Wednesday 15th March 15:00—16:30, Session 3
| ◀ | | | ▲ | | | ▼ | | | ▶ |
| Overview of programme | ||||||
|
Session: |
Translation of Scientific Texts |
|---|---|
|
Place: |
Seminarraum 3 |
|
Moderator: |
Roger Ellis |
|
Paper 1: |
Translatio scientiae: Chaucer’s Translations of the Astrolabe |
|
Paper 2: |
Galen’s Methodus medendi: Middle English Translations as a Meeting Point between the Ancient Times and the Renaissance |
|
Paper 3: |
The Early Middle High German Fragmentary Translation of the Pseudo-Galenic De dynamidiis |
Translatio scientiae: Chaucer’s Translations of the Astrolabe
Elly Truitt
In the late-fourteenth century Treatise on the Astrolabe (one of the earliest examples of an English scientific text), Chaucer engages simultaneously in two kinds of translation—translating a text (or group of texts) from one language to another, and translating highly specialized knowledge into a form that could be more easily understood by nonspecialists. These two simultaneous translations are linked to one another by the use of the reader persona of “litel Lewis,” Chaucer’s ten-year old son. Chaucer uses Lewis as the ideal audience (or reader) in order to communicate both aspects of his translation—the language and the knowledge of the astrolabe and its uses. Throughout the treatise, Chaucer consciously signals his work as translator of text and of scientific practice by using repetition, metaphor, simple language, and the instrument itself. In this paper, I explore the linguistic and rhetorical strategies Chaucer uses to assert his place in a genealogy of scientific translators and the didactic methods he employs to educate the reader in the practical uses of the astrolabe. I argue that in the Treatise on the Astrolabe Chaucer insists that translation itself is a crucial part of scientific practice. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the Treatise on the Astrolabe is an example of the transfer of scholastic science to the court, where scientific knowledge and practices focused on the transformation of natural knowledge to practical ends—in late medieval England, and as such sheds light on the importance of scientific texts and objects in late medieval lay elite culture.
Galen’s Methodus medendi: Middle English Translations as a Meeting Point between the Ancient Times and the Renaissance
Silvia Demo
The Method of Medicine (θεραπεθτικὴ µέθοδος) by Galen can be considered the only ancient systematic exposition of a complete method of medical practice because in it the author establishes a method of healing based on a theory of his own. This paper deals with the reception and translation of the Method of Medicine by Middle English translators of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the ancient medical knowledge was conveyed in the vernacular language. It will emerge that Middle English medical literature was deeply involved in the tradition of this Galenic work that appears in Middle English translations after having been translated many times through the ages from the Greek to the Syriac the Arabic and the Latin. Thanks to these translations the ancient Method of Medicine was transmitted to the Modern English printed tradition. This is testified by the Questyonary of Cyrurgyens, a miscellany printed in 1542 that I am going to take into consideration because it includes the fourth book of the Method of Medicine.
The Early Middle High German Fragmentary Translation of the Pseudo-Galenic De dynamidiis
Valeria Di Clemente
The so-called Bamberger Arzneibuch (c. 1150) is the earliest medical book preserved in German language. It contains three fragmentary texts: the Arzenībuoch Ypocratis, a collection of medical remedies attributed to Hippocrates, a great part of which is also recorded in medieval Latin medical literature; a translation of the oldest Latin version of a Late Antiquity prognostic work, also attributed to Hippocrates; a translation of De dynamidiis, a Latin version of a small text attributed to Galenus, where names and qualities of some medicines are listed. As the codicological history of the fragment suggests, the piece was most probably composed in a monastic context.
The fragmentary translation of De dynamidiis shows a peculiar appearance, since the Greek-Latin names of medicines (eustomacha, stipica, lia, obrectica, collectica, dioretica, catartica) remain untranslated, while the definitions that describe their functions are regularly translated into German. Moreover, the translator is focused on describing the dynamidia of these medicines as precisely as possible, through a series of strategies such disambiguations and repetitions. It is to be hypothesised that the function of the text was deliberately changed during the translation process, becoming a sort of bilingual technical glossary whose aim was to familiarize German learners who lived and worked in monasteries with specific medical terms of Greek-Latin origin.