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The
Medieval Translator. The Theory and Practice of Translation
in the Middle Ages. Ed. Roger Ellis assisted by Jocelyn
Price, Stephen Medcalf and Peter Meredith. Woodbridge, Suffolk:
D.S. Brewer, 1989. 202 pp. The Medieval
Translator II (Westfield Publications in Medieval
Studies 5). Ed. Roger Ellis. London: Centre for Medieval
Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1991. xvi, 276
pp. Translation in the Middle Ages
(New Comparison 12). Ed. Roger Ellis. Colchester: University
of Essex, 1991. 165 pp. The Medieval
Translator 4. Ed. Roger Ellis and Ruth Evans. Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 1994. x, 256 pp. The
Medieval Translator 5. Ed. Roger Ellis and René
Tixier. Turnhout: Brepols, 1995. 488 pp.
These five volumes,
all by different publishers, share a common editor - Roger
Ellis - and an uncommon passion, the study of medieval translators.
Together they form an impressive series of papers drawn
from what have come to be known as the Cardiff conferences
on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle
Ages. The actual Cardiff conferences were held in 1987,
1989 and 1991; volume 5 in the published series is drawn
from a conference that took place in Conques, France, in
1993, and a future volume will no doubt represent a further
conference held in Göttingen, Germany, in 1996. Along
with several parallel initiatives1, the Cardiff series provides
a significant forum for discussions, debates and discoveries
that deserve to be better appreciated within general translation
studies.
Having
strayed into medieval translation almost by accident, I
remain an inexpert outsider who can only comment as such.
As an outsider, though, I can perhaps convey some of the
fascination that might lead others along similar paths.
After the extensive corpora, neat linguistics and relative
certitude of work on contemporary translations, there is
much to be learned from a field where almost all the data
have to be located through archeology or cunning detective
work, where linguistic methods become correspondingly complicated,
and where there is no general agreement about what translation
is or to what extent its modern conceptualisation can be
projected onto the past. Perhaps in gut reaction to these
fundamental differences, the Cardiff volumes name their
object as the medieval translator, the human subject, whereas
modernists talk more readily about "translating" or "translations",
instinctively carving up the contemporary field in terms
of apparently objective processes and products. The medieval
studies are resolutely full of people: exiled princes, court
poets, traitors awaiting execution, numerous monks and clergymen,
a few less nuns, mystic hermits, and many other translators
who remain people even when anonymous. Entering this world,
outsiders like myself soon become aware that we have been
living and studying in the era of the relatively subjectless
translator. It is a valuable lesson.
What do
medievalists talk about? Better, what do they argue about?
Some of the discussions differ little from the issues that
arise in other areas of translation studies. Here, as elsewhere,
there are debates about the evaluative or descriptive role
of the researcher. The weight of philological tradition
is such that quite a few medievalists feel obliged to assess
each translator's performance in terms of right and wrong,
good and bad, insisting on the historical desirability of
faithful and accurate translations (see, for example, papers
by Kalinke and McEntire in volume 3). Others disagree, arguing
that any evaluation imposes our own concepts of translation
on a world that was profoundly other. Yet the divergences
are not as simple as in other parts of translation studies.
A medievalist can always argue that evaluation is futile
because we can almost never be certain we have the exemplar,
the exact manuscript that the translator was working from.
Nor, for that matter, can we be entirely sure we have a
fair copy of the translator's actual product. In order to
evaluate, one must first establish the two texts to be compared,
at the obvious cost of losing the many manuscript variants
that nevertheless functioned in history.
In this way,
the problem of evaluation feeds into doubts about how to
produce critical editions of medieval texts (discussed in
an excellent article by C. W. Marx in volume 2), which in
turn raises serious questions concerning the very object
of historical study. Descriptivists have little trouble
attacking evaluative researchers for selecting fragments
and variants able to prove their preselected hypotheses
(so Wollin in volume 3). Yet there is more than one curly
issue at stake. If the general trend is away from strict
evaluative work, a researcher like Kalinke (volume 3), studying
Icelandic-Norwegian versions of Old French literature, can
nevertheless find and appreciate seventeenth-century manuscripts
that are closer to the Old French texts than are earlier
manuscripts of the properly medieval versions. She therefore
hypothesises, with some justification, that the earlier
translators worked accurately and faithfully, that their
work was degraded by bad redactors, and that the exactitudes
of the later manuscripts are due to a more direct connection
with the earlier translators. Come what may, a strict evaluative
concept of translation can still be deployed. And there
is so little hard evidence in this medieval world that no
one can really invalidate the procedure.
The real question,
though, is whether there is anything to be gained from separating
strict translation strategies from the wide range of rewriting
activities that were freely mixed in the Middle Ages. Scribes
sometimes took considerable linguistic liberties (see Westrem
in volume 4); explanatory material was often inserted without
further ado (see Pratt, in volume 2, among many others);
apparently superfluous material was unceremoniously omitted
(examples appear in numerous papers); and translators often
had an active subjective presence in the translated text.
All these factors must surely be accounted for.
Perhaps this
last-mentioned aspect, the translator's active subjectivity,
is the one that creates the most interesting problems. In
her account of the medieval category of remaniement or "reworking",
Pratt (volume 2) stresses that, in terms of this poetics,
adaptors/translators should indicate their capacity for
judgement by correcting and transforming source material.
Although the trend in the Middle Ages was against innovation,
this particular tradition viewed linguistic fidelity in
a negative light. The real question is then who is or is
not a translator, in what sense of the word, and if indeed
there is any sense that matters. As C. W. Marx argues, since
"authors, translators and scribes were frequently one and
the same" (3.266) there is often little to be gained from
describing the transmission processes in terms of separate
functions. In many cases translation and editing are inseparable
(Burnley, volume 1). There are significant moments when
translators assume the discursive role of the compilator,
the compiler/commentator who can also be a kind of preacher
(Johnson, volume 1). Chaucer made little distinction between
his translating and his "original writing" (Machan, volume
1). Elsewhere, translators becomes narrators commenting
not just on the difficulty of their task but also on the
actual qualities of what they might call "my author" (see,
among others, Brook in volume 2 and Hosington who, in the
same volume, describes a case where the translator suddenly
intervenes, using the first person, some 2000 lines into
the translation). No neat distinction between the translating
and narrating voices would seem to hold up for very long:
Although Wace's asides in his Roman de Brut might be recognised
as the voice of an active translator, when the resulting
text was translated by others Wace was incorporated as an
intervening narrator in the fullest sense of the term (Allen
in volume 3). A variant on these blurred boundaries would
be the medieval translator's discursive proximity to the
"clerkly narrator" of hagiographies, who transmitted not
just words or meanings but also the magical-ritual power
of the saint concerned (Wogan-Browne in 4). Although such
figures find little place in modernist theories of translation,
they might yet resurface in various postmodernist guises,
especially with respect to the actively intervening voices
of visible translators. Medieval history is not the only
area of translation studies that necessarily goes beyond
the anonymous translator projected by linguistic ideals.
Feminist criticism
is also a perhaps surprisingly significant element of this
more human frame. Among others, Barratt (volume 1) brings
to light a previously unnoticed woman translator of the
fifteenth century; Evans (volume 3) seeks out the role of
women not just as translators but also as a specific readership
for whom translations were produced; Phillips (volume 4)
shows how a male voice translated into a female voice by
Chaucer is accorded a narrower range of qualities; Wogan-Browne
(volume 4) discusses three women hagiographers; Voaden (volume
5) deals with the discourse of women visionaries. The Middle
Ages were not quite as full of men as they might appear.
The cultural
scope of these volumes is dominated by translations into
various stages of English (entirely so in the case of volume
1), although there are articles on work into Swedish, Middle
High German, Middle Dutch, Old Norse, Old French, Hebrew,
Castilian and Medieval Welsh. All things considered, this
is an impressive range. Yet it is by no means a balanced
coverage. There is certainly a need for greater integration
of other cultural players, perhaps a few more Semitic or
Slavic translators, for example. A better spread will hopefully
come as a result of further conferences in the series, to
remind us that the intellectuals of medieval Europe probably
formed more of a cultural union than we do now.
An expansion
in this multicultural direction might perhaps be offset
by some curtailing in others. For instance, the series as
we have it includes studies on modern translations of medieval
texts, as well as a few papers that develop the more metaphorical
senses of translation. This can lead to fascinating material
like comparisons with marginally post-medieval techniques
or even with translation as the physical moving of saints'
relics (Ashley and Sheingorn in volume 5), among much else.
Or again, Anne Savage (volume 4) describes the experience
of being pregnant while she was translating Anchoritic texts
on hatred of the physical body. As much as I would like
to know more about the movements of religious artefacts
and the experience of a translative pregnancy (really!),
I struggle to see any general frame able to make all these
insights pertinent to the main fields of inquiry. Similarly,
I suspect that collective progress requires something more
than tacking Walter Benjamin onto a discussion of a nontranslated
mystical text in order to insist that all translation is
like the impossible approach to God (Watson in volume 3).
In short, some of these texts have little to do with the
immediate issues of translation history. I would suggest
that future volumes include more cultures and a few less
metaphors.
Perhaps because
of the diversity of approaches, no overall theory seems
likely to emerge from these papers. This is despite an excellent
paper by Rita Copeland (volume 1) that explores the relations
between Jerome and the context of classical rhetoric, opening
up the paradoxes of translation as both creation and replacement,
continuity and rupture. Roger Ellis, in his introduction
to the first volume, suggests that these might be two poles
between which all medieval translation practices could be
located. However, as the later volumes reveal, there was
much more going on. Copeland stresses the importance of
the general political and discursive context of translation
theory, and no one can pretend that a simple polarity of
formal alternatives can capture all the various contexts
of the Middle Ages. Further, as Ruth Evans points out (volume
4), Copeland herself privileges theory and high-culture
translators, overlooking the ruck of diverse practices and
the more downmarket struggles for the vernaculars.
This is where
careful attention must be paid to the insights of the individual
researchers who, although often wrapped up in their own
authors, periods or genres, have much to offer before any
broad overview can be ventured. This is also why Roger Ellis,
as a careful and generous editor, helpfully uses his introductions
to synthesise the main points rather than to take sides
or exclude. The medievalists are building their castles
stone by verified stone, from the ground up, with relatively
few of the sweeping statements or hermeneutic gestures that
characterise our contemporary theorists. No doubt because
of the complexity of their task, or simply because their
historical vision spans centuries, they would appear to
be less hurried than most of us. Patience might be another
lesson to be learned from their work.
1. See Jeanette
Beer, ed. Medieval Translators and their Craft (Studies
in Medieval Culture, 25). Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval
Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1989,
which includes papers from the sessions on translation held
at the annual International Congress for Medieval Studies
in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Further material has been generated
by the conferences on translation history held in León,
Spain, in 1987, 1990, 1993 and 1996, papers from which have
been published in the two volumes of Fidus Interpres, ed.
Julio-César Santoyo et al., León: Secretariado
de Publicaciones de la Universidad de León, 1989,
and in the journal Livius, also published by the Universidad
de León. In French, see the conference proceedings
edited by Geneviève Contamine, Traduction et traducteurs
au Moyen Age. Paris: CNRS, 1989. All these volumes provide
valuable introductions to research published in the more
specialised journals.
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- Last update
11 March 1999
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