5 - Translation and intralingual reception: French and English traditions of Boethius' Consolatio

Summary

Notker's work and the Ovide moralisé exemplify the two extremes of primary translation. These works also demonstrate how exercitatio defines itself through two models and two historical points of the interlingual transmission of texts. In both cases, the vernacular appropriation of academic discourse is part of the program of exercitatio. The Ovide moralisé takes this program to the furthest extent by using academic apparatuses to refer to itself, so that the translation being produced in the service of exposition has actually displaced the original text and its exegetical encrustations as the object of exposition. When we look between these two extremes of the continuum of primary translation, at texts that represent intermediate forms of primary translation, we see other ways for exercitatio to define itself. In this chapter I will consider how exercitatio can function in intralingual terms, within the same vernacular tradition or related vernacular cultures, where the translators not only contest the original text, but also build on and compete with earlier translations of the same text. This intralingual model of exercitatio anticipates the curious self-referentiality or self-sufficiency of the Ovide moralisé, where the vernacular translation becomes its own discursive subject.

To illustrate the intermediate range of primary translation in this chapter I have drawn from traditions of Boethius translation in French and Middle English. Medieval vernacular translations of the Consolatio have long been the subject of historical and critical investigation, and the last decade in particular has seen an efflorescence in the scholarly literature on these texts and their sources.