Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England: Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
Autor Mary Kate Hurleyen Limba Engleză Hardback – 16 iul 2021
In Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England, Mary Kate Hurley reinterprets a well-recognized and central feature of medieval textual production: translation. Medieval texts often leave conspicuous evidence of the translation process. These translation effects are observable traces that show how medieval writers reimagined the nature of the political, cultural, and linguistic communities within which their texts were consumed. Examining translation effects closely, Hurley argues, provides a means of better understanding not only how medieval translations imagine community but also how they help create communities. Through fresh readings of texts such as the Old English Orosius, Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints, Ælfric’s Homilies, Chaucer, Trevet, Gower, and Beowulf, Translation Effects adds a new dimension to medieval literary history, connecting translation to community in a careful and rigorous way and tracing the lingering outcomes of translation effects through the whole of the medieval period.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814214718
ISBN-10: 0814214711
Pagini: 226
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
ISBN-10: 0814214711
Pagini: 226
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
Recenzii
“[Hurley’s] study allows us to see how thinkers, writers, scribes, and artists in medieval England grappled with differences between themselves and others, between their historical moment and the past, between the unique elements of their culture and of others. … I did not expect to be provoked in the final pages into considering the future promised by the book’s rich readings and theoretical potentialities.” —Benjamin A. Saltzman, Modern Language Quarterly
“Translation Effects is a rich and rewarding study of multiple modes and consequences of the act of translating … For the field of medieval studies broadly and early English studies particularly, Hurley’s reflections, her care, and her insight exemplify and point us with hopeful energy toward newer and more welcoming ways of thinking and doing.” —Elaine Treharne, Modern Philology
“This book is to be welcomed as offering a new angle on translation in medieval England, one that will be of benefit to future scholarship. The key idea of translation effects is original and certainly valuable, and Hurley, by making use of it in her textual analyses, presents interesting readings of a selection of relevant writings.” —Hugh Magennis, Speculum
“This is a well-written, easily absorbed text [that] offers a methodology for examining translations that is apt to bring into sharp focus the wider contemporary concerns of both translator and audience. The study of translation effects may help scholars to better understand how a particular community understood their history and signalled their identity.” —Georgina Pitt, Parergon
“Mary Kate Hurley proposes a new approach to translation studies, using the concept of the translation effect, a broader and more flexible approach to literary and cultural translation than has previously been attempted. Translation Effects is lucid, forceful, and a joy to read.” —Robert Stanton, author of The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England
“This ambitious and engaging book succeeds admirably well in disclosing the translation effects that are inscribed within certain medieval texts, distinctive traces that reveal writers in the process of reimagining and repurposing old texts for contemporary communities.” —Alastair Minnis, author of Hellish Imaginations from Augustine to Dante: An Essay in Metaphor and Materiality
Notă biografică
Mary Kate Hurley is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Ohio University.
Extras
This study reinterprets a central feature of medieval textual production: translation. It demonstrates that medieval texts—from the ninth century to the fifteenth—often leave observable traces of the translation process that reveal their imagined political, cultural, and linguistic communities. I term these traces “translation effects” and argue that their presence creates imagined textual communities that are temporally heterogeneous and geographically expansive. Such effects have a range of ramifications for the communities they help create. Sometimes translation effects lend authority to a translation, such as when the Old English Orosius invokes the voice of the historian Paulus Orosius to both describe and judge past cultures. In other moments, they imply an audience linked not by time or location but rather by access to shared cultural knowledge, such as Ælfric of Eynsham’s Lives of the Saints’s repeated references to stories already known from Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica. These indications of the work of translation give insight into the way medieval readers and writers pursued their craft. By examining translation effects, modern scholars can better understand how medieval translations imagine community.
Considering translation effects calls attention to a fundamental difference between modern and medieval translation. Scholars of modern translation have long acknowledged what Lawrence Venuti calls the illusion of the translator’s “invisibility.” This invisibility is achieved via “transparency,” the characteristic of translations that masks their translators’ role in creating them. Yet according to Venuti, invisibility also enacts a form of violence: domesticating translations transforms the foreign into the familiar and in so doing elides fundamental differences between cultures and silences minority voices. Moreover, “no translation can provide direct or unmediated access to the source text,” no matter how transparent the translator attempts to make their work.
But transparency was not necessarily a virtue for many medieval translators. In fact, many of them actually celebrated the visibility of translation, transmission, and the reception of stories from other times, places, and languages. For example, take Chaucer’s avowal of fidelity to his auctor Lollius in Troilus and Criseyde. Much critical ink has been spilled over the identification of Lollius, the probability that Lollius did not exist, and the possibility that his invocation may be meant to obscure Chaucer’s reliance on Boccaccio for his narrative. Yet as Bella Millett observes, despite Chaucer’s deferral to Lollius, he still creates an author-figure with whom modern readers might feel familiar. Moreover, the author that Chaucer creates in his fiction is also self-consciously positioned as a translator.
In fact, Chaucer explicitly refers to his method of drawing on Lollius’s work as that of transferring a narrative between “tonges.” Regardless of whether Lollius is actually fictive, Chaucer deploys a modesty topos that foregrounds not his invention but rather the words of his auctor. He asks his audience to “Disblameth me, if any word be lame, / For as myn auctor seyde, so sey I” (Book II, 17–18). While drawing attention to his auctor, Chaucer also highlights translation: “No sentiment I this endite / But out of Latyn in my tonge it write” (Book II, 13–14). The act of translation becomes a figure for the kind of decentering of authority that Chaucer asks the reader to accept. Alongside a theory of authorship, we see a theory of the translator emerge in these lines: a figure who attempts to claim his own invisibility even as he alerts readers to his presence. A central goal of this monograph is to demonstrate that although such choices—which draw attention to the presence of translation—might seem jarring to a modern audience, they perform important cultural work in medieval texts. Translation effects foreground translation as an act even when they do not technically perform it. They are not aberrations affecting a translation’s quality, however, but moments of literary invention that imagine new textual communities.
Considering translation effects calls attention to a fundamental difference between modern and medieval translation. Scholars of modern translation have long acknowledged what Lawrence Venuti calls the illusion of the translator’s “invisibility.” This invisibility is achieved via “transparency,” the characteristic of translations that masks their translators’ role in creating them. Yet according to Venuti, invisibility also enacts a form of violence: domesticating translations transforms the foreign into the familiar and in so doing elides fundamental differences between cultures and silences minority voices. Moreover, “no translation can provide direct or unmediated access to the source text,” no matter how transparent the translator attempts to make their work.
But transparency was not necessarily a virtue for many medieval translators. In fact, many of them actually celebrated the visibility of translation, transmission, and the reception of stories from other times, places, and languages. For example, take Chaucer’s avowal of fidelity to his auctor Lollius in Troilus and Criseyde. Much critical ink has been spilled over the identification of Lollius, the probability that Lollius did not exist, and the possibility that his invocation may be meant to obscure Chaucer’s reliance on Boccaccio for his narrative. Yet as Bella Millett observes, despite Chaucer’s deferral to Lollius, he still creates an author-figure with whom modern readers might feel familiar. Moreover, the author that Chaucer creates in his fiction is also self-consciously positioned as a translator.
In fact, Chaucer explicitly refers to his method of drawing on Lollius’s work as that of transferring a narrative between “tonges.” Regardless of whether Lollius is actually fictive, Chaucer deploys a modesty topos that foregrounds not his invention but rather the words of his auctor. He asks his audience to “Disblameth me, if any word be lame, / For as myn auctor seyde, so sey I” (Book II, 17–18). While drawing attention to his auctor, Chaucer also highlights translation: “No sentiment I this endite / But out of Latyn in my tonge it write” (Book II, 13–14). The act of translation becomes a figure for the kind of decentering of authority that Chaucer asks the reader to accept. Alongside a theory of authorship, we see a theory of the translator emerge in these lines: a figure who attempts to claim his own invisibility even as he alerts readers to his presence. A central goal of this monograph is to demonstrate that although such choices—which draw attention to the presence of translation—might seem jarring to a modern audience, they perform important cultural work in medieval texts. Translation effects foreground translation as an act even when they do not technically perform it. They are not aberrations affecting a translation’s quality, however, but moments of literary invention that imagine new textual communities.
Cuprins
Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1 What Orosius Said: Temporal Heterogeneity in the Old English Orosius Chapter 2 Sanctity and Soil: Ælfric’s Life of Oswald, King and Martyr Chapter 3 Communities of the Page in the Ælfrician Homiletic Corpus Chapter 4 Becoming England: The Northumbrian Conversion in Trevet, Gower, and Chaucer Chapter 5 Beowulf’s Collectivities Coda Bibliography Index
Descriere
Explores how translation in texts from Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints to Chaucer imagines political, cultural, and linguistic communities.