Translating the Middle Ages

Karen L. Fresco, Charles D. Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317007203
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on approaches from literary studies, history, linguistics, and art history, and ranging from Late Antiquity to the sixteenth century, this collection views 'translation' broadly as the adaptation and transmission of cultural inheritance. The essays explore translation in a variety of sources from manuscript to print culture and the creation of lexical databases. Several essays look at the practice of textual translation across languages, including the vernacularization of Latin literature in England, France, and Italy; the translation of Greek and Hebrew scientific terms into Arabic; and the use of Hebrew terms in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim polemics. Other essays examine medieval translators' views and performance of translation, looking at Lydgate's translation of Greek myths through mental images rendered through rhetorical figures or at how printing transformed the rhetoric of intervernacular translation of chivalric romances. This collection also demonstrates translation as a key element in the construction of cultural and political identity in the Fet des Romains and Chester Whitsun Plays, and in the papacy's efforts to compete with Byzantium by controlling the translation of Greek writings.

PART 1
What’s in a Word?

Dictionaries and wordlists, far from being politically neutral or dustily uninformative, can offer valuable information about language use and relations between languages, as well as about how cultures conceptualize and organize knowledge. Brian Merrilees, a specialist on late-medieval Latin-French dictionaries, and involved in using modern technologies both to disseminate and understand them, concentrates on two groups of dictionaries from the fifteenth century, one apparently produced for the learned, represented by Firmin Le Ver’s Dictionarius of 1440, the other more evidently an aid to those still learning Latin, of which a Vocabularius printed c. 1490 by Guillaume Le Talleur (the earliest version of which may date from nearly 150 years before) is typical.1 Merrilees shows how definitions can involve a degree of glossing and interpretation, and of creativity and ingenuity in coining new words, although some of these seem not to pass into common use. The study of feminine endings raises the question of to what extent they represent cultural norms—were there indeed women bagpipe players, cornamusaresses, Merrilees asks, while noting wryly that, where the medieval dictionary gives escriveresse for woman writer, the modern-day Trésor de la langue française does not recognize a feminine form for écrivain. While dictionaries invite cultural scrutiny, and yet cannot answer all the questions one wants to ask of them, online projects to make these medieval storehouses of knowledge electronically searchable nonetheless make it possible to trace their lines of influence and dissemination, as Merrilees’s research demonstrates.

Russell Hopley’s essay on “The Translation of Nature: Al-Sharīf al-Idrīsī on the Plant Life of the Western Mediterranean” reconstructs a rich cultural context for appreciating the work of this Moroccan-born scholar, considering in particular the relations between an increasingly beleaguered Andalusian Islamic culture and Sicily, where Idrīsī, himself moving around and across the Mediterranean, between North Africa and Europe, and finally “translated” to Roger II’s Norman court of Palermo in 1139, finds the space and resources to write detailed travel books, as well as the botanical work, derived from Greek and Arabic sources, on which Hopley concentrates here. Hopley compares Idrīsī’s work to that of the ninth-century Iraqi philologist al-Aşma‘ī, whose treatise on desert plant life was, fascinatingly, primarily intended as a companion to explain botanical references in the anthology of pre-Islamic poetry he produced for a later, culturally different, urban readership. While Hopley notes that Idrīsī must have been motivated by an anxiety to preserve his threatened Mediterranean heritage, his treatises also testify to his participation in the dynamic adaptability and renewal of human knowledge.

1 On these texts, see also, MerrileesÜs ”L’apport des lexiques bilingues á I’étude de la creativite lexicale en latin médiéval,” Bulletin Du Cange: Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 63 (2005): 109-17; and his “Translation and Definition in the Medieval Bilingual Dictionary,” in Jeanette Beer (ed.), Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, 1997), pp. 199-214.

Chapter 1
Dictionaries, Definitions, and Databases

Brian Merrilees

Translatio est expositio sententie per aliam linguam.

—Johannes Balbus Catholicon, 1286

Bilingual dictionaries are and have for centuries been indispensable tools in translation and teaching. In this essay we will look at Latin-French lexicons from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and examine how their compilers rendered meaning from one language to the other.1 Our concentration here is largely restricted to two families of texts, one including the large Dictionarius of Firmin Le Ver, completed in 1440, and an incunable Vocabularius familiaris et compendiosus published around 1490 by Guillaume Le Talleur, a printer of Rouen, and one of the earliest attempts at a French-Latin dictionary, the Glossarium gallico-latinum perhaps from around 1430–1450.2 The second group is loosely labelled the Aalma, a title given by Mario Roques after the first lemma in several of its 14 known versions, the earliest of which is possibly from the mid-fourteenth century.3 My colleagues and I are in the process of putting some versions of the Aalma online through the Canada-wide TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) project and we look forward to a multiversion printed edition with Brepols Publishing. The Aalma seems to have been associated with basic learning of Latin and one version gives it the title Mirouer des nouveaulx escoliers, stating also that its intention was to help translate Latin into French and, more surprisingly, French into Latin.4 The Le Ver Dictionarius, on the other hand, is directed at an educated audience, likely Le Ver’s own fellow monks, as well as being the personal creation of a highly sophisticated linguist.

Definitions

The link between these texts and the theme of translation is, of course, through the definitions that are supplied in the second language, per the definition of translation from Johannes Balbus that heads this paper. Balbus was bishop of Genoa in the second half of the thirteenth century and his Catholicon (completed 1286) is the basis for many of the dictionaries of medieval Western Europe. It should be noted, however, that definitions in dictionary texts can often be a mixture of Latin and French: medieval compilers called definition in the same language ethimologia, definition in another language translatio.

As one might expect, many of the French definitions chosen by the compilers are unexceptional, simply equivalents that would seem inevitable choices. In their simplest form, this means a single French gloss for a Latin lemma:

Ablativus .tiva .tivum—ablatif—o

Abluo .is .lui .luere .lutum—laver—a

Ablucio .cionis—lavemens—f [washing]

Abnegacio .cionis—denoiemens—f [denial]

(Aalma Paris 13032)5

Soon, however, this must have seemed insufficient and multiple equivalents were given, as well as secondary and tertiary meanings:

Abominor, abominaris, abominatus sum vel fui, abominari—avoir en desdaing, en horreur ou en despit, abominer [disdain, despise, abominate]

Acus, acus, acui—aguille ou espingle ou ce a quoy on desmelle les cheveux [needle or pin with which one untangles hair]

Admitto .tis, admisi, admittere, admissum—recevoir ou pechier ou legierement tourner un cheval, eslaxier [receive or sin or gently turn a horse, let go] (Aalma Paris 13032)

This is all still rather straightforward, though the example of “Acus” here shows how the compiler leads away from an equivalent to something of an explanation. This tendency increased as dictionaries grew in complexity and sophistication. Further examples we can give are as follow:

Abacus ou Abax est oussi vergue de geometrie ou taule que ont les philosophes ou il font figures en pourre sousmise qui est appellee aultrement emax.cis … abax oussi ou abacus est piere quadrangulee qui est mise sur coulonnes et oussi cascune table de marbre est ausi ditte. (Aalma St. Omer 644)

[Abacus or Abax is also a geometrical measuring stick or a table used by philosophers where they draw figures in the dust that has been spread, also known as emax… abacus is also a square stone placed on the top of columns; any marble table may also be called such.]

Abdicativus .va .vum—.i. negativus .va .vum—negatif, niiés, refusés—quod componitur Superabdicativus .va .vum surnegatif dont celle negation est dite surnegative qui est ajoustee a negation et ne fait nient plus que celle de devant, si comme on dit communement: ego non habeo nichil le quel cose ne vault nient plus que se on disoit ego nichil habet. (Aalma St. Omer 644)

[Abdicativus .va .vum—.i. negativus .va .vum—negative, denied, refused—the compound form is Superabdicativus .va .vum, double negative, this is a negative called double negative which is added to a negative but does n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Editors’ Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1 What’s in a Word?
• Part 2 Translation and Devotional Selfhood
• Part 3 Translation in Italy
• Part 4 Translations of Antiquity and of the Romance Tradition
• Part 5 Translations and Religious and Political Institutions
• Bibliography
• Index