Wednesday 15th March 17:00—18:30, Session 3
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| Overview of programme | ||||||
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Session: |
History of Reception 1 |
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Place: |
Seminarraum 3 |
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Moderator: |
Matouš Jaluška |
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Paper 1: |
Jean D’Antioche and Evrart De Conty : Ego-Statements by Two Translators in Their Work regarding Two Authorities of Antiquity |
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Paper 2: |
Old Material and New Perspectives: Master Ingold’s Golden game |
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Paper 3: |
Expressing Serious Matters in a Safe Language: On the Translations of the Sachsenspiegel for Urban Communities in 14th-Century Poland |
Jean D’Antioche and Evrart De Conty : Ego-Statements by Two Translators in Their Work regarding Two Authorities of Antiquity
Michèle Goyens
At the end of the 13th c., Jean d’Antioche translated from Latin Cicero’s De Inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium (1282) into Old French; a century later, Evrart de Conty writes his Livre des problemes, a Middle French translation of pseudo-Aristotle’s Problemata (c. 1380) based on the Latin translation of the Greek original by Bartholomew of Messina, and on the commentary by Pietro d’Abano. Both translators follow different translation strategies, although they both claim that they want to respect not only the great authority they made available for their public, but also the language into which they express those authorities’ ideas, being very anxious to be understood by their readership.
The paper analyses the ego-statements in Jean d’Antioche’s and Evrart de Conty’s works, in order to verify if this difference in strategy also leads to differences with respect to the translators’ statements regarding their own auctorial status : do they present themselves as authors, or even as an authority, in view of the authority they translate, or do they remain dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants?
We will approach this investigation by studying the use of the personal pronoun je in both translations, and we will show that in the end Jean d’Antioche and Evrart de Conty both produce a text that stays close to the original – the Latin original in the case of Jean d’Antioche, the Latin translation and comment in the case of Evrart de Conty, – but that the first uses a rather word for word translation, remaining au plus pres qu’il pot – as close as possible – to its source text, the second having recourse to paraphrases and explanations in order to pass the knowledge of the great philosopher to its posterity. The use of the personal pronoun is in most cases the reflection of the respect the translators have towards their source : for Jean d’Antioche, je merely corresponds to the use of that pronoun in the source text itself, or, in some rare cases, it has been added so as to clarify the text ; in the case of Evrart de Conty, the situation is more complex, because the translator has sometimes chosen to shorten some passages, and sometimes he adds his personal comments in parts of the translation called glose. So we have the impression that both translators hesitate to state their own authority, or even refuse to do so, but as to Evrart, we detect from time to time a subtle assertiveness when the translator deals with specific subjects.
Old Material and New Perspectives: Master Ingold’s Golden game
Jörg Sonntag
In the late Middle Ages there arose plenty of moralizing treatises using games in order to provide every member of medieval society with helpful advice concerning his or her status within the world and the corresponding codes of practice. One of the most influential treatises was the Liber de moribus ludi scaccorum, written by the Dominican Jacobus de Cessolis in the late 13th century. In the spirit of the flourishing northern Italian cities, he instrumentalized the chess game to sketch a social model that, unlike John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, enhanced the function of the society’s individual members to the king, with respect to their rights and duties, in favour of the general welfare.
This paper will not focus on the five independent German translations and widenings of this popular text, but instead on the still very rarely examined Golden Game (Guldin Spil) of Master Ingold of Basel from 1432. He argued that by playing (now) seven games the right way, they would transform into golden games against the deadly sins: Chess against pride, board games against craving for food, playing cards against incontinence, throwing dice against avarice, shooting against anger, dancing against idleness, and harp playing against jealousy and hatred. Ingold uses a lot of Jacobus’ material – phrases, exempla and concepts of symbolisation. However, in light of his new goal and audience, as well as the mysticism typical for his region, my contribution wants to demonstrate how Ingold complemented that more or less laical material with well-established religious techniques of spiritual imitation. Indeed, he created a particular composition that went much further than Jacobus, in order to open a direct gate to God’s transcendence.
Expressing Serious Matters in a Safe Language: On the Translations of the Sachsenspiegel for Urban Communities in 14th-Century Poland
Anna Adamska
In recent scholarly literature it has been emphasized that the investigation of the interaction between written and literary languages in medieval East Central Europe should embrace not only the relationship between the native languages of the region and Latin, but also the interaction between, e.g. Czech, Polish or Hungarian and German. This dynamic medieval vernacular penetrated deeply into the region, in the first place as the language of a certain model for law, charters and correspondence. Normative texts of the so-called ‘German law’, especially the Sachsenspiegel, from the 1250s onwards became widely available in the municipal chanceries of Hungarian, Czech and Polish towns. However, the ambivalent position of German in the region, often perceived as the language of a ‘dangerous’ ethnic minority, caused the linguistic transfer of the law into the more ‘safe’ and emotionally ‘neutral’ realm of the Latin language.
The aim of this paper is to investigate two 14th-century attempts of translating the Sachsenspiegel into Latin undertaken in Poland. The first one (1308) probably involved only the professionals of administrative urban literacy. The story of the second translation (before 1359) testifies to the high competence in the domain of legal literacy on the part of ordinary town dwellers who explicitly pointed out the need of a new translation, because of serious mistakes in the text they had to use until then. This case study contributes to the ongoing discussions on the active participation of particular communities of readers in the process of translation.