to Venuti for his account of commerce and cultural hierarchies in translation. Venuti argues that translated texts need to meet existing expectations about foreign cultures in order to have success, or to construct an audience to whom the text is intelligible and who can put it to various uses. As Venuti says, ‘assymetries, inequities, relations of domination and dependence exist in every act of translating, of putting the translation in the service of the translating culture’.19 Venuti’s commercial account initially appears restricted in its focus on the modern period, but considerations of capital – whether real or symbolic – were surely involved in medieval acts of translation, too.20 Scribes, copyists and jongleurs earned a living, and sought prestige, through reworking and disseminating texts. Accordingly, each version of Bueve draws on the appeal of the story in a new way. Certain features provide a stable core of meaning, giving the story value and appeal all across Christian lands. These include: Bueve’s exile; his beauty and valour; his bravery against tyrannical and monstrous enemies and in the face of cruel fate; his unshakeable Christian faith; and his exotic 18 The stemma by Rajna has the Anglo-Norman, Franco-Italian and Venetian versions as one group deriving from the lost original, and the French versions as another independent group. See Pio Rajna, Ricerche intorno ai Reali di Francia (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1872), 217. 19 Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 4. 20  A reading of Venuti that assesses both the relevance and limitations of his conceptual model for medieval translation is offered by Mills in this volume.

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adventures. Reworkings then accentuate one or other part of the story’s plot, seeking new markets. Moreover, trade and negotiation feature at the heart of Bueve. In all its versions, merchants have a highly positive role: they get the hero out of scrapes. And whereas sovereigns are local in their interests, caring only for the defence and expansion of their own lands, merchants link worlds and thereby provide an element of universality amongst the many particularisms. Commodity culture appears as the only universal culture. As long as something can sell, it can cross frontiers. Yet literary texts can never be completely reduced to the level of commodity, because their meaning is not absolutely stable. They therefore also open up the problematics of hospitality and the gift. Whereas commodity relationships involve correspondences between things, gift relationships link people, with ambiguous and unpredictable effects.21 Although all market values fluctuate, commodities are relatively secure, but gifts involve contradictory and often violent collisions of intentions and relations. I can never be sure that the foreigner – or foreign text – I welcome into my household will serve me; indeed he (or it) may very well pose a threat. Hence Derrida highlights the etymological links between hospitality and hostility.22 In practice, we afford to guests only a limited hospitality, which is extended out of a sense of duty rather than from openness to the stranger. I let him in, but reserve the right to call the police if he violates my laws. Beyond the pragmatism of such concerns, a radical ideal of hospitality can nonetheless be formulated, whereby the foreigner would be welcomed unconditionally, in all his alterity and strangeness, without rule or regulation. Drawing on Derrida, Berman applies this ideal of hospitality to translation: translated texts should form the ‘auberge du lointain’ [the hostel of/for the foreign].23 Translation should welcome in the foreign on its own terms, rather than reducing it to the same. Berman gives the example of proverbs. To find an equivalent rather than to translate the proverb means avoiding the experience of the foreign: refuser d’introduire dans la langue traduisante l’étrangeté du proverbe original … c’est refuser de faire de la langue traduisante ‘l’auberge du lointain’, c’est, pour nous, franciser: vieille tradition.24

21  I draw here on Sarah Kay’s application of the concepts of gift and commodity to the chansons de geste. See Kay, The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 39–48, 208–19. 22  Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, De l’hospitalité (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997), 45. 23  The expression is Jaufre Rudel’s. 24 Berman, La traduction et la lettre, ou L’auberge du lointain, 15; original emphasis. Subsequent references are provided in parentheses.

bueve d’hantone/bovo d’antona 233 [refusing to bring into the translating language the foreignness of the original proverb is refusing to make the translating language ‘the hostel for the foreign’; this means, for us, making it French: it’s a long tradition.]

Berman terms this mode of translation ‘ethnocentric’ and condemns it as the predominant one in France. Such translation ramène tout à sa propre culture, à ses normes et valeurs, et considère ce qui est situé en dehors de celle-ci – l’Étranger – comme négatif ou tout juste bon à être annexé, adapté, pour accroître la richesse de cette culture. (29) [brings everything back home to its own culture, to its norms and values, and considers everything which is outside that – the Foreigner – as negative, or just worthy of being annexed to enrich its own culture.]

Berman also criticizes the terms of ‘source’ and ‘target’ in which translation is habitually cast: translation cannot be reduced to a move between two stable, pre-existing languages. Instead, he contends, every literary text creates its own new language out of existing tongues, vernaculars and levels of speech. The language of every text is heterogeneous, and a new language must therefore be created during translation, in order to receive it. Thus Berman’s conception of translation has a Levinasian ethical aim: ideally, the translating act receives the foreign as foreign. The production of a translated version that adapts the text completely to its new context fails to respect the differences within the original text to communicate its ‘shock’. Because all versions of Bueve include an ideal of hospitality, they provide an interesting venue for reflection on Berman’s statement that: de même que l’Étranger est un être charnel, tangible dans la multiplicité de ses signes concrets d’étrangeté, de même l’œuvre est une réalité charnelle, tangible, vivante au niveau de la langue. (76) [just as the foreigner is a fleshy being, tangible in his many concrete signs of foreignness, so the literary work is a fleshy and tangible reality, alive in its language.]

Both Bueve and the text are foreign bodies accommodated in differing climates. But how much hospitality do they find? Hospitality always has limits and as a result, we collapse into the logic of commodity. Even the idea of an ‘auberge’ is a commercial one; hospitality offered for a profit. In each of the four versions of the legend examined here – the Anglo-Norman text, Continental III (an Old French version), the Franco-Italian Bovo found in the

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Geste Francor, and the printed Emilian Buova d’Antona of 148025 – a different balance between commodity and hospitality is struck. But how exactly were different communities of interest created around the legend? What makes it a good commodity? Was it repeatedly contorted to the needs of new audiences, or did it retain an immutable meaning, accepted with open arms by publics of different stripes?

Anglo-Norman Version A neat, compact and thrilling narrative, the Anglo-Norman version predates all other extant versions of Bueve.26 It sets the tale in England: Bueve is born ‘en Engletere’ (386) [in England], and neither Charlemagne nor any other king of France features. Only when he returns to Hampton incognito does Bueve speak of France, purporting to be ‘Gyraut’ from the castle of ‘Dygon’ in ‘France’ (2012). ‘François’ otherwise only denotes Christians combating pagans (3614, 3622, 3628). Because of this focus on England, Marianne Ailes calls the text ‘an appropriation of the chanson de geste for Insular culture’.27 But such language casts it as the rightful property of another culture, which is then seized by Anglo-Norman, and given the wandering history of the chanson de geste – not to mention the themes and manuscript tradition of Bueve – it is best avoided. Within the narrative, home is always somewhere else. Throughout, what defines Bueve is desire for ‘ma tere’ (296) [my land]. Early on, he must leave for ‘un autre regné’ (247) [another kingdom], and despairs that ‘il ne irreyt mie a Hampton, la cite’ (1360–1) [he would never go to the city of Hampton]. And later, after recapturing Hampton, Bueve is again exiled because of his horse’s crime, and he laments ‘jeo de le terre tot sui exilez’ (2635) [I am completely outcast from the land]. When the Saracen king Yvori demands to know where Bueve is from (1518), he replies with an itinerary: Jeo ai esté a Nubie E en Cartage e en Esclavie 25  The interrelationships of these versions cannot be accurately traced; I shall therefore compare them without positing any genetic links. 26  References are to Stimming, ed., Der anglonormannische Bueve de Hantone, provided in parentheses. 27  Marianne J. Ailes, ‘The Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone as a chanson de geste’, in Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, ed. Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjević (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 24. Similarly, Susan Crane sees an Anglo-Norman peculiarity in the greater interest in land and in legal questions in this version. See Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 55.

bueve d’hantone/bovo d’antona 235 E a l’Arbre Sek e en Barbarie Et a Macedoyne, par tut en Paienie. (1519–22) [I have been to Nubia, to Carthage and Slavic lands, to the Dry Tree and in barbarian lands, to Macedonia and everywhere in Pagandom.]

Displacement, stemming from his parents’ mismatched marriage, defines Bueve. Much too young for his father, Gui, Bueve’s mother seeks instead the love of Doon. It is, according to the narrator, a ‘graunt pecché’ (120) [great sin] for a young woman to marry an old man. At one stage, Bueve curses his mother: ‘mar fustes si bele! / Bien resemblez puteine, ke deit tener bordele’ (214–15) [a curse on your beauty! You are just like a whore, who should live in a brothel]. Subsequently, he terms himself ‘fiz a une puteine’ (278) [the son of a whore]. This disjuncture from family structures remains with Bueve throughout his exile: he has no home to go to. Because home is lost, it ceases to be a particular site; Bueve belongs to no local mythology. Thus, over and again, community can be created around him. On his travels, Bueve repeatedly demonstrates the qualities that make him a commodity useful anywhere. His beauty is recognized by King Hermine, who allows Bueve to command his army. Hermine’s daughter, Josiane, falls in love with him. However, he claims to be an unworthy ‘povere chevalier de un autre regioun’ (686) [poor knight from another land]. But when Josiane later sends for him, Bueve demonstrates the lack of calculation that marks a noble by giving her messenger his fur coat. Josiane therefore realizes that he is ‘large e corteis’ (748) [generous and courtly], and no ‘velein’ (749) [peasant]. He refuses the surface values of commodity thinking and instead displays the intrinsic values that were temporarily hidden by his clothes. However, because Bueve will not convert even ‘pur tut la tere ke est en paenie’ (400) [for all the heathen land there is], he finally forces Josiane to accept him as other. She allows him to serve her, and thus Bueve becomes a knight. Great emphasis falls on the fact that Bueve remains in the East as an unconverted Christian. Saracen hospitality to strangers features centrally: many helpful Saracens transport Bueve and accommodate him. Bueve is welcomed as a foreign son because of his qualities. Yet he is no commodity, rather an ambiguous gift that arrives from nowhere, a gift with no giver, one whose status is uncertain. What is Hermine accepting when he lets him in? For Derrida, the foreign son is always a potential parricide;28 in this case, parricide happens symbolically, when Bueve kisses Josiane, thus violating her father’s right to give her as a gift. She wants to change faith for Bueve, and Hermine’s religious law is thereby challenged, too. Bueve shows himself to 28  Derrida and Dufourmantelle, De l’hospitalité, 13. Of course, Bueve’s real father has already been killed, and the relationship between lack of a father and exile is clear. Bueve will commit symbolic parricide again later by displacing his surrogate father, Doon.

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be a person rather than a thing, a gift rather than a commodity, and thereby outstays his welcome. Thus there remains no trace of the absolute hospitality which would require Hermine to cede his place for the foreigner. And indeed, the disintegration into commodity logic is encapsulated in the jongleur’s plea for financial reward. The narrator displays his product – previewing the events to come – before saying: Issi com vus me orrez ja a dreit conter, Si vus me volez de vostre argent doner, Ou si noun, jeo lerrai issi ester. (434–46) [Now this is what you shall truly hear me tell, if you are willing to give me your money, or if not, I will stop telling it now.]

We must assess the story as a commodity. How much is the tale of the wonderful knight Bueve worth to us?

French Version (Continental III) This rendering reinterprets the story’s import and appeal through the adoption of a misogynistic perspective.29 The moral is not to trust a ‘fole femme’ [mad woman]; she can make a fool of all but the cleverest men (10–15). Gui dies at the hands of Doon’s men, but his wife is blamed: ‘par sa moiller est mors et devïés’ (400) [through his wife he died and met his doom]. But just as a bad woman poses a threat, a good woman is a valuable commodity. Here Josiane ‘sells’ herself to Bueve: Vois, Bueve sire, com je ai le cors gent, Bel et bien fait et de bon essïent, Tous li roiaumes mon pere a moi apent, N’i a nul hoir fors moi tout soulement, En moi ara riche marïement. (2180–4) [Look, Bueve, sire, at my delightful body, beautiful and well-shaped and in good health, my father’s entire kingdom is attached to me, and he has no heir apart from me, he’ll make a fine marriage for me.]

But she cares not a jot for her other suitors – all kings and powerful men – and only desires Bueve. Thus, as in many Saracen princess narratives (such as the Prise d’Orange), Josiane ratifies the value of the Christian hero by giving 29  References are to Stimming, ed., Der festländische Bueve de Hantone, provided in parentheses; Stimming terms this version ‘Fassung III’.

bueve d’hantone/bovo d’antona 237 herself as a gift to him. Intriguingly, however, Josiane here thinks that Bueve is French, and wants him to take her away ‘en la terre de Franche’ (2216) [to the land of France]. Later, during their separation, she thinks of him: ‘Or iés en France a joie en ton regné’ (3332) [you are now happily in France, in your kingdom]. Elsewhere, though his home is referred to as England, people assume he is from France (for example 10,403 and 11,392). His men are also referred to as ‘François’ (14,622). This suggests that ‘France’ has a wide meaning, encapsulating all western Europe, perhaps because the text vehicles French claims to the imperial throne, or perhaps as part of a reworking of the myth, an attempt to transport it home to ‘France’. In this light, the prominence of ‘epic’ properties in this version – the lengthy battles where Bueve wins victory for Hermine and defeats Doon – can be understood. Moreover, crusade ideology dominates: Bueve’s Christian faith is stressed, and, although Saracen adjuvants remain, the presence of horrible Saracen enemies is remarkable. King Hermine is Christian; out of pity, he accepts Bueve, who then helps him vanquish ‘paien et Sarrasin, / Turc et Persant et Mor et Beduin’ (1626–7) [pagans and Saracens, Turks and Persians and Moors and Bedouins]. And finally, at the conclusion of his eastern adventure, Bueve submits most of the Mediterranean – Cyprus, Sardinia and Sicily – and then Rome, Germany and Lombardy. In a jolly final procession, he carves out a huge empire as almost all of Europe surrenders to him. Like Charlemagne, then, Bueve is simultaneously French and much more than that. Overall, this version works to ensure a domestic market for the text, first through misogyny and then through drawing on the text’s epic qualities and on Bueve’s value as an imperial Christian hero. The tale’s foreignness is attenuated and it becomes one of the boys.

Franco-Italian Version (Geste Francor) This version comes closest to Berman’s ideal of translation as ‘animée du désir d’ouvrir l’Étranger en tant qu’Étranger à son propre espace de langue’ (75; original emphasis) [driven by the desire to open the foreigner as foreigner to his own space of language], because of its unique hybrid language, which blends French with Italian dialects.30 Hence, here a foreign text is received within the language of the translating text. The Geste does not domesticate the legend but superimposes languages to accommodate it in its alterity. It brings Italian dialects under fire from French, and vice versa. There results from this a third language that collects and intermingles influences and currents and that fills the gap caused by the absence of an existing target language. But, as Berman says, ‘l’étrangeté de la traduction métissante/différenciante abolit la mauvaise étrangeté du temps et de l’espace. Ceci ne va 30  References are to Morgan, ed., Geste Francor, provided in parentheses.

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pas sans violence’ (84) [the foreignness of mixed-race/differentiating translation abolishes bad foreignness, the foreignness of time and space. But this is not done without violence].31 Here, rather than the distant provenance of an original being highlighted and repudiated, foreignness is brought within the language of the translation itself in a violent act of linguistic disruption. French is invited onto new territory, but its hegemony is simultaneously contested. The balance between hospitality and hostility manifests itself at the level of language. In terms of narrative, the most striking particularity of this version comes in the incorporation of the legend into a cycle with legends about Charlemagne and Roland. In Bovo itself, Pepin appears, accepting a bribe to side with Doon (here ‘Dodo’) against Bueve (here ‘Bovo’). Hence the idea that France owns the chanson de geste is, paradoxically, reinforced in Italy when the Bovo legend and kings of France are connected. However, though hospitality is a factor, an element of commodity presents itself too. The text now discusses domestic issues. Thus, Henning Krauss argued that this version was tailor-made for an Italy different from France because of its communal (rather than feudal) structures.32 And indeed Bovo appears as a good regional noble, an ideal leader of a city, who desires independence from external sovereign authorities. His portrait resembles those of ideal princes: Mais non amò coardo ni traitors, Senpre el fu dolçe et piatos, Contra li malvés felon et orgolos. (4776–8) [He never loved cowards or traitors, and was always gentle and merciful, but was proud and mean to bad men.]

This aspect provides one answer to Venuti’s question: how does a translation make itself appealing and comprehensible to a different audience? As Venuti argues: as translation constructs a domestic representation for a foreign text and culture, it simultaneously constructs a domestic subject position, a position of intelligibility that is also an ideological position, informed by the codes and canons, interests and agendas of certain domestic social groups.33

31  On the fantasy of violating language to reverse the violence it imposes on us, see Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 79–80. 32  Henning Krauss, Epica feudale e pubblico borghese: Per la storica poetica di Carlomagno in Italia (Padua: Liviana, 1980), 25–69. 33 Venuti, Scandals of Translation, 68.

bueve d’hantone/bovo d’antona 239 But the commodity factor in Bovo must not be overestimated. Bovo remains a baron and chivalric virtues prevail. Krauss’s argument in L’Epica oversimplifies the contested values of the legend, which does not uncritically espouse ‘feudal’ values, and which therefore supports repeated reworkings. The Geste Francor version puts the material to different uses, without being an ethnocentric translation that makes the legend ‘Italian’. Indeed, it also universalizes the legend by highlighting not Saracen elements, not misogyny, nor even the love theme, but rather the moral opposition between Bovo on the one hand and on the other the tyrannical Pepin and the house of traitors, to which Dodo belongs. Pepin takes advantage of Dodo’s war against Bovo to demand sovereignty over Antona. Overall, moral issues predominate. Pepin, though presented as a king of France, works as an imperial figure. Plot elements thus take on wider, not more particular, values: the tale becomes a drama of imperialism against native rule, and more broadly of good against evil. In terms of language as well as plot, then, cultural narcissism and complacency are thereby avoided. There is no real attempt to Italianize the material: this form of translation recognizes and appreciates the alterity of the material by setting it in ‘France’ and by creating a language to house it. Values associated with a ‘French’ literary tradition are welcomed and a new use found for them, partly particularizing them but partly widening their import. Linguistic and political differences are signalled and displayed rather than repressed. The legend’s plasticity reveals itself most strikingly here. Translation works within the text, shuttling between hospitality and commodity. This is not a product but an ongoing production.

Italian version (1480) This version transforms the material in a radical way, giving it the form of cantari (popular Italian chivalric songs) in ottava rima (rhyming stanzas of eight lines).34 The predominant vehicle for epic material in Italy from the mid-fourteenth century onwards, cantari became the most common form of Italian narrative poetry. In one sense at least, then, this version domesticates the material.35 Nonetheless, it shuns the predominant domestic target language of literary Tuscan, instead adopting a northern koinē described as ‘Veneto-Emiliano’ (that is, combining linguistic forms from the Veneto and Emilia regions).36 The text resembles a parody or pastiche of the legend: 34  References are to Branca, ed., Buovo d’Antona, provided in parentheses. On ottava rima, see Jane Everson, ‘The Epic Tradition of Charlemagne in Italy’, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 12 (2005): 45–81. 35  As Gilbert argues in this volume, medieval translation practice could be as much about a change of form as a change of language. 36  Branca, ed., Buovo d’Antona, 19; see also 38–40.

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richly comic and theatrical, it makes liberal use of direct speech and repeatedly appeals to the audience’s emotions. Each cantare starts with an oration asking for absolution for those listening and singing. Buovo is a Christian not an Englishman, and the moralizing aspects of the Geste Francor version remain strong. Dodo and Pepin appear again as the enemies. Here Buovo confronts Dodo: Dudon, ben ti pò star a mente Del duca che tenea questa cittade, Che l’occidesti sì felonamente; E Buovo ch’era sua hereditade, Te portasti di lui sì falsamente! E, brevemente, traditor, son quello: Tu malvaso, a me crudel e fello! (17.34) [Dodo, you should well remember the duke who held this city, whom you killed so wickedly; and Buovo who was his heir, you treated so treacherously! And in short, traitor, I am he: you, evil man, were cruel and wicked to me!]

The text exploits the dramatic potential of the scene to the full. Throughout, Dodo plays the role of pantomime villain. Buovo, starring opposite him, features in a series of humorous disguise scenes. He is not a noble, chivalric hero but a comic champion. This printed text of Buovo was intended for wide dissemination, an innovative move as the printing of chivalric poems was still rare.37 Strong commercial considerations undoubtedly motivate the resort to popularizing elements and the marvellous. In this form, Buovo remained a model for popular literature for a long time, at least into the seventeenth century.38 The Roland legend also survived as folklore and popular romance in Italy long after the decline of interest in chansons de geste, while the tale of Renaut de Montauban – another baron combating an unjust sovereign – provided a subject for Neapolitan and Sicilian puppet theatre until the early twentieth century.39 Thus the matter 37  See Daniela Delcorno Branca, ‘Vicende editoriale di due poemi cavallereschi: Buovo d’Antona e Innamoramento di Galvano’, in Tipografie e romanzi in Val Padana fra Quattro e Cinquecento, ed. Riccardo Bruscagli and Amedeo Quondam (Modena: Panini, 1988), 75–83. 38  Daniela Delcorno Branca, ‘Sulla tradizione italiana del Buovo d’Antona e sui rapporti con la tradizione francese’, in Il romanzo nel Medioevo: Atti del convegno, Bologna, 20–21 ottobre 2003 (Bologna: Pàtron, 2006), 104. 39 On Roland, see the essays in Anna Imelda Galletti and Roberto Roda, eds, Sulle orme di Orlando: Leggende e luoghi carolingi in Italia (Padua: Interbooks, 1987). On Renaut, see Antonio Scuderi, ‘Performance and Text in the Italian Carolingian Tradition’, Oral Tradition 21, no. 1 (2006): 68–89.

bueve d’hantone/bovo d’antona 241 outlived the form that housed it. The 1480 version of Buovo, then, which deforms the material the most, also restores its vitality, thereby accomplishing what Walter Benjamin saw as the principal task of the translator: giving the work an afterlife.40

Conclusion Where is the home of the chanson de geste? The plurality and difference of surviving chanson de geste manuscripts was restrained and contained by the practices of philology with its idea of ‘the lost original’ that, miraculously, always turned out to be a French version: thus the home of the tradition was made out to be ‘France’. But as far as Bueve d’Hantone is concerned, this fantasy dissolves into a blurred movement of versions around the edges and fringes. The French version makes a half-hearted attempt to make Bueve a Frankish knight; only the Italian versions associate his story with kings of France, and they oppose him to that kingdom rather than integrating him into it. Because of its emphasis on borders, boundaries and differences, the text itself becomes a study of hierarchy, dislocation and cross-cultural contact. The many translations of Bueve show the possibility for the same story to appeal to vastly different cultural constituencies. Bueve might, furthermore, invite the question of how many chansons de geste support an idea of home? Frequently, remaining at home and hoping to inherit equals cowardice (hence Aymeri’s insistence in Les Narbonnais that his sons capture their own fiefs rather than waiting for a share of his lands). Home is valuable only if it can be won; a hero targets his father’s land solely in response to being disinherited, as here or in Raoul de Cambrai. Chanson de geste plots are about displacement; the genre promotes an ideal of spreading and dissemination. They are tales of travel, exile, pilgrimage, conquest and adventure, not of fixity; and their history is one of routes. Borders are there to be moved or at least crossed. Frequently mistaken as monological, the genre must rather be conceived of as a field of contest, with clashes between values and ideologies as well as between knights. Thus the texts contain many nonrealized communities: nascent ‘national’ communities can be imagined, but there are others. Both Berman and Venuti see a utopian dimension to translation’s anticipation of community and consensus and its movement towards the eventual reconciliation of cultural differences. In the history of Bueve, the universal elements of the plot are utopian features, aspects of shared culture. Exile becomes a universal space: all readers can associate with a hero without a 40  See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 70–82.

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home. Moral categories work in this way too, and the world is always clearly divided into good and evil. Other constants include Bueve’s desire for home and his refusal to accept substitute land, as well as his religion: over and again, Bueve rejects the opportunity to renounce his Christian faith. Owing to these features, the text has anchors and ideological seals. Its world does not become one of incessant and incomprehensible shifting. Paradoxically, these constants and universals remain untranslatable (unconditional, nonnegotiable) but they provide a core which makes translation possible, allowing the text to travel as a commodity whose value is widely recognized. However, encounters with difference are thus constrained as well as enabled. Each version seeks wider appeal by demonizing a particular group – traitors, kings, Saracens, women – and each uses the material as a commodity, albeit as well as offering hospitality to a gift, a heterogeneous text. The Anglo-Norman text makes Bueve into an internationally desirable product; the French incarnation, in turn, adopts a misogynistic, anti-Saracen perspective to turn him into a crusading heart-throb Christian hero. The Franco-Italian version offers hospitality to a foreign language – creating linguistic heterogeneity – but counters this through the stabilizing appeal to moral and anti-imperial sentiments. Finally, the Italian edition reinvents the narrative to popularize it and permit its survival. Thus the margins displace the ‘centre’, along the lines of Venuti’s claim that ‘a study of the periphery in any culture can illuminate and ultimately revise the center. Yet in the case of translation, of cross-cultural exchange, the peripheries are multiple, domestic and foreign at once’,41 or along the lines of Berman’s destabilization of the opposition between home and exile: only in exile can the propre of the work – that which is most homely and most foreign in it – come out.42 Categories of language, geography and text are opened to renegotiation. For medievalists, this entails the revision of linguistic and literary histories shaped around the development of national traditions.43 The ethical dimension to translation is there, in the moment of reconfiguration, which is often curtailed by stabilizing logics: pragmatic, political and commodity concerns. Absolute openness to the difference of another culture ultimately remains an unreachable utopia, but the ideal can be glimpsed anamorphically, in translations of tales through countless diverse locations.

41 Venuti, Scandals of Translation, 4. 42  This is the argument of Berman’s L’épreuve de l’étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). 43  Butterfield’s contribution to this volume attempts precisely such a rethinking in relation to vernacular languages in late medieval England.

Untranslatable A Response

Simon Gaunt Babel: un nom propre d’abord, soit. Mais quand nous disons Babel aujourd’hui, savons-nous ce que nous nommons? Savons-nous qui? Considérons la survie d’un texte légué, le récit ou le mythe de la tour de Babel: il ne forme pas une figure parmi d’autres: Disant au moins l’inadéquation d’une langue à l’autre, d’un lieu d’encyclopédie à l’autre, du langage à lui-même et au sens, il dit aussi la nécessité de la figuration, du mythe, des tropes, des tours, de la traduction inadéquate pour suppléer à ce que la multiplicité nous interdit. En ce sens il serait le mythe de l’origine du mythe, la métaphore de la métaphore, le récit du récit, la traduction de la traduction. Il ne serait pas la seule structure à se creuser ainsi mais il le ferait à sa manière (elle-même à peu près intraduisible, comme un nom propre) et il faudrait en sauver l’idiome.1 [Babel: a proper noun in the first instance, perhaps. But when we say Babel today, do we know what it is we are naming? Do we know of whom we speak? Let us consider the survival of a text bequeathed, the narrative or the myth of the tower of Babel: it is not just one figure among others: speaking as it does of the inadequacy of one language to another, of one place in the encyclopaedia to another, of language to itself and to meaning, it also speaks of the necessity of figuration, of myth, of tropes, of towers [turns] of inadequate translations to supplement that which plurality forbids us. It would in this sense be the myth 1  Jacques Derrida, ‘Des tours de Babel’, in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, 2nd edn (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 203, cited here from www.jacquesderrida.com.ar/frances/tours_babel.htm (accessed 8 August 2011). All translations in this essay are my own; I have occasionally added alternatives in parentheses.

244 simon gaunt of the origin of myth, the metaphor of metaphor, the narrative of narrative, the translation of translation. It would perhaps not be the only structure to demarcate itself thus but it would do so in its own way (itself more or less untranslatable, like a proper noun) and we need to rescue [save, preserve] its idiom.] Babel, Derrida asserts here in the first paragraph of his seminal essay ‘Des tours de Babel’, is not just a figure among others: Babel retains its status as foundational myth precisely not just because it figures the failure of different languages to correspond to each other, but rather because it figures the inadequacy of all language to man’s aspirational drive for wholeness (figured by ‘one tongue’ and ‘the same speech’ in Genesis 11:1: ‘labii unius et sermonum eorundem’) and mastery (figured by the impossible proposed heights of the offending tower in Genesis 11:4: ‘faciamus nobis civitatem et turrem cuius culmen pertingat ad caelum’).2 And for Derrida, embedded as he is in the ‘linguistic turn’, the impossibility of linguistic wholeness and mastery implicitly stands for, but also outweighs, the impossibility of other forms of wholeness and mastery. Thanks to Babel, Genesis tells us, mankind’s language(s) will be both confounded (Genesis 11:7: ‘confundamus’, says the one and indivisible Hebrew God, intriguingly, but perhaps prophetically, using the first person plural) and confused (Genesis 11:9: ‘confusum’). God thereby instantiates linguistic difference as both a punishment and an injunction to translate: people are condemned not to understand their neighbour’s speech (Genesis 11:7: ‘non audiat unusquisque vocem proximi sui’), yet the implication is surely that they should try to do so. Thus, if universal understanding is prohibited by God, translation is divinely ordained. Of course the parable or fable of Babel in Genesis 11 layers irony upon irony. Thus, although God recognizes mankind’s original wholeness (Genesis 11:6: ‘ecce unus est populus et unum labium omnibus’), mankind itself needs to be dispersed, and thereby fragmented (Genesis 11:9: ‘inde dispersit eos Dominus super faciem cunctarum regionum’) to realize its prior unity, let alone the value of this: from a human perspective ‘one people’ and ‘one language’ are retroactive constructs that were heuristically always already lost, by which I mean they would seem to be destroyed by their very conception or articulation. And this inherent fracturing of linguistic unity is nicely figured in the translation history of the Vulgate Genesis 11 itself, where a single Latin verb (confundere, of which confusum is the past participle) gives rise to two verbs (in English, at least): to confound and to confuse. Implicit, then, in the Babel myth, as Derrida saw it, is not just destruction but the process he called différance, whereby meaning moves relentlessly along the signifying chain, never to come to rest, and which deprives man of unmediated access to stable meaning. Indeed, meaning is 2  All citations from www.latinvulgate.com (accessed 8 August 2011).

untranslatable 245 always displaced and at one remove; hence Babel is not just a myth, metaphor, narrative or translation, but rather ‘le mythe de l’origine du mythe, la métaphore de la métaphore, le récit du récit, la traduction de la traduction’ [the myth of the origin of myth, the metaphor of metaphor, the narrative of narrative, the translation of translation]. Babel thus offers another way of understanding the ‘absolute translation’ to which mankind is condemned, which Derrida theorizes in Le monolinguisme de l’autre,3 and which is discussed in the Introduction to this volume. But maybe the final irony of Genesis 11 is that in some ways the people of Babel got what they wanted. They built their tower so that their name might be ‘celebrated’ (Genesis 11:4: ‘celebremus nomen nostrum’) and while most translations give this phrase perhaps audacious overtones of creation (for example, see the King James Bible: ‘Let us make us a name’), celebrare suggests rather a desire for renown, perhaps commemoration.4 And in this respect the Babylonians certainly got what they wished for. I do not aspire to say anything new about Genesis 11 or indeed about Derrida, but I would like to unpack a little the intriguing last sentence of his introduction to ‘Des tours de Babel’, as it seems to me to pose some pertinent questions for translation in the Middle Ages: ‘Il ne serait pas la seule structure à se creuser ainsi mais il le ferait à sa manière (elle-même à peu près intraduisible, comme un nom propre) et il faudrait en sauver l’idiome.’ First, what is the subject of this sentence? A number of referents for the pronoun il are possible: Babel itself, the proper noun, the text, the narrative and the myth. Characteristically, Derrida’s pronominal indeterminacy here mimes what he is talking about (structural parallels), as it does again in the parenthesis: does elle refer to structure or to sa manière? And, equally characteristically, Derrida then introduces what will prove to be one of the main themes of his essay in a parenthesis, which is to say that proper names are untranslatable. Yet even that isn’t quite it. Something here (the unspecified il) is more or less untranslatable, like a proper name. But why is a proper name untranslatable and how can something be more or less untranslatable? Surely translations of proper nouns abound and something either is, or is not, translatable? And why explain the idea here – whatever it is – through an analogy? Finally, what language or idiom is it that we have to save at the end of the sentence: that of Babel (in which case before or after its destruction?), that of the structure it represents, that of the manner of its structure, or that of the proper name? While I cannot hope to answer these questions in what follows, they underpin this response to Rethinking Medieval Translation. * 3  Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996). 4  A point marked only relatively infrequently in translations: see, for example, DouayRheims, ‘let us make our name famous’. Translation history can often weigh heavily on sound bites such as this.

246 simon gaunt The essays in this volume are for the most part concerned with the process of translation, and therefore with what is translatable, with the productive potential of translation and with the ethical or political ramifications of this. Thus one fundamental concern in medieval culture – as we see in Burgwinkle’s and Campbell’s contributions – is the transparency or opacity of the word of God, and the adequacy, or indeed inadequacy, of any language, post-Babel, to mediate divine truths. Whereas, as Burgwinkle shows, Ramon Llull displays mainly blithe confidence in his ability to mediate sacred truths transparently in a range of languages, the fragile and elusive nature of divine truths when translated between languages seems, as Campbell demonstrates, to have troubled Rutebeuf in his Miracle de Théophile, but nonetheless to have represented an irresistible challenge. Perhaps even more interestingly, as Griffin argues, the author/translator of the Ovide moralisé felt the need not just to extrapolate morals from his source texts, but also to read morals into them so that the process of translation not only unsettles the original, but is also confident in its own superiority, translating something that perhaps was not even there in the first place. Politically, the process of translation stresses movement and fluidity, and as Stahuljak’s and Sunderland’s essays illustrate, translations may be one trace among others of the sometimes extensive liminal zones, spatially, culturally and politically, in which translations – or indeed translators – embody contact but also sometimes conflict. People, objects and texts moved around extensively in the Middle Ages for political, commercial, cultural and devotional reasons, and if the textual residues of this mobility often render linguistic difference per se invisible or quasi-invisible (as Stahuljak and Mills point out), our understanding of medieval texts may be limited if we fail to grasp the multilingual context in which many texts were produced and circulated. Traduttore/traditore [translator/traitor], as the saying goes, and this betrayal may be political or ethical as well as semantic: both Guynn and Léglu show how ideologies may be repackaged beyond recognition in translation, even where recognizable words, names and themes ostensibly provide continuity. If translation may lead to an excess of meaning, as in the Ovide moralisé, it can also lead to the rejection of unacceptable or perhaps irrelevant ideas. But sometimes something even more radical happens, which is to say the foreclosure, as opposed to the suppression, of some element of foreignness. Two particularly suggestive essays in this volume in this regard are Gilbert’s and Mills’s (though others also gesture in this direction). Gilbert shows how the translation of a narrative from one form to another, in this case from verse to prose, renders the original inaccessible, even unattainable, partly because language itself changes over time, effectively smothering the original. Mills, on the other hand, investigates the foreclosure of more radical forms of difference – religious and possibly also racial – showing how (in legend) Thomas Becket’s non-Christian mother is effectively a blank page on which a Christian text (a conversion narrative) may be written. She is not translated from

untranslatable 247 something (a Muslim woman) into another (a Christian woman), but rather, as Mills puts it, from nothing into something.5 This raises, I suggest, not simply the question of when translation founders, a problem on which most of the essays in this volume touch in one way or another, but also the problem of the untranslatable. Yet I would further suggest that the untranslatable should be regarded not only as a problem, but also as an opportunity, an invitation for further thought, and as an ethical necessity. In the case that Mills examines, the treatment of Becket’s mother’s pre-Christian life as a blank space is undoubtedly politically pernicious, part of the suppression of alterity, and yet, as many translation theorists have pointed out, to render the strange and foreign intelligible often entails domesticating it, assimilating it, reducing it to familiar structures, one might say familiar forms of the foreign that exist primarily as a foil to the familiar, dominant discourse that becomes a constraining as well as a containing frame.6 Perhaps under these circumstances there is, potentially at least, something positive about falling outside the field of representability, which is also to say outside the field of translatability. The untranslatable thus implicitly retains a core of otherness, of difference that cannot be assimilated. Let us return then to the question of why a proper noun is untranslatable. Perhaps the aporia at the heart of medieval translatio suggests an answer to this. The classic examples of translatio studii and translatio imperii entail physical movement between places and temporal progression, as well as transposition between languages. Even if languages were a transparent vehicle for meaning, so that a translated text had exactly the same resonance as its source (which we know is never the case), movement in space and time changes an object, a person, a language or a text. Learning, to take the classic example of translatio from the prologue of Cligès, is not going to be the same in imperial Rome as it was in Greece, and it is going to be transformed as radically by a move from Rome to France.7 And of course underpinning this instance of translatio is the myth of Troy, whereby ‘Troy’ is displaced first to Rome and then, by some accounts, to north-west Europe. Clearly ‘Troy’ here is symbolic, but equally clearly a new Troy can never be identical with its namesake, since a place is singular in time and space. It is the temporal and spatial singularity of the proper noun that makes it untranslatable. 5  There is a strong Lacanian resonance here. See Lacan’s seminar ‘De la création ex nihilo’, in Jacques Lacan, L’éthique de la psychanalyse: Le séminaire VII (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 139–52. 6  See most notably Antoine Berman, ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004), 276–89; Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998), esp. 81–7. 7  Chrétien de Troyes, Cligès, ed. Charles Méla and Olivier Collet (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994), lines 24–44.

248 simon gaunt This is not to say that attempts are not made to translate proper nouns, but medieval writers are keenly aware of the slippery and ephemeral nature of the results. Consider Wace’s adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of the origin and history of London’s name.8 Originally called ‘Trinovant’, which in itself is a reflex ‘par corruptiun’ of ‘Troie Nove’ (1228–9), Brutus’ city ‘desur Tamis’ (1221) is then rebaptized ‘Kaerlu’ (1233) after being substantially rebuilt by King Lud, but this is in turn ‘corumpu’ (1234) to give ‘Lodoïn’ (1235) before finally ‘Londenë en engleis dist l’um / E nus or Lundres l’apelum’ (1237–8) [in English one says London and now we call it Lundres]. The stress on corruption here masks the rupture that has actually taken place: there is in fact no etymological connection between New Troy and London (see 1231–3) so New Troy, like Troy itself, has not in fact been translated, whatever impression the history evoked by Wace here gives of continuity. Strikingly, when Wace discusses the city’s names in the present, native Londoners have no more hold on what their city is called than past citizens, since ‘we’ call the city ‘Lundres’. But if ‘we’ means ‘francophones’ there is nonetheless a sleight of hand here, for surely many francophones in London also spoke English, while many anglophones also spoke French. Wace is acknowledging here the multilingual nature of twelfth-century England, one in which translation must have been a mundane and everyday practice for many, but hard and fast linguistic categories may simply not work for this society. This layering of languages, of periods and of ethnic groups is then explicitly cited as the reason why proper names come and go: Par plusurs granz destruiemenz Que unt fait alienes genz Ki la terre unt sovent eüe, Sovent prise, sovent perdue, Sunt les viles e les contrees Tutes or altrement nomees Que li anceisor nes nomerent Ki premierement les fonderent. (1239–46) [Through the several episodes of great destruction wrought by foreign peoples, who often owned the land, often took it, often lost it, are towns and counties named entirely differently now compared to the names used by the ancients who founded them in the first place.]

The stress here is on otherness (‘alienes genz’, ‘altrement’). ‘London’ may superficially be the same place, but nonetheless it is not the same. Several thou8  All citations by line number from Wace, Le roman de Brut, ed. Ivor Arnold, 2 vols (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1938–40). I am greatly indebted to discussions with Jessica Stoll for the points I make here about Wace’s history of London’s name.

untranslatable 249 sand lines later, Wace recapitulates the history of London’s name at length (3739–74), reiterating also his point about the names of places changing and concluding as follows: Mult en purreit l’on trouver poi, Si come jo entent e oi, Qui ait tenu entierement Le nun qu’ele out premierement. Quant Lud, li bons reis, fu feniz, A Lundres fu ensepeliz Juste une porte ki ad nun De sun nun Porlud en Bretun; Engleis la parole unt turnee E Luddesgate unt numee. (3781–90) [One would be hard pressed, according to what I have understood and heard, to find many [towns] that have kept entirely the name they had originally. When Lud, the good king, died, he was buried in Lundres (London) beside a gate that was called after his name in Breton, Porlud; the English have transformed (turned) this word and call it Luddesgate (Ludgate).]

The rhyme pair entierement/premierement underscores the point that proper nouns – and perhaps words more generally – do not, indeed cannot, stay intact in translation. A parole is rather ‘turned’ or transformed into something different (3789). But it is also significant here that Lud’s name survives, albeit transformed, only where there is also a physical residue of Lud himself, at Ludgate where he was buried, which in turn emphasizes the singular nature of the proper noun, its quasi-material specificity in time and place, and the fact that it cannot be easily detached from its original referent. All of this suggests that if you wish to record or acknowledge this temporal and spatial specificity, you need to preserve not so much the original name (and ‘Troie Nove’ is interestingly in itself a translation, already situating origins elsewhere), but certainly the various names a place has had at specific moments in the past. For Trinovant, Kaerlu, Lodoïn, Londenë and Lundres are in fact different places, transformed by each wave of ‘alienes genz’. Paradoxically, given that ‘fidelity’ is such an issue in translation studies, even though often as a straw man, perhaps the most faithful way to translate is not to translate at all. Another way of putting this is that translation is of necessity a fundamentally diachronic activity that fails the synchronic reality of everyday language. One mode of medieval writing in which untranslated proper nouns abound is descriptions of the world. Such texts are generically eclectic and include encyclopaedias, more extensive, narrative accounts of journeys outside Europe such as Marco Polo’s Le devisement du monde or Le livre des merveilles

250 simon gaunt attributed to one John Mandeville, merchants’ manuals, narratives or records of missions to Asia and so on. These texts often accumulate in quick succession series of similar but deeply foreign-sounding place names that readers are almost certainly never going to have encountered before reading the text in question and without any precise idea of where they might be. (See, for example, Devisement cxxx–cxxxvii: Caingiu, Cacianfu, Cianglu, Ciangli, Candinfu, Singiu, Ligin, Pingiu, Cingiu).9 When this occurs, what exactly is the effect? As Michèle Guéret-Laferté suggests, one effect is undoubtedly what Barthes called ‘l’effet de réel’.10 This reality effect is produced partly by the way the cities are positioned spatially and even temporally in relation to each other (Cacianfu is ‘ver midi’ in relation to Caingiu; Candinfu is six days south of Ciangli and so on). The singular situation of all these places in space and time is then echoed in the way their names are individuated. Empirical research on the Devisement identifies nearly all the numerous places mentioned with real places, so it is generally believed that Marco Polo was attempting to recall, as best he could, and to convey to his francophone readers, foreign place names. In order to do so he does not Gallicize them and in so doing one might say he respects their specificity rather than assimilating them to a francophone symbolic as Wace does with London when he calls it Lundres. Yet the specificity of these places for the text’s francophone readers, who have no experience of the various places’ geographic and temporal situation, is primarily a product of linguistic differentiation. Indeed, given how similar the descriptions of a lot of these places make them sound, one might say that real difference between, as it were, Cingiu and Singiu is just one letter, as if the core of untranslatability comes down to what Lacan famously termed ‘the insistence of the letter’ in the structuring of the Real.11 The Devisement also raises interesting questions about what we, as modern readers, do with texts that seem to emanate from the interstices and liminal spaces between different languages, or to situate themselves self-consciously between two linguistic traditions, as Butterfield suggests is the case with Charles d’Orléans, Lydgate and Hoccleve in her contribution to this volume. 9  References are to Marco Polo, Milione. Le divisament dou monde. Il milione nelle redazioni toscana e franco-italiana, ed. Gabriella Ronchi, introduction by Cesare Segre (Milan: Mondadori, 1982), provided in parentheses. 10  Michèle Guéret-Laferté, ‘Le vocabulaire exotique du Devisement du monde’, in I viaggi del ‘Milione’: itinerari testuali, vettori di trasmissione e metamorfosi del ‘Devisement du monde’ di Marco Polo e Rustichello da Pisa nella pluralità delle attestazioni. Convengo internazionale Venezia, 6–8 ottobre 2005, ed. Silvia Conte (Rome: Tiellemedia, 2008), 291; Roland Barthes, ‘L’effet de réel’, Communications 11 (1968): 84–9. 11  Jacques Lacan, ‘L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud’, in Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 493–528. The English phrase ‘insistence of the letter’ stems from the early translation of this essay. See Jacques Lacan, ‘The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious’, trans. Jan Miel, Yale French Studies 36–7 (1966): 112–47.

untranslatable 251 Composed by two Italians writing in French, the earliest version of the Devisement blends Italian morphological forms and syntax into a French base.12 Whereas much earlier and some contemporary scholarship has a tendency to attribute the linguistic hybridity of the so-called Franco-Italian version of the Devisement to incompetence and sloppiness, more nuanced philologists and literary critics prefer to see in this unique linguistic performance a literary koinē that deliberately marks itself off from standard literary French and contemporary (presumably) spoken Italian.13 As Butterfield suggests, dealing with such texts requires us to develop a new model of translation: whereas modern translation theory tends to assume the prior existence of a ‘source’ and a ‘target’ language, some medieval texts are written in one language but ‘saturated’ with another. This poses particular problems when we are considering what happens to texts such as the Devisement when they are ‘translated’ into more standard forms of one of the languages between which they position themselves. Thus the language of the earliest version (and supposed original) of the Devisement has been described by one scholar as ‘deformed’, while the language of the version in more standard Old French is judged ‘remarquable … dépourvue des graves incorrections et des confusions verbales qui déparent la rédaction franco-italienne’ [remarkable, stripped of the serious errors and verbal confusions that undermine the Franco-Italian redaction].14 Whereas traditionally medieval texts are thought to become corrupt in transmission (rather like Wace’s place names), paradoxically this text turns out to be originally, always already corrupt, always already hybrid, always already a translation.15 This hybridity is further enhanced by the foreign words that litter the Devisement. By foreign words, I do not just mean Italianisms in French, but rather words from Oriental languages such as Mongol, Chinese and Persian. Indeed, in one instance in the textual tradition of the Devisement, which may or may not derive from the ‘original’, the narrator seems to show an awareness that in any language, or family of languages, there are degrees of foreignness:

12  On the language of the Devisement, see most recently Maria Grazia Capusso, ‘La mescidanza linguistica del Milione franco-italiano’, in I viaggi del ‘Milione’, ed. Conte, 263–83. 13  For example, see Valeria Bertolucci Pizzorusso, ‘Lingue e stili nel “Milione”’, in L’epopea delle scoperte, ed. Renzo Zorzi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994), 61–73; Peter Wunderli, ‘Un luogo di “interferenze”: Il franco-italiano’, in La Cultura dell’Italia padana e la presenze francese nei secoli XIII–XIV, ed. Luigina Morini (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001), 55–66. 14  Philippe Ménard, Marco Polo: à la découverte du monde (Paris: Glénat, 2007), 10. 15  See further Simon Gaunt, ‘Translating the Diversity of the Middle Ages: Marco Polo and John Mandeville as “French” Writers’, Australian Journal of French Studies 46, no. 3 (2009): 235–48.

252 simon gaunt Sed scire debitis quod per totam provinciam Manci una servatur loquela et una manieres litterarum. Tamen in lingua est diversitas per contratas, veluti apud laycos inter Lonbardo[s], Provinciales, Francigenas, etcetera; ita tamen quod, in provincia Mançi, gens cuiuslibet contrate potest gentis alterius intelligere ydioma.16 [But you must know that in all the province of Mangi, one language is used and one script. Yet the language is different according to the region, as it is among the lay people of Lombardy, Provence, France etc.; in the same way, in the province of Mangi, people from one region can understand the idiom of the people of another.]

The text here affirms what any good Romance philologist knows: that Romance languages may on occasion be mutually intelligible without translation (‘gens cuiuslibet contrate potest gentis alterius intelligere ydioma’), while nonetheless remaining separate languages (‘in lingua est diversitas per contratas’). But even more interesting than this observation is the structural parallel made between different Romance languages and different dialects of Chinese. The text thus renders difference intelligible through analogy. Or, as Derrida would say, ‘Il ne serait pas la seule structure à se creuser ainsi mais il le ferait à sa manière’ [It would perhaps not be the only structure to demarcate itself thus but it would do so in its own way]. The words from Oriental languages that appear in the Devisement are, however, marked as radically rather than relatively foreign. In her recent study of these foreign words, Michèle Guéret-Laferté suggests that while ‘tout récit de voyage fait une vaste opération de traduction, une transposition qu’opère celui qui décrit la réalité étrangère de façon à ce qu’elle soit assimilée’ [any travel narrative undertakes a vast task of translation, a transposition operated by the person who described the foreign reality so that it might be assimilated], the traveller will nonetheless encounter ‘l’intraduisible’ [the untranslatable]: C’est cette altérité qui ne trouve pas d’équivalent dans le monde et la langue du narrateur qui est mise en évidence par l’insertion de termes étrangers. Ce signe autre, signe de l’Autre, constitue bien une preuve qui vient renforcer la valeur du témoignage et il produit sur le lecteur un incontestable ‘effet de réel’, tout en dégageant, par son incompréhensibilité même, un aura d’étrangeté.17

16  Marco Polo, Milione. Redazione Latina del manoscritto Z, ed. Alvaro Barbieri (Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 1998), 250. This Latin version is thought to derive from an early but lost version of the Franco-Italian text. 17  Guéret-Laferté, ‘Le vocabulaire exotique’, 290–1.

untranslatable 253 [It is this alterity that finds no equivalent in the narrator’s world and language which is highlighted by the insertion of foreign terms. This other sign, or sign of the Other, plainly constitutes a further proof of the value of eye-witness, and produces for the reader an undeniable ‘reality effect’, while all the while giving off, by virtue of its very incomprehensibility, an aura of foreignness.]

Guéret-Laferté identifies and discusses thirty-seven words from Oriental languages that the text records, some of which are glossed and some of which are not. Where a word is glossed, she suggests that the ‘volonté traductrice’ [will to translate]18 is that of Marco Polo’s supposed collaborator and amanuensis, Rustichello da Pisa, to whom the text’s use of French is also often attributed.19 This part of her argument is perhaps less persuasive than the remarks I have just quoted about the effect of foreign words and their ‘aura of foreignness’. I also think the different ways in which the Oriental words are glossed warrant further scrutiny. Sometimes a direct equivalent or translation is given, for example ‘toscaor, que vient a dire en nostre lengue home que demorent a garde’ (xciv.3) [toscaor, which means in our language men who mount guard], though as we can see ‘translation’ is already tipping over into paraphrase here and more often than not this is the case. But in some instances attempts at ‘translation’ work quite explicitly through analogy, such as with the ‘mainere d’osiaus qui sunt apelés bargherlac des queles le fauconz se passent. Il sunt grant come perdis, il ont fait les pies come papagaus, la coe come rondiaus’ (lxxi.6–7). If this bird surpasses a falcon, is bigger than a partridge, has feet like a parrot and a tail like a sea swallow, it is in fact none of these things, but quite specifically a ‘bargherlac’ (probably a Turkish word).20 The trouble Marco Polo (or Rustichello da Pisa) has taken here to render the bird easier to picture for the francophone reader, even if the resulting image resembles a legendary hybrid beast, may, as Guéret-Laferté suggests, confirm ‘la rigueur de l’information’ [the accuracy of the information] and illustrate ‘l’objectif encyclopédique de l’œuvre polienne’ [the encyclopaedic intention of Polo’s work],21 but in also underlining, as Guéret-Laferté likewise notes, its specificity the text effectively confronts its readers with the untranslatable, a foreign reality which in practice cannot be assimilated. And as the Devisement seems to realize, if alterity is ultimately to be respected, the translator must 18  Guéret-Laferté, ‘Le vocabulaire exotique’, 301. 19  The prologue to the Devisement famously informs readers that Marco Polo dictated the text to Rustichello da Pisa, otherwise known as the author of a French prose romance compilation, while both were held for ransom in Genoa in 1298. 20  Guéret-Laferté relies, for her understanding and etymologies of Oriental words, on the ‘Indice Ragionato’ prepared by Giorgio R. Cardona to Marco Polo, Milione. Versione toscana del trecento, ed. Valeria Bertolucci Pizzorusso (Milano: Adelphi, 1975). See entry for bugherlac (570). 21  Guéret-Laferté, ‘Le vocabulaire exotique’, 291.

254 simon gaunt surely in the end abandon equivalence, paraphrase and analogy, leaving us just with the untranslated and untranslatable foreign word. Perhaps translation can only become really interesting precisely at the point where the process of translation reaches its limits and is effectively abandoned. Perhaps, as Derrida suggests in his elliptical parenthesis in the opening paragraph of ‘Des tours de Babel’, everything is more or less untranslatable, like a proper noun, and to acknowledge this we must ‘save’ or ‘rescue’ its idiom. And perhaps we do this by not even attempting to translate it. This clearly has ethical and political ramifications for our understanding of intercultural contact, movement and conflict, not just in the Middle Ages but in any period. But for those of us who have a stake in mediating medieval literary culture to modern readers today, the untranslatability of texts written in different languages, in different places and in a different period poses a particular challenge, especially given that our pedagogy increasingly, sometimes exclusively, relies on translations of texts not in English. The ubiquitous ‘parallel’ text now used for teaching Old and Middle French texts, for example, was intended to help students with the language of the original, but increasingly, as most teachers recognize, it has displaced the original. Thus all too often students using the generally admirable Lettres gothiques series that is now widely used to teach medieval French literature see the righthand page, with its modern French, as meaningful, and the left-hand page, with its medieval French text, as at best baffling and difficult, at worst as meaningless. And part of the problem here is that the translations are too readable: the Lettres gothiques editions, their covers all tell us, are intended to give not only ‘un accès direct’ [direct access] to the medieval text, but also an ‘accès aisé grâce à la traduction en français proposée en regard’ [easy access thanks to the French translation offered on the facing page]. But in giving our students ‘easy access’ to medieval texts through translations, are we not in fact missing the point of our pedagogy? Shouldn’t it in fact be difficult and challenging to access a different culture and isn’t being confronted with the alterity of a strange language part of this process? Maybe the best translation ethically is in some respects a bad translation in literary terms, like the fourteenth-century translations of Homer by Leonzio Pilatus that Desmond discusses in her chapter in this book. Perhaps the creaking syntax and stylistic infelicities of translations such as these serve the source text better precisely because they are designed to support the reader in her or his encounter with the baffling strangeness of something that is foreign. As Walter Benjamin famously suggested, maybe the ideal of all translation is ‘an interlinear [and literal] version of the holy scripture’,22 a version that does not necessarily help us to understand everything about the text it aims to translate, that is not 22  Walter Benjamin, ‘The Translator’s Task’, trans. Steven Randall, TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10 (1997): 165, consulted at http//:id.erudit.org/iderudit/037302ar (accessed 14 July 2011).

untranslatable 255 readable independently of its source text, but forces us rather to look directly at it. Perhaps our teaching translations need to be less readable, to force our students to look at the left-hand page, not necessarily with total understanding, but hopefully with attention, with respect and with the wonder that truly looking directly at difference can induce. Easy access, it would seem, can paradoxically lead to inaccessibility.

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Index Aachen [Aix-la-Chapelle], 228 Acre, 150, 153 Aeneas, 1, 52 Aeneid, 29, 30, 33, 36. See also Virgil Africa, 155, 186, 198, 199 Agincourt, 207 Aix-la-Chapelle [Aachen], 228 Alexandre (by Jehan Wauquelin), 166 Alexandria, 150, 157–62 Al-Ghazali, 188, 189 Anderson, Benedict, 154 Angevin Empire, 22–3, 25. See also Naples Anglo-French. See French, of England Anglo-Norman. See French, of England Aliscans, 227 anthropology, 85, 86, 87–8, 93–4, 168 Antoine de La Sale, 81–2 Apter, Emily, 185–6 Aquinas, Thomas. See Thomas Aquinas, Saint Arabic, 84, 104, 152, 156, 184–91 passim, 194, 199 Aragon, kingdom of, 195 Arethusa (in the Ovide moralisé), 54, 55–6 Aristotle, 84–91, 106, 185, 189, 195, 196, 199 Armenia, 135, 184, 231 Arras, 191, 192 n. 22, 202 n. 37 Art (by Ramon Lull), 186, 187, 188, 190–91, 195, 199, 200, 202 Ascanius (in the Ovide moralisé), 52–3, 57 Asia, 149, 250 Aspremont, 228 Athens, 56 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 72 Averroës, 84–5, 90–1, 104, 185, 199 Avignon, 22, 23 Babel, 48–51, 169, 243–5

Bagnyon, Jehan, 175–7, 179 Barcelona, 193 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 89, 89 n. 17 Bal, Mieke, 65–7, 81 ballads, 144 Barbary, empire of, 155 Barlaam (Calabrian monk), 21–6 Bartholomew of Bruges, 91 Basoches (medieval guilds), 85, 92–3 Basochiens. See Basoches Becket, ‘Alisaundre’. See Thomas Becket, Saint, mother of Becket, Gilbert (father of Thomas), 127–40, 142–5; wife of, see Thomas Becket, Saint, mother of Becket, Matilda. See Thomas Becket, Saint, mother of Becket, Thomas. See Thomas Becket, Saint Becket windows (Chapter House and St Michael le Belfrey, York), 137, 142–4, 145 belle Hélène de Constantinople, La (by Jehan Wauquelin), 171–3, 179 n. 34, 181 Benjamin, Walter, 7, 42, 48, 51, 53, 59, 164, 168–70, 173–80, 174 n. 25, 182–3, 241, 254–5 Berman, Antoine, 4, 5, 6, 7, 136, 226, 229, 232–3, 237–8, 241, 242 Bevis of Hampton. See Bueve d’Hantone biblical exegesis, 62 bilingualism, 206–8, 211–14, 217, 221–4 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 16, 21–2, 24–8, 30, 32–4, 36–7, 39–40, 73, 75 body language, 144 Boethius, 91, 176–7 Bollomier, Henry (canon of Lausanne), 175–6 Bovo d’Antona. See Bueve d’Hantone Breton, 249

286 index Breviculum, 191–203 Britain, 1, 10, 12, 226. See also England; Scotland; Northumberland Brutus (‘first’ king of Britain), 1, 248 Brutus, Lucius Junius, 66–7, 82 Bueve d’Hantone [Bevis of Hampton; Bovo d’Antona], 135, 229–42 Burgundy: manuscripts, 65, 165, 178 n. 32, 180–2; Valois dukes of, 165, 180–2 Buridant, Claude, 166–67, 168 n. 12 Bury St Edmunds, 208, 213 Butterfield, Ardis, 12 Byzantine Empire, 22–9, 32, 37. See also Church, Byzantine; Constantinople; Mediterranean; Thessalonica Caen, 132 Caenis [Caenus] (in the Ovide moralisé), 57–60 Cairo, 157, 158, 160, 161 Calabria, 22–3, 24, 26 cantari (Italian chivalric songs), 239–41 Carnival, 85–6, 89, 94–5, 95–104 Carthage, 234–5 Catalan, 184, 190, 191, 201, 202 catharsis, 84–95, 87 n. 11, 103–6 Catholic Church. See under Church Ceres (in the Ovide moralisé), 55–7 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 205 Champagne (town in France), 108 chanson de Guillaume, La, 227 chanson de Roland, La, 227, 228 chansons de geste, 134–36, 179, 226–42 Charlemagne, 1, 227, 234, 237, 238 Charles V (king of France), 64, 207 Charles d’Orléans, 207–19, 223–5, 251 Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, 180–2 charters, 107, 109–24, 114 n. 23 Chartier, Alain, 217 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 10, 72–3, 125–7, 128, 131, 134, 213, 223, 224 Chichele, Robert (brother of Henry, archbishop of Canterbury), 220 chivalry, 177, 180 Chrétien de Troyes, 29, 247 Christ, 52–3, 56–60 passim, 94, 187 Christine de Pizan, 64, 211, 217 Church: Catholic, 22–4, 96, 97, 99, 109, 128, 136, 151–3; Byzantine, 23–4; universal church, 128, 151, 152 Child’s History of England, A (by Charles Dickens), 145

Chroniques (by Jean Froissart), 150, 155–7, 162 Cicero, 29, 30, 82, 88 code-switching, 11, 136, 215 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 14–15 Collatia (town in Italy), 66, 71, 81 Cologne, 135 colonialism, 151–5, 157, 162, 205–7 Compendium logicae Algazelis (translation of Al-Ghazali’s Logic), 188, 189 competence, linguistic. See fluency Compostela. See Santiago de Compostela Constantinople, 23, 25, 28, 29, 153, 160 contact: cultural, 2, 12–13, 15, 22–4, 32–3, 40, 133, 146, 147–63 passim, 204–25 passim, 254; linguistic, 12–13, 15, 32–3, 40, 125, 133, 135–6, 147–63 passim, 204–25 passim, 250–1 conversion, linguistic aspects of, 127, 129–33 Copeland, Rita, 3 n. 2, 9–10, 14, 104, 178 Cornish, Alison, 12 Coutances (town in France), 150 Crete, 156 Cyprus, 153–4 n. 16, 157, 160–1, 184, 237 Damascus, 157 Dante Alighieri, 185 Dares Phrygius, 31–2 De casibus (by Giovanni Boccaccio), 72 n. 45, 73 de Man, Paul, 164, 169–70, 174, 174 n. 25 De recuperatione terre sancte (by Pierre Dubois), 132, 150–5, 153 n. 14, 162 dérimage, 164–83. See also prose Derrida, Jacques, 2–7; ‘Des tours de Babel’, 6, 7, 42, 47–8, 50–1, 53–4, 59–60, 169–70, 190, 243–5, 252, 254; Le monolinguisme de l’autre, 2–3, 5, 50 n. 15, 245; ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’ 3, 7, 110–12, 122, 210; De l’hospitalité, 232, 235 devisement du monde, Le (by Marco Polo), 149, 250–4 devotional literature, 170 dialects. See Franco-Italian; Genoese dialect; Neapolitan dialect; Veneto-Emiliano Diana (in the Ovide moralisé), 55–6 Dickens, Charles, 145 Dictys Cretensis, 31–2 didactic literature. See exempla ‘discursive heterogeneity’, 136 domestication, 4, 6, 83, 127, 129, 133–4, 136–7, 144, 226, 229, 237–9 passim, 247

index 287 Doon de Mayence, 231, 235–40 passim drama, medieval: cry, 86, 95; farce, 85–6, 89–90, 93–5, 101–6; festive drama, 84–106; miracle play, 107–24, 246; moralité, 86, 99–101, 105; sottie, 85–6, 89–90, 94–9, 104–6 Dubois, Pierre, 132, 150–5, 153 n. 14, 162 Edward I (king of England), 153 n. 14 Edward IV (king of England), 80 Egypt, 153, 153–4 n. 16, 157, 158. See also Nubia Emilia (region in Italy), 239 England, 15, 88, 128–31, 134–5, 138, 143, 144, 146, 206–25 passim, 227, 231, 234, 237. See also Britain; Northumberland English: ‘aureate’ English, 208–9; Middle English, 9–10, 13, 15, 125–46 passim, 130, 134, 136, 138, 146, 206–25 passim; modern English, 4, 69, 126, 136, 206, 244, 254; relationship to French, 11, 135–6, 206–25, 248 Englishness, 134, 136 Epistre (Hoccleve’s translation of L’epistre au dieu d’amours), 211, 213 ‘ethical non-indifference’, 65–7, 82 ethics: of commodity/gift, 113, 116–19, 121–4, 226, 229, 231–42; of translation, 1–8, 14, 15–16, 41–3, 82, 107, 110–12, 119, 122–3, 127–8, 129, 136–7, 147–50, 162–3, 170, 204–7, 222–5, 226, 231–42 passim, 246–7, 249, 254–5; of the untranslatable, 247, 249, 254–5. See also domestication; ‘ethical nonindifference’; fidelity être à traduire, l’, 43, 47–8, 50–1 Euripides, 21 Eutychianos, 108 Evans, Ruth, 12 exempla, 61–83, 118 exile, 229, 234–5, 241–2 Facta et dicta memorabilia (by Valerius Maximus), 62, 63–5, 69–72, 80, 82 faicts et les conquestes d’Alexandre le Grand, Les. See Alexandre Fair Rosamund (by Thomas Miller), 145 Faits et dits mémorables. See Hesdin, Simon de; Nicolas de Gonesse farce. See under drama, medieval Ferron, Jean, 73, 75, 77, 80 fidelity: figures of, 127; of interpreter, 147, 149–50, 152–3, 162, 162–3; in translation, 3, 5, 8, 9, 43, 44 n. 7, 174–5, 185–6, 249

First Quadrilogus, 129, 138 fixers, 147–63, 150 n. 6 Flanders, 157, 181 Flood, Finbarr B., 14 Florence, 27, 39 Floure and the Leaf, The, 214–15 fluency: linguistic, 132, 155, 204–25; in translation, 4, 19, 125, 125 n. 1, 204–25 Folena, G., 167 foreignness, 4–5, 25–8, 127, 130–4 passim, 136, 138–46 passim, 159, 161, 179, 204–26 passim, 226 n. 1, 229, 231–9 passim, 241–2, 246–7, 250–5 France, 1, 23, 29, 77, 86, 88, 95, 153–5, 159, 161, 207, 208, 210, 211, 214, 226–42 passim, 247, 252. See also Burgundy; Normandy; Provence Franks, 163, 227 French: of England, 11, 135–6, 206–25, 227–31, 233–6, 242, 248; Middle French, 41–66, 70–83, 85–6, 95–106, 132, 147, 149–63, 164–83, 206–25, 254; modern French, 254; in Naples, 23, 32; Old French, 12, 13, 32, 107–24, 135–6, 156, 191, 226–42, 248, 251, 253–4. See also Franco-Italian Franco-Italian, 229–31, 233, 237–9, 241–2, 251 Froissart, Jean, 150, 155–7, 162 Fulbert of Chartres, 109, 110 n. 8 Gautier de Coinci, 109, 110, 110 n. 8, 117 n. 26, 123 Genoa, 157, 184, 192 Genoese dialect, 155–6 Germany, 227, 237 Geste Francor, 230, 234, 237–40 Girart de Roussillon, 228, 229 n. 14 Girart de Vienne, 228 God, 44, 56, 94, 113–22 passim, 144, 169–73, 178, 186–91 passim, 195, 199; as agent of translation, 127, 131, 133, 138–9; divider of languages, 48–50, 244; incarnate, 52–3, 58–9; name of, 48, 169; word of, 5, 48, 184, 185, 189, 246. See also Christ Gormont et Isembard, 227 Gower, 10, 217, 220 Greece, 1, 24–9 passim, 39, 222, 247 Greek: ancient Greek, 21–2, 25, 28–40, 85; Graecus, 36–7; identity, 24–7, 29–30; language/literature, 21–40, 84–5, 87, 90, 108, 152, 166 ‘Greekling’ (graeculus), 29 Grim, Edward. See First Quadrilogus

288 index Gringore, Pierre, 85–6, 95–106 Gui (father of Bueve d’Hantone), 231, 235, 236 Guillaume de Machaut, 150, 157–63, 212 hagiography, 126, 129–44, 146 Hebrew, 120, 173 n. 23 Henry II (king of England), 141, 145 Hermannus Alemannus, 84–5, 90–1, 104 Hesdin, Simon de, 64–5, 70–4, 76, 78, 79, 83 hierarchy: linguistic, 8, 14, 15, 41–42; original/copy, 3, 5, 8, 188–9, 229, 231 Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, 32, 72 histoire de Charlemagne, L’, (by Jehan Bagnyon), 175–7, 179 histories, national linguistic/literary, 206–29, 242 histories, Roman, 61–83 historiography, 147, 150–63 Hoccleve, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 219–23, 225, 251 Holy Land, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 138, 144, 150–5, 157 Homer, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 30–40, 38 n. 62, 227, 254 Horace, 30, 33–4, 88 hospitality, 6, 7–8, 30, 136, 226, 229, 232–9, 242 Iliad, translation of, 21–40. See also Homer images: text-image ‘translation’, 8, 61–3, 83, 191–203; and effacement of difference, 139–44; of translation, 201–3 imperialism, 2–3, 125, 239 interpreter. See interpreting interpreting, 8, 131–3, 147–63, 223–4. See also fixers Isidore of Seville, 91–92, 188 n. 13 Islam, 126, 159, 186, 188, 189, 190, 193–4, 199 Italian: identity, 24–5, 27, 29; language/ literature, 12, 32, 231, 234, 237–41, 251. See also Franco-Italian; Genoese dialect; Neapolitan dialect; Veneto-Emiliano Italian Wars (of Louis XII), 86, 97, 100, 102, 105 Italy, 12, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 39, 72, 88, 95, 227, 228, 238. See also Calabria; Emilia; Lombardy; Veneto Jaume II (Majorcan king), 184, 187 Jean de Meun, 70

Jean, duke of Berry, 64 Jeanne de Bourgogne (queen of France), 41 n. 3, 202, 202 n. 37 Jerome, Saint, 37 Jerusalem, 151–2, 153–4 n. 16, 155, 157 jeu des eschaz moralisé, Le (by Jean Ferron), 73, 75, 77, 80 jeu du Prince des Sotz et de Mere Sotte, Le (by Pierre Gringore), 85–6, 95–106 Jews, 108–9, 111, 120, 120 n. 29, 137. See also Judaism Josiane (lover of Beuve d’Hantone), 135, 231, 235, 236, 237 Judaism, 185, 186, 188. See also Jews Julius II (pope), 97, 99 Juvenal, 29 Kinoshita, Sharon, 12–13 Kubilai Khan, 149 La Sale (by Antoine de La Sale), 81–2 Lacan, Jacques, 250 language: and identity, 25, 150; as a mark of foreignness, 125–7, 129–34, 137–9, 189, 205–6, 208; ‘original’ human language, 190, 244; ‘pure language’, 59, 169–70, 169 n. 14, 182; redemptive power of, 112, 120–1; transformation of, 174–5, 229, 233, 237–9, 251; and truth, 42, 121, 169–70, 187–9, 246; universal language, 188–9. See also body language; mother tongue languages: confusion of, 48–51, 243–5; interaction between, 11, 187, 204–25 passim, 233, 251; learning of, 132, 151–5, 185, 187–8, 194; oral/written, 152, 154–5; visual depiction of, 127, 141–3, 194. See also Arabic; bilingualism; Catalan; English; French; Greek; Hebrew; Italian; Latin; multilingualism; Occitan; Oriental languages; Saxon language; vernacular languages; xenoglossia Laon, 228 Latin: ‘corrupt’, 126, 131; and Greek, 34–40, 84–5, 90–1; language/literature, 22, 25–6, 29–30, 32–42, 61–73, 77, 81, 104, 108, 118, 120–1, 152, 166, 170, 173 n. 23, 176, 184–5, 191–4, 201, 213, 222, 228, 244; and vernacular languages, 3, 8, 9–10, 14, 41–42, 45, 61–4, 70–1, 120–1, 135, 165–6, 168 n. 12, 176, 178, 208–9 Latin Church. See Church, Catholic Laurent de Premierfait, 61, 75 Le Myésier, Thomas, 191–203, 191 n. 21,

index 289 202 n. 37. See also Breviculum Legend of Canterbury, or, The People’s Martyr, A (by Elizabeth Stewart), 145 Legend of Good Women, The (by Geoffrey Chaucer), 72–3 Léglu, Catherine, 12 letters, 24–30, 38, 109–24, 114 n. 23 Levant, 150. See also Syria; Mediterranean Libre d’amic e amat (by Ramon Lull), 188 Libre de contemplatió (by Ramon Lull), 187, 189–90 livre des merveilles, Le (attributed to John Mandeville), 250 Livy, 61, 63, 66–7, 71–2, 77, 81 Logic (by Al-Ghazali), translation of, 188, 189 Lombardy, 237, 252 London, 128, 130–1, 137–40 passim, 143, 220, 248–50 Louis XII (king of France), 86, 95–106 passim, 207 Low Countries, 180–1. See also Flanders Lucretia, 63, 65–83 Ludgate, 249 Lull, Ramon, 18–19, 184–203, 246 Lydgate, John, 19, 207, 208–10, 211, 212, 213, 221–2, 223, 225, 251 Lyon, 184 lyric, 207–25; ballade, 212–13, 224; rondeau, 212, 223–4; troubadour/trouvère, 222 Macedonia, 235 Mahdia, siege of, 150, 155–7 Majorca, 184, 186, 187, 192–5 passim Man of Law’s Tale, The (by Geoffrey Chaucer), 125–8, 131 Mandeville, John, 250 manuscripts: Cambridge, St John’s College, G.5, 219, G.25, 216–17; Cambridge, Trinity College, R.3.20, 212–14; Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 145, 137–8; Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, St Peter, perg. 92, 192–203; London, British Library, Additional 44949 [Tywardreath Psalter], 219, Harley 682, 207–11, 215–20, 223, Harley 2277, 137–8, Royal 2.B.VII [Queen Mary Psalter], 139–44, Royal 18.E.IV, 79–80, Royal 20.B.III, 219; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 108, 129–39, Rawl. poet 225, 137; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, français 30, 72 n. 45, français 41, 77–8, français 53, 72 n. 45, français 127,

72 n. 45, français 229, 73, 75, français 282, 76–7, français 286, 72, français 287, 73–4, français 12595, 72 n. 45, français 25458, 207, 224, latin 15450, 192, 202; Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale 261, 77 n. 57 Mary the Egyptian, Saint, 108–9 Mary, Virgin. See Virgin Mary medical texts, 32, 87 Mediterranean, 21–40 passim, 153–5, 157, 198, 199, 237 Mesnagier de Paris, 73, 80 Metamorphoses (by Ovid), 41–60. See also Ovid; Ovide moralisé Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ (by Averroës), 84–5, 90–1, 104. See also Hermannus Alemannus Middle English. See under English Middle French. See under French Miller, Thomas, 145 Minnis, Alastair, 13 Miracle de Théophile (by Rutebeuf ), 107–24, 246 Miron, Gaston (Quebecois poet), 224 mistranslation, 44, 65, 189 Montpellier, 184, 187, 192 n. 22 Morocco, 155 mother tongue, 12, 166, 167, 167–8 n. 10, 180, 190–1 multilingualism, 3, 11, 12–13, 15, 48–50, 134, 146–8, 152, 156, 184, 201, 204–25, 246, 248. See also bilingualism; xenoglossia mummings, 213 music theory, 91 Nabokov, Vladimir, 204–5 names: of people, 36–7, 131, 138; of places, 36, 36 n. 58, 138, 247–50; transliteration of, 36, 36 n. 58; untranslatability of, 48–50, 131, 138, 243–5, 247–54. See also God, name of Naples, 22, 23, 26, 32–3, 40, 156, 157, 240 Narbonnais, Les, 241 Nasreddin (chief interpreter to the sultan), 162 Neapolitan dialect, 32 Nicolas de Gonesse, 64, 74, 76, 78, 79 Normandy, 215, 228 Northumberland, 126, 127, 131 Nubia, 234–35 Occitan, 12, 191, 228 Odyssey, translation of, 25, 27, 34, 37. See also Homer

290 index Old French. See under French Oriental languages, 251–3 original. See source Oresme, Nicole, 70 Orléans, 228 Ovid, 41–60, 67, 70, 73 Ovide moralisé, 41–60, 246 Ovide moralisé en prose, 167–8, 178 Pallas (in the Ovide moralisé), 54–6 Palma, 186, 187, 187 n. 9, 188, 190 Paris, 85, 95, 107, 109, 153, 184, 189, 191, 192, 192 n. 22, 200, 202, 213. See also Saint-Denis ‘passing’, as a translator, 184, 184 n. 2 Paul, Deacon of Naples, 108, 109 Pepin (king of France), 227, 238, 239, 240 philosophy, Classical, 87, 185. See also Islam; Judaism; Scholasticism Pilatus, Leonzio (translator of Homeric epics), 22, 24–8, 30, 33–40, 254 Pisa, 184 Perceval of Coulonges (chamberlain and captain to Peter I), 157–62 Peter I (king of Cyprus and Jerusalem), 157–62 Petrarca [Petrarch], Francesco, 21–33, 37–40 Phaeton (in the Ovide moralisé), 52, 57 Philip IV (king of France), 153, 153 n. 14 Philip VI (king of France), 151 Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, 171–2, 180–2 Phoebus (in the Ovide moralisé), 52–3, 57 Pierre II, duke of Bourbon, 77 Plato, 21, 87, 91 Plutarch, 64 Poetics (by Aristotle), 84–5, 87–8, 90–1 politics: of festive drama, 84–6, 88–106; of translation, 1–8, 14–16, 71, 83, 86, 104, 127, 147–8, 162–4, 170–83 passim, 223, 226, 246, 254. See also colonialism; histories, national linguistic/literary; imperialism Politics (by Aristotle), 84–5, 87–8, 90–1 Polo, Marco, 149, 250–4 postcolonial studies, 2, 3 n. 2, 12–13, 14–15, 204–7, 210, 223 Prasad, G. J. V., 205–6 prise d’Alixandre, La (by Guillaume de Machaut), 150, 157–63 prose: mise en prose as translation, 8, 164–83, 246; translation into, 37–8, 38 n. 62, 61 Provence, 252

Publicola (Roman consul), 77, 78, 80 Queen Mary Psalter, 139–44 Raoul de Cambrai, 241 Ramon de Penyafort (confessor to Jaume I of Aragon), 187 n. 9, 193 Raymonda, duchess of Lombardy, 80–1 Randa, Mount, 187, 195 Recovery of the Holy Land. See De recuperatione terre sancte Renaut de Montauban, 240 Richard II (king of England), 211 Robert of Anjou (king of Naples), 23, 25, 32, 34 Robert the Wise. See Robert of Anjou (king of Naples) Rocamadour, 186, 193 Roman Church. See Church, Catholic roman de Brut, Le (by Wace), 248–51 Roman Empire, 28, 227 romance (literary genre), 134, 177 Romance languages. See vernacular languages Romans (town in France), 94 Rome, 1, 28–9, 32, 61–83 passim, 126, 184, 226, 237, 247. See also Roman Empire Rushdie, Salman, 206 Rustichello da Pisa, 253 Rutebeuf, 107–24, 246 Saint-Denis (town north of Paris), 228 saints’ lives. See hagiography Santiago de Compostela, 186 Saracen princess plot, 135, 138, 144, 236–7 Saracens, 137, 140 n. 30, 145–6, 151, 153, 162, 172, 173, 187, 234, 235, 237, 239, 242 Sardinia, 237 Saxon language, 126 Scholasticism, 185, 190 Scholastic translation, 86, 90–2 scientific texts, 32 Scotland, 144 Seneca, 30 sermons, 109, 170 Shirley, John, 212–13 Sicily, 156, 228, 237, 240 Slavic lands, 234–5 Socrates, 199 Sophocles, Hölderlin’s translations of, 174 Sophronios, 108 source: critique of, 3 n. 2, 5, 8, 229, 233, 241;

index 291 displacement of, 9–10, 12, 37–8, 44–5, 104, 205, 254; preservation of, 34–8, 61; privileging of, 3, 7, 179, 229, 241; transformation of, 174–80. See also être à traduire, l’ South English Legendary, The, 129–41, 143–6 stained glass, 137, 142–4, 145 Stewart, Elizabeth, 145 Suffolk, duke of (William de la Pole, jailor to Charles d’Orléans), 213, 214 Syria, 125–6, 127, 145, 158 Tarquin Collatinus, Lucius (husband of Lucretia), 66, 71, 75–6, 80 Tarquinius, Sextus (son of Tarquinius Superbus), 66, 69, 71, 76, 77, 77 n. 57, 78, 80, 81–2 Tarquinius Superbus, Lucius (Etruscan king), 66, 69, 71, 78 Taylor, Jane, 204 theatre. See drama, medieval Theophilus [Théophile], 107–24 theory, and medieval translation studies, 2–8, 9, 13, 14, 15–16, 53–4, 206, 210, 226, 229, 245 Thessalonica, 23–6 passim Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 91 Thomas Becket, Saint, 127, 128, 132, 134, 139, 140, 141, 143, 145–6, 246; mother of, ‘Alisaundre’, 127–46, 246–7, Matilda, 132 tower of Babel. See Babel translatio, 22, 28–30, 36, 39–40, 107, 110–13, 116, 118–19, 121–4, 126, 178; medieval concept of, 1–2, 2 n. 1, 7, 46, 61, 107, 148–9, 247; reliquiarum, 148; studii, 29, 32, 40; studii et imperii, 1–2, 2 n. 1, 10, 12, 14, 29, 148, 247; visual, 143 translation: and appropriation, 1–2, 4, 8, 10, 14, 40, 44–5, 82–3, 104, 254; collaborative, 30, 33–7; and cultural dominance, 2–5, 9–10, 150–5, 162–3, 226, 231–4, 239; (re)definition of concept, 3 n. 2, 8, 13–14, 15, 148, 210, 251; as derivative, 3–4, 82–3, 170; and difference, 4, 5, 6–7, 30, 40, 51, 82, 136–7, 204–25, 226, 231–4, 237–42, 246–7, 250–5; and equivalence, 25, 34–7, 40, 50, 111, 119, 121–2, 204–5, 221, 252–4; and history, 7, 164, 169–83, 246; and interpretation/commentary, 2, 30, 43, 45, 47, 54, 64–5, 82, 147–8, 166–7; interlinear, 33–7, 39–40, 254–5; and material culture, 13–14; metaphors of, 48, 51–60, 174, 180, 182, 243–5; ‘minoritizing translation’, 4, 133, 136; and moralization, 45–7, 45 n. 10,

52–4, 57, 64, 246; ‘relevance’ in, 3, 7, 110–12, 122; relationship to place, 11, 15, 147, 149, 162–3, 226–42, 246–54; and revelation, 42, 46–7, 59–60, 185–91; ‘rough’, 204–25; and the sacred, 7, 41–2, 46–51, 54, 59–60, 107, 110, 116–19, 121–4, 169–83, 184–91, 195, 246; sense-for-sense, 70–1, 83; terms for, 42–3, 167–8, 173; la traduction absolue, 5, 245; as transfer, 185, 189, 224; and updating, 61–2, 65, 71, 83, 174–80; within a single language, 50, 50 n. 15, 164–83; word-for-word, 25, 33–40, 70, 82–3, 186. See also ethics, of translation; fidelity, in translation; fluency, in translation; God, as agent of translation; images; interpreting; mistranslation; politics, of translation; prose; translatio; translation studies; xenoglossia translation studies, 2, 8, 147–8, 204–7, 226, 249 translator: acteur/translateur, 64–65; agency of, 147–9, 156, 162–3, 185–6, 203; as author, 2; body of, 185–7, 191; as cultural mediator, 22, 147–50, 162–3, 184; dérimeur as, 165 n. 4, 168; drug(e)man, 155, 156, 162; as ‘interpretant’, 186, 201; invisibility of, 4, 7, 123–46, 149, 184, 205; task of, 173–4; trucheman, 223–4. See also God, as agent of translation; interpreting; ‘passing’, as translator; xenoglossia travel writing, 149, 249–54 Troy: matter of, 22, 27, 29–40 passim, 221–2, 247; translation of, 247–9. See also Aeneas; Aeneid; Iliad; Odyssey; translatio, studii et imperii Troy Book (by John Lydgate), 221–2 Tunisia, 155, 184. See also Carthage Tymoczko, Maria, 7, 128 Tywardreath Psalter, 219 universal church. See under Church untranslatability, 127, 129, 133, 138, 182, 242, 243–55. See also names, untranslatability of Urdu, 206 Valerius Maximus, 62, 63–5, 69–72, 80, 82 vernacular languages, 152, 154, 167; literary/ documentary uses of, 41–2, 112–13, 120–1, 170, 188; in relation to Latin, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 70, 135, 165, 166, 167, 176, 178, 208–9; in relation to other vernaculars, 10–11, 135–6, 152, 155–6, 204–25, 251–2 Veneto, 239

292 index Veneto-Emiliano (northern Italian koinē), 239 Venice, 28, 157 Venuti, Lawrence, 4–8, 30, 127, 133, 185–6, 219, 222; The Scandals of Translation, 4, 136–7, 146, 226, 229, 231, 238, 241–2; The Translator’s Invisibility, 4, 7, 82–3, 125, 127, 147, 204–5 Vidal de Besalù, Raimon, 185 Vie de sainte Marie l’Egyptienne (by Rutebeuf ), 109, 112, 123 Virgil, 29, 30, 33, 38 Virgin Mary, 52, 59, 60, 94, 107, 108, 109, 116–21 passim, 117 n. 26, 123

Vita coetanea (by Ramon Lull). See Breviculum Vita Sancti Thomae. See First Quadrilogus Wace, 248–51 Wauquelin, Jehan, 166, 171–73, 179 n. 34, 181 Westminster, 208 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, 11 xenoglossia, 126, 184 ‘Young Beichan’ (popular ballad collection), 144

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Cover image: Tower of Babel. Manuscript of Ovide moralisé (first quarter of fourteenth century). Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS O.4 (1044), fol. 23r. Collections de la Bibliothèque municipale de Rouen. Photographie Thierry Ascencio-Parvy.

RETHINKING

Emma Campbell is Associate Professor in French at the University of Warwick; Robert Mills is Lecturer in History of Art at University College London.

Medieval Translation

Medieval notions of translatio raise issues that have since been debated in contemporary translation studies concerning the translator’s role as interpreter or author; the ability of translation to reinforce or unsettle linguistic or political dominance; and translation’s capacity for establishing cultural contact, or participating in cultural appropriation or effacement. This collection puts these ethical and political issues centre stage, asking whether questions currently being posed by theorists of translation need rethinking or revising when brought into dialogue with medieval examples. Contributors explore translation - as a practice, a necessity, an impossibility and a multi-media form - through multiple perspectives on language, theory, dissemination and cultural transmission. Exploring texts, authors, languages and genres not often brought together in a single volume, individual essays focus on topics such as the politics of multilingualism, the role of translation in conflict situations, the translator’s invisibility, hospitality, untranslatability and the limits of translation as a category.

156+5mm

Campbell and Mills

“Engaging and informative to read, challenging in its assertions, and provocative in the best way, inviting the reader to sift, correlate and reflect on the broader applicability of points made in reference to a specific text or exchange.”  Professor Carolyne P. Collette, Mount Holyoke College.

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