Preface

It is fitting that a volume dedicated to the topic of translation should mark other transitions as well. Regular readers will have noticed the new cover design, which signals Florilegium’s move to the University of Toronto Press as the journal’s new publisher. The editorial team and the Canadian Society of Medievalists / Société canadienne des médiévistes, Florilegium’s parent association, are delighted to enter this new publishing partnership.

This new beginning coincides with a departure, Carol Harvey’s retirement as French Co-editor. Dr. Harvey initially stepped in, at short notice, as Editor of the 2004 volume while also serving as President of CSM/SCM, and she has been Florilegium’s French Co-editor for all subsequent volumes. However, her contributions have extended well beyond her responsibilities for the French side of the journal’s operation and have included, among many others, the editing of a Festschrift for Brian Merrilees, published as the 2007 volume. Her extensive knowledge of medieval French literature and her expertise in both medieval and modern French have been invaluable. It has been a long, highly productive, and most congenial collaboration, and Florilegium, its Editor, and the Canadian Society of Medievalists / Société canadienne des médiévistes owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Dr. Harvey. We wish her all happiness in her retirement.

Transitions, translations, and transfers are also the focus of the essays in this collection. Examining medieval translations in verse and prose, from Latin into Old English, Middle English, Old French, and Occitan and from Middle English into Latin, the articles provide a sampling of the translators’ responses to specific problems, from the technical challenges of capturing poetic effects in another language to those arising from differences in the cultural and intellectual contexts. The papers also illustrate the diversity of the aims and methods of medieval translators in adapting their texts for different reading and listening audiences, both secular and religious, while adding layers of new cultural significance or inviting multilingual audiences to contemplate the wider range of meanings which emerge from reading the source text and the translation together, as suggested by the presentation in bilingual manuscripts. Other translations considered here not only bridge the linguistic divide but also effect a transfer from an enclosed to a secular audience or adapt pre-Christian texts for reception in new political, cultural, or intellectual contexts, ranging from King Alfred’s Wessex to papal Avignon. The approaches taken by the contributors are as diverse as the translations they consider, adopting methodologies informed by the work of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, offering detailed analyses of the political implications of a specific translation, or presenting a side-by-side comparison of successive translations of the same text produced for audiences in different cultural milieus.

In the first article in this collection, Emma Campbell explores the complex temporalities of the Histoire des moines d’Égypte, Wauchier de Denain’s early thirteenth-century translation of Rufinus of Aquileia’s fourth-century Historia monachorum in Aegypto. Written at a time when the aural consumption of religious works was becoming common among wealthy lay audiences, the Histoire, as Campbell points out, is one of the earliest extant hagiographic texts in French prose. The essay examines the intermingling of the voices of the translator, the narrator, and the characters within the narrative, all referencing the ‘now’ of their own asynchronous present(s) which here dissolve the linearity of time. This, as Campbell shows, is also represented visually in the historiated initials in one of the manuscripts, where the narrator Postumien, painted within the initial O of “Or” (now), is seen lecturing to a group of monks or pointing beyond the image frame of his own ‘now’ to the words of the translator Wauchier, as both narrator and translator instruct their monastic and lay listeners across time.

The translator’s self-conscious presentation of temporality is also at the centre of Miranda Griffin’s essay on the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé. Focusing on the timelessness implied by the Christian allegorization of Ovid’s pagan text, Griffin examines the issue of temporality through the lens of the works of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida...