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...