Figures of English Translation, 1382–1407

ROGER ELLIS

In 1409 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, issued a ban, drafted in 1407, against unlicensed Bible translations in England. His action was the culmination of a process with numerous precedents in the last twenty years of the fourteenth century, most notably the Blackfriars Council of May 1382, at the end of which Arundel's predecessor Archbishop Courtenay issued a promulgation forbidding unauthorised explication of the Scriptures in either Latin or the vernacular. Like Arundel's constitutions, Courtenay's edict had as its target the Oxford academic – by then, the heretic – John Wyclif and his Oxford-trained disciples, who had early appreciated the value of, and need for, vernacular Biblical translations as part of a thorough-going programme of church reform. In the increasingly dangerous times between those two proclamations – times punctuated by the deposition of Richard II and the usurpation of the throne by Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) in 1399, as also by the civil statute De heretico comburendo [On the burning of the heretic] in 1401 – not only was a large number of translated and original works produced, but also an important debate was joined about the possibility and justification of vernacular translation, which we can use as a snapshot of the state of translation up to that time and beyond.

For these debates there was good precedent, as we shall see, in the various prefaces produced by St Jerome to accompany his Bible translations. Jerome does not figure directly in the prefaces produced by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) to accompany his many major translations. But he does figure in other works studied in this chapter: in the preface (1387) by John Trevisa (c. 1342–c. 1402) to his translation, for his patron the Duke of Berkeley, of the Polychronicon of the Chester monk Ranulph Higden (d. 1363–4); in the so-called General Prologue (1395–7) to the second version of the Wycliffite Bible translation; in an anonymous Wycliffite Tract in support of the latter, produced sometime between 1401 and 1407 and deriving from a contribution to the debate in 1401 by the orthodox Oxford academic Richard Ullerston (d. 1423); and in a set of anonymous tracts in defence of Biblical translations in English, preserved in a manuscript dated between 1400 and 1430 (MS Cambridge University Library Ii.vi.26). As striking as the writers' invocation of Hieronymian models, though, was their general recourse to home-grown precedents, many of them derived from the Polychronicon: which has the bonus of allowing us a backward glimpse at the situation of translation in England earlier in the Middle Ages.

The figures referred to in the title of this chapter are therefore twofold: first the translators themselves, though this is not an essay, as such, about their translations; secondly, the figures, Biblical and other, homegrown and European, whom they cited in support of their projects.

Chaucer

The debate was not restricted to the academic circles most closely associated with Wyclif. Echoes can be clearly heard in the work of the court poet Geoffrey Chaucer, though Chaucer's theorisings have little feel of an actual debate about them. Like Trevisa, Chaucer had the added benefit, which the Wycliffites soon lost, of friends in high places for whom translation projects could function as a form of self-publicity, and who might therefore be prepared or persuaded to give the exercise their support. This, I take it, is one reason why Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe directly names Richard II as 'lord of this langage' (56; cf. Crane, 1999: 55 n. 63).

There is, nevertheless, if submerged, a clear debate going on in the work of Chaucer. This debate is fuelled above all by that fear of error or excess – that transgressing of boundaries – which Horace and Cicero had boldly made matter of virtue in a translation and which St Jerome had turned into a (negative) moral imperative (Copeland, 1991). An authoritative original, it is assumed, needs to be transmitted unchanged to its target readership with no other changes than 'oure tonges difference' requires (Troilus and Criseyde I.395). This religious model of translation carries the consequence that expert readers must be invited to oversee the translated work and correct it as necessary (CT VIII.84). Such readers may find fault with an original which adds to its original (by way of proverbs, CT VII.955–6; in other ways, Troilus III.1329), and Chaucer gives them power to 'incresse or maken diminucion' of the text (Troilus III.1335).

Clearly implied in all this theorising is a tacit denial of cultural difference. A translator totally identified with his original, and possessed of the linguistic means to carry it over to like-minded readers, will grant readers immediate and unmediated access to its truth. The impossibility of realising such an aim is immediately apparent, though, in the effort needed to bridge the gap between the language of the original and that of its new readers. Chaucer has a number of ways of expressing this understanding. Most radical is his use of the Gospels, in the prologue to the Melibee, to provide a precedent for the divergences of a translated text from its original. The evangelists, he tells us, vary in their presentation of the Passion: 'somme of hem seyn moore, and somme seyn lesse'. In their work, truth is therefore operating at the level not of their individual 'tellyng', where there is a clear 'difference' between them, but of the divine 'sentence' [meaning] they were inspired to utter (CT VII.943–52). Chaucer uses the trope to guarantee a translation's identity at the level of 'sentence' with its original, even as he allows for differences to operate in its actual expression. But he also allows the inference to be drawn that truth does not have to be monolithic, monological.

The implications of this relativising of the sacred text were evidently not lost on Chaucer. The Troilus, for instance, having worked to collapse the gap between present and past, in the already-noted comment to Book I, openly acknowledges it in the prologue to Book II. Here, writing of his Boccaccian original as if it were written not in Italian but in Latin, and, moreover, as if it were contemporary with the events it is describing, Chaucer confronts head-on the unavoidable consequence of any attempt to make the past available to the present. Lovers may have managed their affairs as well in the past as they do now, but their example needs mediation – or, what is now almost a shibboleth of the subject, 'domestication' (Venuti, 1995) – to make it relevant. The translation of a thousand-year-old past in Troilus has to reckon with words which now seem 'wonder nyce and strange' (II.24). Consequently, even though Chaucer reiterates his belief in the translation's ability to match the original on the level of its sentence – for, as the proverb has it, all roads lead to Rome (II.36–7) – the emphasis falls squarely not on that sentence but on its new tellyng. Chaucer's alleging of the Latinity of his source then works both to elevate the translation, and to allow the inference to be drawn that Latin enjoys no absolute status: this in spite of the fact that, as the lingua franca of late medieval Western Europe, Latin was hugely valuable as a tool enabling the learned to speak directly to one another across vernacular divides.

These understandings come still more clearly to the fore in the preface to the Astrolabe. Once again the need for a translation truthfully to represent its original is focused by the trope that all roads lead to Rome (Astr. 39–40). This time, though, Chaucer's claim to have preserved the truth of his original in his new version is not simply ironic, because this translation is a working tool, designed to help the reader calculate the movements of the stars. It will be of use only if tailored precisely to an actual location: 'the latitude of Oxenforde' (10). The original text, that is, exists only as differently realised in different locations and languages. In this schema, Latin, the point of departure for Chaucer's version, is not a universal language, the property of a clerical élite, but rather the language of a 'folk' (33), presumably of Italy. The analogy with versions of the treatise in other languages – Greek, Arab and Hebrew – clinches the point: Arab and Hebrew identify the people whose native tongues they are. Hence, Latin versions are themselves dependent on existing versions in 'othere dyverse langages' (34). This awareness of Latin as the penultimate step in a chain of linguistic transmission has immense importance for the discussion. It has striking precedent – as analogue, not source – in King Alfred's preface to his translation of the Cura Pastoralis of St Gregory (Swanton, 1993).

This explicit relativising of Latin accompanies an opposing impulse to elevate the status of English: 'these trewe conclusions [will suffice] in Englissh as wel as sufficith to ... Latyn folk in Latyn' (28–33). This assertion of the equality of English with other languages for the expression of complex understandings was not a new development in vernacular writing. In the early fourteenth century (so Turville-Petre, 1988, 1996), it was almost part of a writer's self-definition. But the only clear precedent for it in Chaucer's work comes with the awareness, at the end of the Troilus, that English as a language is compromised by its 'diversite ... in writyng' – probably the absence of a standard written English – so that it compares unfavourably, in this respect, with the uniform Latin language of Chaucer's illustrious Latin predecessors (V.1792–4). The Astrolabe has another, equally specific, negative to contend with: its first reader is a 10-year old boy, the writer's own son, 'lyte Lowys' (1). Consequently, the text has to undergo a double transformation, first into English and then into the 'light' and 'naked' English which a 10-year-old can understand. Hence the title given the work in several copies, 'brede and milke for children'. To make sure the child can understand what he is reading, Chaucer must not only simplify his language, eschewing 'curious endityng and hard sentence' (45) in favour of 'rude endityng', 'naked wordes' and 'lighte Englissh' (26, 43, 51), but also repeat himself, so that, having read 'a god sentence' twice (49), the child is more likely to remember it: a 'superfluite of wordes' (43) readily paralleled elsewhere in Chaucer, as we have seen.

These comments are more important than they may at first appear, not least because the Astrolabe survives in more copies than any of Chaucer's other works except The Canterbury Tales. In particular, as we shall see, the terms Chaucer uses to categorise his translation ('light', 'naked', 'rude'), and his own role as translator ('lewd'), are regularly used, earlier in the century (Turville-Petre, 1996: 35–6), as also by Chaucer's contemporaries, to characterise vernacular translation generally. This overlap is possible because a translation undertaken for a child can function as a metaphor for the whole process of translation: able to speak and read only their mother tongue, the illiterati are as children compared with their intellectual betters. Consequently, translation aims to help these metaphoric children to grow up, and to develop a competence in areas of thought to which hitherto they have had no direct access.

In this metaphorical schema, the obvious father of the people is the King, who has the power to unite the people around himself – 'alle that him feith berith and obeieth', as the preface says, 'everich in his degre, the more and the lasse' (57–9). Chaucer may well have been looking across the Channel to the courts of Charles V and VI, in hopes that Richard would follow their drive to shift the centre of European literary gravity northwards from Italy to France: what Lusignan (1989) has called translatio studii. Get the King on line, and you make it more likely that your support for the vernacular will not fall foul of the growing ecclesiastical reaction against it. Not just a patron, Richard is to authorise a vernacular (English) court culture for which there has been no sustained precedent in England almost since the time of King Alfred. So, at least, I read the earlier-noted address to Richard in the preface as 'lord of this langage' (56).

Unfortunately, Richard was showing himself signally unable to unite his people around himself. Chaucer's only other direct address to the monarch, in the envoy to the balade 'Lak of Stedfastnesse', a poem whose difficulty of dating may witness to the difficulties which dogged Richard's reign almost from its outset, reveals a dispirited awareness that the King is unlikely ever to function as an English Augustus. He must be urged to protect his people ('Lak' 23, 28) and permit nothing that may damage his 'estat ... in [his] regioun' (25). The implied relationship of king, royal estate, people, and country is in danger of breaking apart; the King himself seems no longer to 'dred God, do law, love trouthe and worthinesse' (27).

In such a situation, the vernacular translator-author may find it simpler, and safer, to assume the mantle of the 'lewd compilator' (Astr. 61) who defers to the authority of the ancients ('olde astrologiens', 62). A further sign of this caution is the use of the traditional formula (Tupper, 1917) deprecating 'envie': 'and with this swerd shal I sleen envie' (Astr. 64). The courts of the great are hotbeds of envy, as the prologue to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women clearly acknowledges (F 352–60): so the envy to be slain by Chaucer's assumption of the role of compiler is possibly that of contemporaries towards him. The figure recalls, however briefly, the dangerous situation in which Biblical translators like St Jerome regularly find themselves.

Trevisa

Trevisa was fellow for a time of the Oxford college, Queen's, which also accommodated Wyclif and the most important of Wyclif's early followers, as well as, later, Ullerston. Consequently, Trevisa was closer to the eye of the storm Wyclif was raising than ever Chaucer was. By the time he came to produce his translation of the Polychronicon for the Duke of Berkeley, fortunately, he was well away from the literal epicentre of the debate: like Chaucer, therefore, he gives little sense of the dangerous issue translation was becoming. Nevertheless, the fictional debate that Trevisa creates, in his prologue, between a lord and his clerk, surrogates for his patron and himself, has numerous links with the actual debate(s) of which records have survived. In acknowledgement of the power relations that will sustain the translation, and also, perhaps, of the sense that the issue of translation was still an open question, Trevisa's version of the debate is as playful as a similarly fictionalised debate by Chaucer, in the prologue to the Legend.

The lord wins the debate hands down, with much better arguments and much surer control of the minutiae of scholarly debate, notably when he distinguishes the different kinds of need which could justify the production of a translation of a volume of chronicles for lay readers (70–81). And the debate casts Berkeley in a still more favourable light: he doesn't need the translation himself, since he can read Latin – of course, he will be glad of help with the harder bits: who wouldn't? – so he is championing the cause of translation for his Latinless underlings as an instance of disinterested princely generosity.

Trevisa has another way of creating a positive role model for his noble patron. As part of his argument for translation, he includes a number of precedents, both European and home-grown, which feature prominent royal patrons: Charles the Bald, who commissioned John Scotus Erigena to translate pseudo-Dionysius from Greek to Latin; most importantly, King Alfred, who commissioned the Bishop of Worcester to 'translate Seint Gregore hys bokes Dialoges out of Latyn ynto Saxon' (139–40). Berkeley is in the very best company, therefore, in patronising his dim-witted clerk.