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
trustworthy limits on the translator's prerogative. But one can certainly
imagine circumstances where this prerogative can be so enlarged as to
reduce the validity of the gloss/neologism alternative as a means of
describing the liberties undertaken.
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
of the value of these models in describing and resuscitating the translated
text. The more prominent the models, the less original is the translator and
the more purely textual the criticism of the translation. As the models
recede (as arguably they do in
Piers Plowman but not in
Malory), then the larger the editorial prerogative to reconstruct without
deference to a source reading.
