Translating English Literary History

The five-volume Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (OHLTE) sets translation apart as an autonomously valid form of literature, “treating translations wherever appropriate as literary works in their own right” (publisher description). For anyone who has ever had to defend the legitimacy of studying, making, or reading translations, this publication undoubtedly counts as a major event. For anyone who has not considered translation relevant to their own primary interests, the OHLTE testifies weightily to the contrary. Every seemingly monolingual work functions within a global linguistic system shaped by the practice, and the ubiquitous potential, of transfer among multiple locations and forms. English literature does not, and has never, existed in monolingual isolation.

These truisms hold especially firm for the OHLTE’s medieval volume, under review here. As the editor, Roger Ellis, points out in his preface, “almost everything written in the medieval period could be presented as a translation in one sense or another” (p. 3). In addition, the modern term literature requires a more “generous” (p. 2) definition for the medieval period than for the modern centuries, such that many texts that could hardly be considered imaginative fiction find their way into the OHLTE. Even “English” turns out not to be a strictly linguistic requirement, as Insular translations into French and Latin also receive some attention throughout the volume.

The broadest claims of the OHLTE lead to two contradictory implications: translated works are somehow distinct enough to stand apart from compositions not derived from another source; translation is so pervasive that it affects every kind of textual production. The difficulties posed by this dichotomy increase when we recognize that some “original” compositions may have had now lost antecedents in other languages. In what follows, I explore some of the implications of these paradoxes from several perspectives: first, literary themes that receive particular emphasis in the chapters of the OHLTE; second, the treatment of theory in the OHLTE; third, comparison of the OHLTE with recent histories of medieval English literature tout court.

The Translator ’s Masked Body

The OHLTE’s chronological scope, stretching from Old English to 1550, affords some unique opportunities for perspectives on the longue durée of translation in Insular culture. David Lawton’s discussion of Biblical translation, for example, frames the dramas of the late Middle Ages (Wycliff, Arundel’s Constitutions) with King Alfred (880s) and Miles Tyndale (1535) (as a result, he suggests that the term “Wycliffite” be abandoned, p. 229). Since most of the chapters cycle through a similar span, the OHLTE provides a treasure-trove of information and bibliography for readers with any number of historical and thematic interests. Two major topics, though, recur with particular regularity: politics and the body. This pairing in fact inheres in translation: power relations surround the motives for and the shapes of translated texts; the translator, quite corporeally, mediates these relations.

In keeping with the conventional notion of translatio imperii (transfer of power from one empire to another), the English language itself carries various political implications. John Burrow’s essay on the “Languages of Medieval England” (the OHLTE’s first essay) explores these issues at the broadest level, while Helen Phillips’s essay on “Nation, Region, Class, and Gender” sketches translation’s impact on some of the most common political themes. In Robert Stanton’s more focused essay on Alfred the Great, English appears intimately linked, for the first time, with explicit ambitions to forge a common political culture. During and after the Norman Conquest, English signifies that culture’s durability in the face of a new Norman-speaking ruling class. Centuries later, the overt claims of Henry V positioned English as the symbol of national strength, pitted quite directly against various forms of Continental and Insular French.

Translation into English in any of these contexts functions as a political gesture, one amplified by the “doubleness” of translation itself, which in turn mirrors the canny doubleness of diplomacy: under the cover of merely repeating another text, translators...