 | |  |
III
Since all the citations used to support or illustrate the four basic models and their extensions are drawn from the work of a single author (in fact from a limited section of only one translation), I obviously cannot expect that MODELS A-D will prove capable of accommodating all textual conditions where translation is involved in establishing or charting the transmission of a text. Indeed, as has been shown, there are in Trevisa no genuine examples of either MODEL D1 or D2, both of which can probably be broken down into a combination of MODELS B and C. However, the fact that there is a theoretical need for a fourth class, and that this class would result in models looking something like D1 or D2, does confirm that the focus of this discussion is more on the construction of usable models than on representing the work of one author through stemmatic diagrams (as happens in the Vinaver/Malory example mentioned earlier).
The area most likely to need elaboration is doubtless the gloss/neologism alternative, especially in the degree of variance from the norms of context and source. It is here that Trevisa's characteristics as translator are most influential over the paradigms suggested in this article, for his neologising tendencies (a result of his sense of the English language as needing semantic enlargement) and his "clere and playne" doctrine combine to establish fairly
When, for example, Chaucer is charged, in the Prologue of The Legend of Good Women, that "thou hast translatid the romauns of the rose" (l. 329 [F version], 255 [G version]), are we to suppose that the same act is invoked as when Johnson insists that "Poetry cannot be translated, and therefore it is the poets that preserve languages" (Boswell, Life of Johnson, 11 April 1776)? Whatever Johnson meant by that remark, should we assume that Chaucer had proved him wrong by tackling a poem like the Romaunt? Johnson's suggestion would deny exact equivalence (of the sort we have been observing in Trevisa) in any other medium—even syntactic—a notion disputed by Locke's claim that this function of equivalency as opposed to definition is the only proper responsibility of translation: "This is to translate, and not to define, when we change two words of the same signification one for another" (Essay on Human Understanding, 3. 4. 9). The problem, of course, is in the slippery term "signification", which (as we have seen) to Trevisa frequently meant enlargement or expansion. But could it then be argued that LaƷamon's Brut, with its more than doubling of the 15,000 lines of Wace, is in any appropriate sense a translation of his French "source", or is the Roman de Brut itself a translation of the Latin of Geoffrey of Monmouth? The game, played with some wit by Valerie Flint in her suggestion that Geoffrey's Historia is a parody,[16] could continue back to Geoffrey himself with his fanciful claim that he was only "translating" the little Welsh book given to him by Walter of Oxford.
Translation, through its emphasis on continuity and tradition rather than individual creativity or idiosyncracy, becomes a mediaeval staple for the reticent poet, and is exploited with considerable skill by the humble Chaucerian narrator of, for example, Troilus and Criseyde, where, despite the claimed subservient role of the English poet, the use of MODELS A-D would hardly occur in editorial practice.[17] As a device for defending one's work against the supreme charge of "fiction", translation may therefore become one of the rhetorical artifices of fiction itself, and the ironic stature and methods of the translator could deliberately obscure any models to be found in charting this new construct. For most authors in Middle English, however, one can probably proceed downwards from a conventional source study, establishing the putative degree of fidelity, to a genuinely textual consideration
| | |