5 - From Boeve to Bevis: The Translator at Work

Summary

To call the composer of the Middle English Sir Bevis of Hampton a ‘translator’ is not necessarily to imply that the text itself is a ‘translation’. Indeed, as Jennifer Fellows has pointed out, ‘Only to a limited extent can Beves accurately be described as a translation of Boeve.’ So what does it mean to describe the Middle English Bevis as a translation of the Anglo- Norman Boeve de Haumtone?

The author (or authors) of Bevis used a much broader range of translational procedures than we tend to recognize. Lengthy passages are interpolated, while others are substantially cut or even omitted; changes are discernible in the portrayal of some characters, in the relative emphasis given to individual episodes, and in the attention accorded to the hero's children. And yet, without necessarily agreeing that the whole of Bevis should be described as a translation of Boeve, critics have recognized that for at least some sections of the poem, such as the hero's enfances, the term is accurate. That is to say, while ‘translation’ may not be the right word for the text as a whole, it is an appropriate designation for the process that produced large sections of it. Translation as a process, not a product, will therefore be my subject here: not what a translation is or should be, but what a translator does. I shall leave aside substantial omissions, lengthy interpolations and bold rewritings, all of which are obviously motivated by conscious agendas, whether aesthetic or ideological or both, but shall look instead at closely rendered passages, which shed light on the more mundane, though no less interesting, aspects of translation as a straightforward attempt to convey to an imagined audience what one considers to be most important or most interesting about a text. The process involves a careful, and often not consciously articulated, balancing of fidelity to the textual source and appeal to the anticipated audience. Changes that occur at this level are subtler and often made automatically. Nevertheless, they can have a significant cumulative effect not only on individual translated texts but also on an entire genre, especially a popular one such as the Middle English romance, as I hope to show.

Translators invariably have to deal with major translational constraints, including the two languages’ different structures and usages and, in the case of verse translation, prosody.