Translations médiévales: cinq siècles de traduction en français au Moyen Âge (XIe-XVe siècles.Étude et répertoire (review)

This magnificent publication has two distinct parts. The first offers essays on the data presented in the second. Part II, produced by a team of collaborators, contains an astonishing 1226 fiches, cataloguing c. 2670 medieval translations into French and Occitan of c. 1000 source texts preserved in c. 8700 manuscripts and c. 300 incunables (slightly conflicting figures are given). The fiches are classified mainly according to source language: Greek, classical and medieval Latin, other Romance languages, German, Hebrew, and Arabic. However, there are also some opaque supplementary categories: 'Catastrophe et supercheries', 'Purgatoire', 'Enfer', and 'Limbes', some of which list uncatalogued material. These répertoires conclude with a set of indexes of source texts, authors, translators, translations, manuscripts, key themes, enabling also chronological cross-referencing. This is copper-bottomed scholarship of astonishing scope and richness. It is also, however, a work in progress: Part II is a print version of an online database (Transmédie), scheduled to go live in 2014. The database is a treasure trove, though at present still somewhat uneven.

Part I is invariably informative, but several essays, particularly in the first two sections ('Modèles culturels médiévaux' and 'Perspectives esthétiques'), are surveys that could have benefited from tighter word limits. A notable exception here is Pierre Nobel's 'La Traduction biblique', a terse, suggestive essay on how translations of the Bible evolve through time, with much to say about the stylistic impact of Biblical translations. Sylvie Lefèvre's 'Les Acteurs de la traduction' has extraordinary range and erudition. Claude Buridant's 'Esquisse d'une traductologie au Moyen Âge' offers food for thought but largely reiterates a 1983 essay. Part I really takes off intellectually in its shorter third section 'Approches linguistiques'. Here Sarah Kay's 'La Seconde Main' demonstrates how fluid the boundaries between Romance languages can be in some circumstances (thereby calling into question the very notion of translation), while Frédéric Duval's scintillating 'Les Néologismes' shows how the boundary between Latin and a Romance vernacular may be similarly unclear. Duval also offers a powerful, well-illustrated argument for the centrality of translation to the development of literary French.

Some significant general conclusions emerge from Part I (apart from the essays mentioned, Duval's 'Quels passés pour quel Moyen Âge?' and Buridant's 'Modèles et remodelages' are important). First, if classical Latin culture feeds into medieval French culture far more than Ancient Greek (only 9.35 per cent of source texts are neither Latin nor Greek, but 84 per cent of the corpus translates from Latin), the overwhelming majority of translations are from medieval Latin (58 fiches for classical Latin sources; 864 for medieval Latin). Secondly, if the majority of translations are of devotional texts, particularly hagiography, vernacular readers also had a marked taste for history, especially imperial and Trojan history: translatio studii is thus always already translatio imperii. Thirdly, a significant proportion of translations into French were made in England throughout the Middle Ages, to a lesser extent in Flanders, with Paris playing only a minor role. The statistical tables at the end of Part I, compiled and analysed by Cinzia Pignatelli, make for fascinating reading, although they come with a health warning: she relies only on data recorded in the fiches but acknowledges these are not systematic. Sometimes data has not been recorded because it is not knowable, but this is not always the case: even a perfunctory perusal of Part II reveals inconsistencies in the level of data recorded and in the classification of texts. For example, the thirteenth-century French compilation Les Faits des Romains is treated as a classical Latin source text; Marco Polo's Le Devisement du monde is treated as...