Drawing on approaches from literary studies, history, linguistics, and art history, and ranging from Late Antiquity to the sixteenth century, this collection views 'translation' broadly as the adaptation and transmission of cultural inheritance. The essays explore translation in a variety of sources from manuscript to print culture and the creation of lexical databases. Several essays look at the practice of textual translation across languages, including the vernacularization of Latin literature in England, France, and Italy; the translation of Greek and Hebrew scientific terms into Arabic; and the use of Hebrew terms in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim polemics. Other essays examine medieval translators' views and performance of translation, looking at Lydgate's translation of Greek myths through mental images rendered through rhetorical figures or at how printing transformed the rhetoric of intervernacular translation of chivalric romances. This collection also demonstrates translation as a key element in the construction of cultural and political identity in the Fet des Romains and Chester Whitsun Plays, and in the papacy's efforts to compete with Byzantium by controlling the translation of Greek writings.
Author(s): Karen L. Fresco, Charles D. Wright
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2012
Language: English
Pages: 236
City: London
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Editors’ Foreword
Introduction
Part 1: What’s in a Word?
1 Dictionaries, Definitions, and Databases
2 The Translation of Nature: Al-Sharīf al-Idrīsī on the Plant Life of the Western Mediterranean
Part 2: Translation and Devotional Selfhood
3 Translating ma dame de Saint-Pol: The Privilege and Predicament of the Devotee in the Legiloque Manuscript
4 Foul Fiends and Dirty Devils: Henry, Duke of Lancaster’s Book of Holy Medicines and the Translation of Fourteenth-Century Devotional Literature
5 Languages Low and High: Translation and the Creation of Community in the Chester Pentecost Play
Part 3: Translation in Italy
6 Dante’s Comedy: The Poetics of Translation
7 Traces of the Translators in Late Medieval Italian Vernacularizations
Part 4: Translations of Antiquity and of the Romance Tradition
8 Translating Julius Caesar
9 John Lydgate’s “Ugly” Orpheus: Translation and Transformation in the Fall of Princes
10 Intervernacular Translation in the Early Decades of Print: Chivalric Romance and the Marvelous in the Spanish Melusine (1489–1526)
Part 5: Translations and Religious and Political Institutions
11 Monks and History: Byzantine Chronicles in Church Slavic
12 Greek at the Papal Court During the Middle Ages
13 Translation, Transcription, and Transliteration in the Polemics of Raymond Martini, O.P.
Bibliography
Index
