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APPENDIX: TREVISA THE TRANSLATOR
The purpose of this brief appendix is to describe, for readers who may be unfamiliar with Trevisa's work, his general principles for translation as discussed in his theoretical writing on the subject. The texts covered here will be well-known to most mediaevalists, who should not therefore expect a re-evaluation of Trevisa's translation techniques.[18] For non-mediaevalists, however, the materials may provide an illuminating background to the specific cases cited in this study.
In the Dialogue on Translation [19] the problem is stated in characteristically plain terms: that people of different nations "vnderstondeth others speche no more than gaglinge of gees. For jangle that one neuer so fast, that other is neuer the wyser though he shrewe hym instede of good morrow. This is a grete meschyef that foloweth now mankynde." The remedy for this cultural and social problem is "that some man lerneth and knoweth many dyuerse speches. And so bytwene strange men of the whiche neyther vnderstondeth others speche suche a man may be mene and telle eyther what other wole mene."
The translator is thus a "mene" between oppositions created by the difference of language, and it is important not to undervalue this directly communicative (as opposed to individually creative) theory of translation, since it not only determines the linguistic motivation for translation but also characterizes stylistic and rhetorical effects—often to the dissatisfaction of the modern critics. Witness, for example, A. J. Perry's unease: "He wished to be understood—this resulted in wordiness,"[20] although the comment seems eventually to be only a reflection of the conventional (and convenient) Trevisa use of the doublet as a reinforcement of the semantic "core" of the Latin original; the problem is not so much Trevisa's wordiness (in any rhetorical
In the shadow-boxing of the Dialogue, it is the Lord who is given all of those arguments which Trevisa is to exemplify in the translations themselves: that a "skylfull" translation is one that "myght be knowe and vnderstonden," rather than one demonstrating the creative power of the translator; that "prose is moore clere than ryme, more easy and more playne to knowe and vnderstonde" and should therefore be employed wherever possible. In fact, all of Trevisa's major translations are of Latin prose works, and when verse is occasionally embedded therein, he will usually render it as prose, sometimes with a suspiciously anti-poetic comment like "God woot what þis is to mene". The doggerel verses at the head of DPR (if they are by Trevisa), merely reinforce the implication that verse was a foreign and uncomfortable medium to the translator.[21]
There is no need to be concerned here with the cultural or literary or even theological defence of translation in the Dialogue, except to note that, in citing Jerome, Alfred, Caedmon, and Bede (and the act of "prechyng" as "very translacioun"), Trevisa is determined to establish and affirm the continuity not of literary merit (for, as he remarks, the Hebrew which Jerome translated was already "good and fayr and ywrytte by inspyracioun of the holy gost"—i.e. Jerome did not improve the original by turning it into another language), but rather the continuity of the subservience of the translator to the work and its author, and the duty and necessity of following the "clere and playne" doctrine.
How did Trevisa imagine that this theory would turn out in practice? A partial answer to this question (beyond the translated texts themselves) is contained in the Epistle to Lord Berkeley: "For travell wol I not spare comfort . . . to make this translation clere and playne, to be knowe and understondyn. In some place I shall set word for word and actiffe for actiffe and passife for passife arowe right as it standeth without changinge the ordre of words. But in some places I must change the order of words and set actiffe for passife and aƷenward. In some places I must set a resoun for a word, and tell what it meaneth; but for all such changing the meaning shall stand and not be chaunged."
This practical description of technique presents us again with an espousal of fidelity, but a fidelity which may modify its form if not its nature or intention. Thus, the concept of subservience may be rather ambiguous: is the translator being more faithful by setting "passife for passife arowe right as it standeth," and perhaps thereby producing an unintelligible sentence in English, or by giving "a resoun for a word" (e.g. in glosses or neologisms), and destroying therefore a verbatim parallel in the hope of achieving a greater clarity, and thus semantic rather than morphological or syntactic "fidelity" to the source? As is obvious here, Trevisa is at least conscious of the problem and its alternative resolutions, and as I hope is evident from the body of this article, he could arrive at his goal of fidelity through one of several practices.
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