The Bilingual Text

History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation

Jan Walsh Hokenson, Marcella Munson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317640356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Bilingual texts have been left outside the mainstream of both translation theory and literary history. Yet the tradition of the bilingual writer, moving between different sign systems and audiences to create a text in two languages, is a rich and venerable one, going back at least to the Middle Ages. The self-translated, bilingual text was commonplace in the mutlilingual world of medieval and early modern Europe, frequently bridging Latin and the vernaculars. While self-translation persisted among cultured elites, it diminished during the consolidation of the nation-states, in the long era of nationalistic monolingualism, only to resurge in the postcolonial era.

The Bilingual Text makes a first step toward providing the fields of translation studies and comparative literature with a comprehensive account of literary self-translation in the West. It tracks the shifting paradigms of bilinguality across the centuries and addresses the urgent questions that the bilingual text raises for translation theorists today: Is each part of the bilingual text a separate, original creation or is each incomplete without the other? Is self-translation a unique genre? Can either version be split off into a single language or literary tradition? How can two linguistic versions of a text be fitted into standard models of foreign and domestic texts and cultures? Because such texts defeat standard categories of analysis, The Bilingual Text reverses the usual critical gaze, highlighting not dissimilarities but continuities across versions, allowing for dissimilarities within orders of correspondence, and englobing the literary as well as linguistic and cultural dimensions of the text. Emphasizing the arcs of historical change in concepts of language and translation that inform each case study, The Bilingual Text examines the perdurance of this phenomenon in Western societies and literatures.

Part I: Vulgar Tongues

Medieval and Renaissance Conditions (1100–1600)

A. Changing Concepts of Language and Translation

Jacob Burckhardt defined the Middle Ages not so much by what it made visible in terms of human achievement as for what it obscured, or failed to achieve: until the fourteenth century a new mental structure lay hidden “beneath a common veil … woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues” (1954:100). In Burckhardt’s highly influential reading of the period, patiently awaiting the West’s discovery under this misty veil was nothing less than the Renaissance, that is, the full awareness of the individual tel quel, the individual who, in perceiving his (or her) self-conscious uniqueness was no longer merely aware of himself only as belonging to a larger, more general category, “as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation”, but as a fully and self- reflexively conscious individual (1954:100). The Burckhardtian celebration of the Renaissance as light against dark, as Renaissance bright light finding voice against medieval murky darkness, is too familiar to rehearse here (for recent discussion, see Patterson 1990, 1996; Aers 1992:194–97; Kerrigan and Braden 1989:37–54). We should note, however, that as Lee Patterson and David Aers have shown, through the 1990s medieval scholars have continued to replicate Burkhardt’s notion that before 1500 the individual thought of himself or herself only in terms of larger groups, thus internalizing Burckhardt’s thesis of the “creation of the individual”. Although medievalists have long chafed at Burckhardt’s notion of the Renaissance “invention” of the individual, they have nevertheless tended to analyze medieval subjects in his terms of race, people, and social or political organization, thus in terms of the subject’s relationship to natio, to state, and to their attendant linguistic structures (Aers 1992:194–97).

Concomitantly, scholars have found myriad “splits between outer realities and inner forms of being” (Aers 1992:186) in medieval texts ranging from the vernacular writings of Dante, Jean de Meung, and Chaucer, and in the Latinate context of catechism and Eucharistic recital. Given the keen interest of recent medieval scholarship and New Historicism in subject formation and the general means through which subjectivity is attained and presented, it is rather surprising that the pervasive bilingualism of the Middle Ages and early modern periods has not been foregrounded more frequently in discussions of the medieval subject. It is even more surprising that those looking for specific instances of subjective awareness through social practices of literature should routinely disregard the unique position and cultural function of the bilingual self-translator bridging linguistic communities.

One of the factors contributing to this critical blind spot is perhaps the rather limited scope of most recent linguistic studies of bilingualism. Although this area is under increasing investigation in contemporary linguistic theory, stimulated in large part by its growing impact on global capitalist culture, most studies sweep past the important precedent set in the medieval and Renaissance periods, peaks of both literary bilingualism and biculturalism. Yet in these periods, bi- or multi-lingualism was not the cultural exception but rather the norm, as such translation scholars as John Adams, Leonard Forster, and Rita Copeland have ably demonstrated. Indeed, as Adams and Forster both emphasize, medieval Latin, although a “dead” language, long remained particularly well suited for the dissemination of all manner of subjects. Latin literary, scientific, ecclesiastic, and legal texts, among others, persisted through many centuries of continued use in contact with vernaculars. Latin remained a viable language for ecclesiastic rites long after its general deliquescence in Western culture. Sperone Speroni categorized it in 1542 as a “dead language” because of this dual trajectory, entailing a functional separation from the Western vernaculars in daily use (Baddeley 1993:43). These indelibly bilingual and even multilingual conditions, which were dominant in medieval and to a lesser extent Renaissance Europe, gave Latin the semantic and thematic flexibility in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to adapt itself to several different intellectual and professional domains and to accommodate many different textual forms. Indeed, only bilingualism enabled the eventual displacement (through replication) of Latin textual authority by the vernacular canon (Copeland 1991). Historians agree that ambient bilingualism and multilingualism were such pervasive linguistic modalities in these periods that the universality of Latin, as a learned language, provided antidotes to the “collective phenomenon” of language conflict among the vernaculars (Crespo 2000: 24), defining the semiotic constraints of the evolving vernacular forms (Kittay and Godzich 1987). Why, then, are there so few studies focusing on medieval or even Renaissance bilingual texts or translators?

One of the obvious difficulties in explicating translative bilingualism in the context of medieval concepts of language and self is that, as the continuing impact of Burck- hardt suggests, our very categories of theoretical analysis are modern rationalistic ones, often more deeply rooted than we realize. To a large extent, medievalists are used to confronting this gap in analytical tools. Groundbreaking medieval translation studies by such scholars as Beer and Copeland have shown how the literary and historical specificity of the Middle Ages, however heterogeneous, requires conceptualizing medieval translation as cultural practice, and they have rigorously questioned the adequacy of modern translational terms. In response to postcolonial studies in particular, general translation theorists have also begun seeking ways around the rationalistic concepts that have long undergirded the field. Douglas Robinson on translative subjectivity explicitly rejects rationalist theories that attempt to explain translative production uniquely through the notion of a coherent, historically discrete consciousness, and instead adduces what he calls the “postrationalist” translative self. He likens this figure to Daniel Simeoni’s concept of the “mosaic habitus”, or the dual existence of the bilingual translator as one who exists both “inside” and “out”: the term translator refers not simply to an individual with an active intellectual existence, but also to those material and social practices outside the individual and in which he or she actively participates (Robinson 2001:143). This is why, as we noted in the Introduction above, Pym’s notion of the translator as performative, sociolinguistic “interculture” serves a history of bilingual production in the Middle Ages and Renaissance better than the standard contemporary demarcations of writers, languages, and texts. Interculture characterizes the major modes of bilingualism in the medieval and early modern periods: vernacular/Latin bilingualism, vernacular/vernacular bilingualism, and most salient for learned humanist culture, a Latin/Latin bilingualism in which different idioms of the same language transmit a very different cultural stance, and in which the identical word signifies entirely different sets of meanings. Erasmus, remarkable or “monstrous” as he may have been for writing uniquely in Latin, shared common ground with other major humanists in this regard: a writer’s knowledge of words was of primary consideration, and a knowledge of things largely secondary. It was from the verba that the res itself could be known.

This aspect of humanist thought positions itself deliberately against the theory of human language which guided the greater part of medieval intellectual thought: in the Aristotelian (and Scholastic) conception of language, it is the res and not the verba which is of fundamental importance. The two are linked through particular mental structures which serve as perceptional interface, and therefore it is not the word itself that is the proper subject of examination, but rather the mental concepts and/or events which mediate the interpretation of things (Moss 2003:89). Patristic criticism, following Aristotle, emphasizes the thing and not the word in looking to recover “a truthful meaning beyond the accidents of human linguistic multiplicity” (Copeland 1991:43). Medieval emphasis on res over verba helps explain why even though sociolinguistic conditions in the Middle Ages were dominantly bilingual, there is so little overt reference to the phenomenon in the tradition of patristic criticism and translation, where linguistic difference is de-emphasized and “target” and “source” material conflated in the immanence of the divine. Unity of meaning lies not in the particularity of any one language or linguistic articulation, but rather in the global truth which obtains through sacred history. Hence Augustine’s view, presented in De doctrina christiana, that the Bible is a historical narrative that must be read literally, and only secondarily viewed as a repository for allegorical meaning (as in the later patristic tradition recognizing four levels of scriptural interpretation: literal, moral, allegorical, and spiritual). Augustine is clear: interpretive ambiguity must be guarded against, and he therefore takes great pains to differentiate between natural and conventional signs, the better to discuss the dangers that can arise from a reader’s ignorance of the qualities of a sign. And if only Scripture is capable of being interpreted allegorically, as Augustine and Aquinas both asserted, then bilingual translative production of a medieval author working in genres associated with the vernacular is indeed difficult to classify. Here, as in so many other realms of literary development, Dante’s role is crucial. In a famous letter to Cangrande della Scala he contextualizes his explanation of the polysemantic nature of his Commedia by drawing an explicit parallel between the four patristic senses in which Psalm 114 must be interpreted, and the many ways in which the Commedia is to be read. Dante thus radically expands the stable of linguistic symbols open to analysis to those outside the scriptural context. All poetry – indeed, all linguistic symbols – become fair game for literary interpretation, and the stakes of interlingual interpretation also become much greater.

Despite such important advances in our understanding of medieval literacy, linguistic thought, and sign theory, medieval scholarship is still rather at pains to come to agreement on the basic terminology that best refers to medieval linguistic conditions. The critical lexicon is vague, when not contradictory. Gilbert Ouy, one of the few scholars to concentrate explicitly on the composition and status of the bilingual text in the Middle Ages, concludes bluntly that “le phénomène du bilinguisme médiéval n’a été jusqu’ici que très insuffisamment étudié” (Ouy 1998:ix), for two reasons: in part because the conceptual category of bilingualism is so difficult to pin down in this period generally, and in part because so few author/translators can be said conclusively to fit whatever rubric is being used. In the case of Nicole Oresme, for example, scholars have long attributed the French translation of his Latin text De moneta to him, but not because his name graces any of the extant French manuscripts. Rather, as Claire Richter Sherman notes, reference to the French version of the De moneta as “his treatise” in Oresme’s Ethiques and Politiques points to Oresme as the author of both versions (Sherman 1995:338; n. 9). Describing the difficulty scholars face in even identifying medieval bilingualism, Ouy openly acknowledges the complex linguistic reality of the medieval period: the unequal development of written forms of Romance vernaculars in relation to long-established Latin, new Latin idioms and the creation of different models of literacy under the influence of scholasticism, shifting fault lines of genre and form, the variable status of written and oral language production in a myriad of social communities, and the lack of a clear correlation between political boundaries and spoken or written vernaculars. On this latter point, Ouy notes that although we may easily refer to bilingual (self-translated) medieval texts written in “French”, this written French in no way resembled the maternal language of a Jean Gerson or a Jean de Montreuil in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries; he even goes so far as to posit trilingual conditions by the late fourteenth century (Ouy 1986). In such conditions, Ouy adduces only Jean Gerson and Jean de Montreuil as clear primary examples of medieval bilingualism (Ouy 1998:xi). Indeed, linguists note that it is only quite late, from 1530 on in the French context, that we begin to find texts making consistent reference not to French as a langage, a term connoting a dialect with local or regional application, but rather as a langue, connoting universal application. Similarly, the year 1530 signals the end of a “first phase” of orthographic modernization undertaken by Renaissance humanists, and also signals the clear separation of neo-Latin from the vernacular (Baddeley 1993:53–54).

Thus, in lively lexical disputes, some scholars of medieval translation adopt the rubric “territorial multilingualism” (or bilingualism), since it implies close contact among different languages within a single politico-geographic area, and the mutual modification of each language through close contact with the others (Crespo 2000:2728) - an important nuance which the simple term “bilingualism” does not capture quite so readily. Little wonder, then, that scholars have recurred to a profusion of terms in an effort to describe the medieval linguistic environment, including Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zones”, intended to define colonialism’s particular asymmetries (see Coldiron 2003:335 for further discussion of the influence of colonial contact theory, and Pratt’s in particular, on medieval translation theory). Daniel Baggioni, in his useful study Langues et nations en Europe, summarizes much of this terminological debate by navigating between colingualism, diglossia, plurilingualism, multilingualism, and bilingualism. Yet despite the importance he places on bilingualism for an enhanced understanding of language and cultural activity in the Middle Ages, Baggioni, like many sociolinguists, follows traditional models of bilingualism by defining it as a condition that obtains when two languages being brought into contact enjoy “equivalent” cultural status. Bilingual equivalence is thus opposed to diglossia, where each of the two languages in cultural contact fulfills a different “function” and holds a status “unequal” to the other language (Baggioni 1997:55). This traditional understanding of bilingualism raises important questions, however, when Baggioni and others turn to the context of the Middle Ages. How equivalent or commensurate is in fact the cultural status of rapidly and unevenly developing vernacular languages – languages wherein written codes were lagging far behind oral usage – and the long-established Latin, used in the same contexts and through similar methods, during a span of many hundreds of years?

As Baggioni’s chart of the emergence of national languages shows, in most areas of Europe there was anywhere from a one-century gap (Spain) to a six-century gap (the British Isles) between the appearance of the first written texts in the vernacular and the creation of the first grammars of those vernaculars (Baggioni 1997:63–64). To chart such matters gives visible confirmation of what the detailed analysis of medieval texts also tells us: it takes centuries for the standardization of European vernaculars to begin, over which time Latin as learned language remains fairly stable in comparison, particularly because it continues to thrive in ecclesiastical contexts and to be used in certain professions (such as law) where codified formulae retain currency. It also remains stable because it was explicitly articulated as the universal language par excellence, the language whose very grammar was thought to be based on a logical correspondence between ideas and the universal linguistic structures used to represent them. (So universally perceived was the semantic content of Latin, in sixteenth-century France, that as major a figure as Théodore de Bèze, in the Dialogue de l’ortografe, advocates keeping the practice of having grammars commonly explain the written vernacular not by referencing the phonemic oral equivalent, but rather by citing the equivalent Latin words; see Baddeley 1993:24.) The vernaculars, by contrast, were theorized as contingent, relative, shifting – and therefore generally unsuited for any discussion of universal truths. How, then, to compare the relative status of the vernacular and Latin? Which cultural context(s) should form the basis for the analysis? Must bilingualism necessarily be equated, as sociolinguistic models require, with “equivalency” of linguistic and/or cultural fluency? Moreover, if the bilingual author, medieval or otherwise, can be said to have a “mother tongue”, does it automatically follow that all other languages he or she might use will be of unequal status? Finally, how do we measure the relative status of two languages when cultural and linguistic “exchange” is not taking place in marketplace or monastery, nor between author and translator, but instead in the person of the bilingual author? We will return to these questions in a moment, after considering concepts of the medieval and Renaissance “self’ or consciousness as defined and articulated through language.

Leonard Forster, whose short study The Poet’s Tongues (1970) was one of the first to focus explicitly on literary multilingualism in Europe, including the medieval and early modern periods, explicitly rejects the notion, both theoretical and historical, of language as key to social identity. Historians theorizing the development of the European nation-state support Forster’s thesis. Although the terms natio and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Aims and Terms
• Part 1. Vulgar Tongues: Medieval and Renaissance Conditions (1100-1600)
• Part 2. The Widening Compass of the Vernaculars: Early Modern Conditions (1600-1800)
• Part 3. Facing Language: Romantic, Modern, and Contemporary Conditions (1800-2000)
• Epilogue
• References
• Index