Translation and Literature 19 (2010)

Transcription

1 The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Vol. 1: To Edited by Roger Ellis. Pp. x Oxford: Oxford University Press, Hb This chronologically first volume of the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English 1 is an impressive compendium of information about literary history and textual transmission from Anglo-Saxon England to the early Tudor period. Its clear topical organization will help readers and researchers to find their way directly to the material that is of greatest interest to them: the languages of medieval England, manuscript culture, regionalism, class and gender, theories of translation, patronage, individual figures who played a large role in the activity of translating, and the corpus and subjects of translation, with chapters on the Bible, religious writing and women s contributions to religious culture, romance, chronicle and history, classical authors, translations from Italian humanists, and scientific and medical writing. The majority of the essays here are to be admired as expert surveys of translation in literary history. Rosalind Field s consummate account of romance, Vincent Gillespie s rich and exhaustive survey of religious writing, Philipp W. Rosemann s fine introduction to Robert Grosseteste s Latin translations, Tim Machan s erudite but also accessible study of manuscript culture, and Roger Ellis deeply researched essay on patronage of translators, stand out as definitive contributions to their subjects. A number of essays foreground the problem of translation with more thematic emphasis: Traugott Lawler makes a fascinating case for recognizing William Langland as a translator, assessing the refractory multi-lingualism of the three versions of Piers Plowman to show how scriptural and liturgical translation is both a textual and metatextual concern across the texts; Karla Taylor s chapter on writers of the Italian Renaissance is a model of a critical survey, assessing what she calls the brokenbacked narrative of Italian-English translation from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries and providing authoritative as well as subtle arguments about the delayed impact of trecento poetry in England; and David Lawton energetically reassesses Bible translation as a key form of English literary history (on this essay see the more detailed account below). A few essays miss the definitive mark: Barry Windeatt on Chaucer covers the facts of career and sources in accurate detail but without reframing any of the now familiar questions about the Chaucerian persona; and Stephen Medcalf s chapter on 1 The previously published Volume 4 was reviewed in this journal: Vol. 16 (2007),

2 Reviews translation from classical authors wastes its opportunity with rather quirky coverage (long sections on Boethius and Apollonius of Tyre; a short section on Ovid and Virgil overlooking Christopher Baswell s authoritative 1995 study Virgil in Medieval England and a coda on translations from Greek). It is noteworthy that the subject of theories of translation is confined to one chapter, Nicholas Watson s stimulating analysis of the theoretical structures expressed by the vernacular writings of medieval England by studying the vernacular lexis of translation itself as this is deployed in the translators prologues. Noteworthy because, the theoretical dimensions of medieval translation having been given explicit attention in Watson s excellent chapter, few of the other contributors have taken the opportunity to reflect upon the intellectual history or critical consequence of translation. With a few notable exceptions (especially Watson, Lawton, Taylor, and Coldiron), the contributors do not engage with work written in the general field of Translation Studies over the past fifty years, perhaps under editorial pressure to focus on pragmatic history and keep their essays free of theoretical preference or difficulty. This is a book in which, to take the most obvious examples, George Steiner is never mentioned, and Lawrence Venuti merits one citation. The force of ancient traditions of translation theory Cicero, Horace, Seneca, and Boethius, on whose thought the Middle Ages drew so fruitfully is rarely acknowledged. The volume is a packed encyclopedia of medieval translation, but chapter by chapter it does not enlarge our sense of how translation is part of intellectual history and how the Middle Ages participated in and transformed this theoretical tradition. The tendency is to develop individual topics and take ideas about translation as a given, without considering where the ideas may have come from or what the Middle Ages did with the legacy of ancient thought about interlingual mediation. Thus this volume may be less welcoming to readers interested in the long development of translation but not already committed to the elements of Old and Middle English literary history. But the pragmatic history of translation does not need to be divorced from the history of its theoretical debates. As noted above, there are some exceptional essays that bring history of ideas to bear upon the literary history of translation. Among these, the ambitious contributions by Nicholas Watson and David Lawton require special attention. Watson refuses an institutional top-down approach that moves from the universalizing authority of Latin to the local interests of vernacular translators. Instead, he insists that theory is made afresh, with new ethical sensibilities, in the practical pronouncements of 222

3 the vernacular translators prologues. Theirs, he demonstrates, is a shared technical terminology that demonstrates the stability of the role translation maintains at the centre of the place of knowledge and exchange that is medieval vernacular culture, an essential mediatior between the riches of learning, the past, and elsewhere, and... the lewed, the now, and here. What Watson s insistence can underscore for us is the sheer centrality of translation in vernacular culture, and by contrast its relative marginality to that universalizing Latin culture, despite the historical importance of learned translations from Greek and Arabic. The Vulgate translation of Scripture achieved sacred canonicity almost immediately upon its completion, and thus the Latin Middle Ages had early on resolved the most pressing issue of interlingual mediation and the translator s authority. But these issues remained dormant in medieval culture, to be reopened and reassessed with the proliferation of vernacular literary movements in the later period. Watson argues, interestingly, for the stability of translation in English literature, not only in terms of its centrality and ubiquity, but in terms of a stability, or objectivity, of outlook: Capgrave, he notes, presents his hagiographical translation as a definitive process that is marked, not by temporal loss, but by cultural and spiritual authority; and even the translators of the Wycliffite Bible ultimately see translation as efficacious and authoritative, despite the painful, difficult, even halting process of linguistic mediation that the translation s General Prologue describes. But Watson finds confidence in the power of translation outside the sacred or devotional sphere, where we might expect to see a notion of guaranteed access to truths beyond the vagaries of human language. On his view, even translation in the secular realm is infused with purpose and cultural assurance. Watson brings to John Trevisa s famous Dialogue between a Lord and aclerk(concerning the value of English translation) a distinctively optimistic reading of Lord Berkeley s role as aristocratic patron of learned Englishing: the patron is... ideally situated to act as a symbol of the cultural imperatives that make a translation necessary and efficacious. The patron assumes the role of divine guarantor of the truth and authority of profitable secular literature. Watson s argument accords less actual meaning to the humility topos so characteristic of translators prologues, seeing it rather as something of an indexical device, a way of signalling an epochal completeness of the translation rather than failure in the face of temporal loss. Watson s exploration of a bottom-up translation theory, finding a self-consistent theory generated across practical contexts in English writing, deserves to be read and debated by all students of English literary history, so 223

4 Reviews provocative is its strong account of translation as a self-making capacity, and its subtle engagement with seemingly unprepossessing or merely conventional statements by translators. David Lawton begins his generous and wide-ranging essay on translations of the Bible by carefully unpacking just what the Bible is. As indeterminate a thing in the twentieth century as in the ninth or fourteenth centuries, as much open to para-scriptural performance, one revered item on a continuum of sacred texts from the Psalter to Pilgrim s Progress to Scripture Notes, the Bible serves as a unifying theme in a long tradition of sacred translation. Lawton s survey encompasses para-scriptural English poetry in Anglo-Saxon biblical rendering from Cædmon to Ælfric, the Middle English Orrmulum, the vast tradition of alliterative retellings of the Bible in Middle English which in itself stretches from such works as the South English Legendary to such imaginative reinventions as Piers Plowman and St Erkenwald as well as the Vernon manuscript, the Wycliffite Bible, Reginald Pecock, and the Bible in the early Tudor period. But impressive as it is, the coverage is not the source of the excitement that Lawton s article generates. Rather it is the capacity to dwell productively and lucidly on a paradox, the simultaneous presence and absence of the Bible at the centre of an emergent vernacular culture of writing. What Lawton says of the massive Vernon manuscript of the late fourteenth century could be said of the literature of the whole period: it is biblical in spiritual function and in vernacular translation without being, in the main, biblical text. In its myriad medieval forms, the Bible stands at once concealed and revealed. This paradox rests in large part on the difficulties whether linguistic, logistical, or ultimately and famously political of translating the whole Bible into English. What counts as the Bible, therefore, is as much its cultural immanence as its word-for-word or verse-for-verse presence, and indeed its vernacular power seems to be the greater the more it recedes behind its simulacra, dispersed and renewed through a field of new texts that tell all or some of its story. Here Lawton recasts the very core of ancient translation theory, the dialectic between word and sense, as a vast cultural script. The Bible as codex is not, in fact, everywhere: it is under guard, quarantined for the privileged use of clergy, and yet at the same time it is a universal inward book which informs the multiple shapes of its dispersions. This, the paradox of clerical authority in relation to the Bible, is also the historical engine of the first great project of Bible translation in English, the Wycliffite Bible of the last decade of the fourteenth century. In terms of literary history, Lawton s argument, if no longer new, is one that 224

5 merits fresh formulations such as this because it needs to be re-argued at every turn: the Wycliffite Bible is not the false start of English Bible translation that early modernists have made it out to be, but rather the beginning of the main event that was to be restaged by Tyndale, Coverdale, the Great Bible of 1539, and the King James Bible of From 1380 onwards, the English Bible has a continuous history. The paradox, traced by Lawton, of biblical presence and absence, revelation, and concealment, represents a darker or more troubled theoretical background than Watson s optimistic vision of translation as an authorizing dynamic of English writing. But taken together, the essays are mutually enhancing, and, more broadly, inform the project of this volume as a whole with strong perspectives on the critical, intellectual, and ideological consequences of translation in both religious and secular spheres. Essays such as these, written by scholars of unimpeachable credentials, should go a long way (indeed beyond the covers of this volume) towards closing the artificial divide between the pragmatic history of translation and its internal critical debates. Rita Copeland University of Pennsylvania DOI: /E Elizabeth I: Translations. Vol. 1: ; pp. xi Vol. 2: ; pp. ix Edited by Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Hb. $50 each. The Consolation of Queen Elizabeth I: The Queen s Translation of Boethius s De Consolatione Philosophiae, edited by Noel Harold Kaylor Jr and Philip Edward Phillips. Pp. xii Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Hb. $63. Throughout the Middle Ages in England, members of the ruling royal families routinely commissioned original and translated works, but did not generally have the time or the learning to produce such works themselves. One of the most illustrious exceptions to this generalization is Queen Elizabeth I ( ), whose surviving translations are now available in a two-volume edition which supersedes all earlier modern editions of individual translations, and features some translations previously unavailable in modern editions. The editors inclusive interpretation of the term translation (discussed Vol. 1, p. 5) allows them to include, in Volume 1, inscriptions by 225