Chaucer's Tale of Melibee and the Failure of Allegory
Abstract When Chaucer calls his Melibee “a litel thyng in prose,” he signals a key formulation for understanding his inclusion of a translation as his contribution to the Canterbury Tales. This article argues that Chaucer draws upon the legal model of ownership and use developed in Henry de Bracton's De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae as an analogue to literary ideas about textual ownership and borrowing. In doing so, he posits that the central problems the Melibee addresses revolve not around the specific political circumstances of Ricardian England, as has long been assumed by critics, but around the possibility of a vernacular author “owning” and “using” allegory.
“Englishing” Horace: The Influence of the Horatian Tradition on Old and Middle English Poetry
desire for education or literature” (19) as Norman and Angevin kings increasingly came to rely upon written documents in their exercise of imperium. The 40 trajectory Clanchy posits importantly differentiates the stages of literacy whereby these bureaucratic documents evolve from being visual reminders of oral transactions to becoming part of a bureaucratic mechanism that more fully exploited lay literacy by “producing authenticated documents, retaining them in archives and transcribing them on to rolls for ready reference” (71). Clanchy credits this creation and maintenance of an archive which could be queried for producing writs and other documents on behalf of the crown to Hubert Walter, the chancellor of King John. Prior to becoming chancellor of England, Hubert Walter had been the papal legate to England. Clanchy rightly asserts that the habit of relying upon an archive as, in essence, a databank which could be searched for data to support the exercise of royal authority “spread from the royal As Copeland notes, both secular and religious potentates required highly literate bureaucracies 40 that proliferated from the twelfth century forward (“The Trivium” 56). As Ian Cornelius notes, in time these bureaucracies became, in essence, machinery that functioned with ever increasing independence (299). !47 Chancery and Exchequer to provincial centres” (71) in both Angevin England and Capetian France as those two countries contested their competing claims for hegemony; however, he does not assert that Hubert Walter’s archival innovations at England’s royal chancery may well have been standard protocol imported from the papal chancery, which had begun the tripartite process of producing, maintaining, and referencing written records far earlier than had the kings of France and England. Indeed, as argued above, the Investiture Controversy marked the key shift in papal attitudes toward archival record-keeping. This greater willingness to trust in texts’ ability to convey truth and authority will necessarily affect the way the influence of the Horatian tradition will manifest. In the Anglo-Saxon period, these influences will appear sensaliter through the “recombinatory engineering of meditative memoria” (Carruthers, The Craft of Thought 30). By the fourteenth century, however, the increase in textuality will result in more verbatim uses of the Horatian tradition. Consequently, not only will it be crucial to consider which of the “various Horaces” are being transmitted by means of the commentaries but also to consider the vehicle by which these Horaces may have been transmitted. With respect to the AngloSaxon period, the monastic model of meditatio provides the mode of transmission. Although there can be no way of knowing what was conducted orally, we can glimpse in the extant manuscripts what was received aurally. As we move into the Middle English period, increased textuality affords us a potentially clearer picture of both the substance of the Horatian tradition operative for a given poet as well as for the means of !48 transmission. The manuscripts from the twelfth century forward are far richer paratextually and show, therefore, more fully the way Horace’s poetry was understood; consequently, this opens up clearer paths for glimpsing Horace’s influence over vernacular literature. Lastly, with respect to Chaucer and Gower, considering Horace’s presence in the florilegia is a crucial concern for understanding the reception of the Horatian tradition in the fourteenth century and the influence it exerted over their poetry; the florilegia will have implications for either altering or reinforcing the Carolingian disposition toward Horace as the source of bons mots for courtly use. Latin and the Vernacular With respect to medieval uses of the auctores, it is important to bear in mind that Charlemagne’s renovatio contained the geminated goals of the translatio studii et imperii; in other words, Charlemagne was seeking to appropriate both the power and intellectual prestige of ancient Rome. Geminated also is the meaning of translatio, for it means both to transfer to another place and to transfer into another language or mode of signification. Consequently, a translation of a classical Latin source in the Middle Ages 41 is to transfer the sententiae into a different mode of signification. As Gehl succinctly phrases the status of Latin’s auctoritas, “Latin was the only perfect and certain instrument for attaining the wisdom and moral probity of the ancients” (Moral Art 27). There is a certain sort of axiomatic truth in acknowledging that every translation project is an adaptive process that negotiates a new work out of the original, one that seeks to Lewis and Short, translatio. 41 !49 recuperate something valuable from a different time, language, or culture. Nonetheless, the integumentum model of hermeneutics, whereby the interpreter’s task is to remove the veil of the verba thus rendering accessible the truth of the res beneath it, fundamentally alters the nature of translation and the relationship between the original work and the adaptation. 42 Adding to this complexity is a situation in which Latin and the vernacular languages in the Middle Ages possessed fundamentally different places in the hierarchy of the ability of verba to express truth. In such a milieu, we return to Huguccio’s Magnae Derivationes, where translatio is defined as “expositio sententiae per aliam linguam.” It is worth unpacking Huguccio’s definition to understand the relationship an auctor like Horace would have for medieval poets working in the vernacular. That to translate is an expositio places translation firmly within the realm of the commentary tradition: it is an explanation, a sort of “gloss” on a text that helps the reader understand the original text. That this expository act concerns a sententia indicates clearly that the verba being translated are subordinate to the wisdom contained sensaliter through the language. Indeed, the translator uses the vernacular, the “alia lingua,” to penetrate the verba, thereby exposing more fully the res of the sententia. As a result, translation of the auctores in the Middle Ages can be “as expositio sententiae, a kind of commentary [that] draw[s] on the resources of formal academic commentary to help it render an auctor’s As Ralph Hanna et al. phrase the situation: “medieval ‘translation’ does not mean merely the 42 production of a replacement text: exposition, exegesis, interpretation (however one wishes to denote hermeneutic process) is involved as well” (361). !50 words in vulgari” (Hanna et al. 362). If we accept that ordo glosses are an attempt to help the student lift the integumentum, thereby exposing the res hidden under the verba, by means of removing the artificiality of the original word order, then translation into the vernacular can be apprehended as the logical extension of the ordo naturalis. Bearing in mind Copeland’s assertion discussed above that “the grammatical function of ennaratio becomes itself a metadiscourse,” ennaratio is fundamentally “a dynamic, recreative engagement with the language of tradition” (Rhetoric 60-1). Translation, then, is a process of ennaratio in which “recombinatory engineering,” to use Carruthers’s apt architectonic metaphor, reveals the sententia of an auctor through another language. Consequently, this dissertation must consider the relative status of Latin and the vernacular. With respect to Chapter Two, which takes up the Exeter Book, an interesting situation obtains that calls into question not only the text-paratext relationship between the accessus and the work it introduces but also the relative authority of Latin and Old English. Unlike the areas of Europe where the Romance languages evolved from Vulgar Latin, in England, Latin was always an acquired language, and speakers of Old English were aware of the separateness of their vernacular from Latin. Significant also for the relative authority of Old English was King Alfred’s own program of translatio imperii et studii vis-á-vis the translation of “bec ða ðe niedbeðearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne” from Latin into English. This translation program was not at all concerned with a slavish, literal translation of the verba by which the sententiae of these most necessary books were veiled: Alfred’s translation not only made use of abbreviatio but !51 also used material from the commentary traditions that had accrued around the Latin works for amplificatio (Hanna et al, 363). A key case in point that demonstrates both the text-paratext and Latin-vernacular dynamics at play in Alfred’s translation program is the Old English Boethius. The Old English Boethius abbreviates the five books of the Latin original into only forty-two chapters and survives in two versions, one which renders the Latin metra as prose and one which renders them into Old English verse. The order of the original is not followed. The Old English Boethius, moreover, is heavily interpolated with material 43 from the commentary traditions (Hannah et al. 363). Most interesting of all, however, is the fact that Donaghey has offered a compelling argument for Nicholas of Trevet’s use of the Old English Boethius in producing his commentary on the De consolatione in the early fourteenth century—long after Old English was thought be comprehensible to Englishmen. What is noteworthy here is that Trevet was not at all troubled in using an 44 Old English translation, which drew on extensive Latin commentaries in its abbreviatio B. S. Donaghey aptly phrases the ordering of the Latin as “redistributed” and “drastically 43 modified” (7). That this remained the standard disposition between text and commentary through the Middle 44 Ages and into the Early Modern period is evinced by the fact that when William Bullokar prepared his phonetic English edition of the Distica Catonis in 1585, he freely interpolated the distichs themselves with the comme
Code switching in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love
This article examines the phenomenon of code switching in The Map of Love (1999) by the Egyptian—British writer Ahdaf Soueif. Though she chooses English as a medium for her creative expression, Soueif deploys Arabic in her narrative to represent different aspects of the linguistic and cultural norms of Egyptian society. The article's methodology is informed by Kachru's framework on contact literature and his categorization of the occurrence of literary code switching or bilingual creativity into different strategies that encompass cultural and linguistic processes. The results indicate the predominance in The Map of Love of the discourse strategies of employing lexical borrowing, culture-bound references and translational transfer. Finally, the article analyzes the functional motivation of code switching in the postcolonial context of the novel and how the use of certain creative strategies might enhance or diminish the narrative's effectiveness and readability.