Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England

Translation Effects is a quietly, even stealthily radical book. Translation is a concept with a long pedigree, in scholarship as well as in the medieval period. It can have the most traditional of connotations, from philological notions of original and derivative to ideas of faithfulness and accuracy and consistency through time. Yet, as we all know, medieval “translation” was often practiced as the loosest kind of adaptation—invention operating under cover of transmission. Hurley's study defines its titular concept with beguiling capaciousness, essentially as the traces of carryover from one language to the next, or one text to the next, or even one telling to the next, in time: “translation effects foreground translation as an act even when they do not technically perform it” (p. 3). In this way, translation effects partake of a basic mystery of language, the way the ghosts of past utterances make any present one possible, though this is not really where Hurley takes her argument. The book proceeds gradually, starting with actual translation (the Alfredian Orosius, Ælfrician saints’ lives) and eventually moving beyond it to depicted and finally metaphorical senses of the term, in Middle English treatments of the “Saxon” past and Beowulf's fabric of received narratives, respectively. But even from the very beginning, for Hurley, translation effects “are not aberrations affecting a translation's quality . . . but moments of literary invention that imagine new textual communities” (p. 3). In recognizing “translation effects”—the “products of linguistic transfer”—not as aberrant but as normal aspects of medieval literary invention, Hurley dissolves some of the very grounds for source studies and philology. Medieval invention carries over elements of tradition while making something new, leaving traces—effects—of this process that are key to its imagined community, a community which is not synchronic, furthermore, but diachronic, including past audiences and past transmitters but also future iterations of both. Neither a stable ur-text, the object of philology, nor the unidirectional relation often implied by “source” can very well sustain themselves in the light of such insights.Another radical aspect of the book is its scope, encompassing pre- and post-Conquest works which themselves reach backwards and forwards in time. Chapter 1 treats the Old English Orosius and specifically the phrase marker “cwæð Orosius” (Orosius said) as a moment, repeated multiple times, of a text showing its seams. Hurley reads this foregrounding of engagement with an original text as constructing a complex, heterotemporal “now” that looks back on the coming of Christianity both to Rome and to Britain. It engages anxiety over the weakening of empires and takes pains to construct a community backwards as well as forwards in time, one that sees the pre-Christian past as inferior to the Christian present and the troubled Christian present redeemed in a projected future. In this chapter in particular, a striking omission was the absence of any discussion of orality as a conditioning factor, even for what had clearly been adopted into written tradition. “Cwæð Orosius” seems to beg to be read alongside other examples in the Old English corpus of language, including writing, being cast as performative speech act.Chapters 2 and 3 treat Ælfric's work and its afterlives. Chapter 2, on the Life of Oswald, considers his intensive focus on the creation of a holy community in Britain. Without directly addressing it, Hurley confirms Leslie Lockett's reading of Ælfric as an antimaterialist devoted to orthodoxy, here in his systematic erasure of details found in Bede's account of Oswald's life, for example, in favor of a general English sanctity. The Ælfric chapters are characterized by Hurley's customary close reading but in places lack introductory material and more expansive discussion that would help contextualize the arguments. For example, chapter 3 treats the glossing activity of the Tremulous Hand of Worcester but provides only a footnote pointing to an introduction to that figure. I will say also that the account of imagined community as created by translation effects in this chapter—here, glossing activity over time— is expansive to a point where one loses track of what particular quality is being claimed for translation: “a mind at work over multiple readings can, through the accretion and transfer of additions and emendations, even exist in a metaphorical textual community with itself” (p. 124). I do not disagree, but there are two points to make. First, this is an important theoretical and philosophical insight that applies to all writing and all thought: we are all beside ourselves, from one moment to the next. This being beside oneself and in textual community with one's past selves, further, applies to orality as much as it does to literacy, as Augustine understood in his discussion of memory. One adds to and emends in the memory just as can happen on the page, though the specific phenomenologies may differ. This is what makes Hurley's narrowing assertions baffling to me, for she says, just after affirming that one can be in a textual community with oneself over time, that “in any case, it is always—and only—through the medium of the page that such a community is made possible” (p. 124). I can see the difference between the fixity of the page and the malleability of the mind and memory, but surely the nuance of Hurley's analysis shows that there is malleability inherent in linguistic transfer, no matter the medium. Here again, the unwillingness to turn toward the scholarship on oral tradition seems an unfortunate omission—unnecessarily limiting in terms of the scope of the argument.The last two chapters of the book are where things get much more expansive. Chapter 4 is devoted to three Middle English works that look back towards the conversion of the English to Christianity in Northumbria: Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, Trevet's Chronicle, and Gower's Confessio Amantis. The three authors differ in their treatment of linguistic difference, but according to Hurley they nevertheless all use translation effects to create and affirm a holy England out of the checkered past and peoples of Britain, a process not irrelevant to the history of our field, which is a point I will return to below. Chapter 5, on Beowulf, is rather stunning. It argues that the poem sustains a tension between “community” and “collectivity.” Narratives and narrative transmission throughout the poem imply communities, centered on humans and human time scales, which collectivities of various beings, objects, and times destabilize and ultimately destroy. “Collectivity” is thus a powerful analytic concept for the chapter, and it, too, receives only a footnote pointing to a fuller theoretical discussion. I kept feeling, reading the chapter, that it was doing its best to fit into the book's framework of “translation effects,” but that it really wanted to embrace its own agenda, one of engagement with recent work on object-oriented ontology, for example. But I don't consider that a weakness, necessarily. It was its own sort of translation effect.The book's radical aspects notwithstanding, its stance toward the field, by which I mean engagement with scholarship and self-situating therein, is quite conservative. This is perhaps most apparent in Hurley's discussion of the problematic and much-debated term Anglo-Saxon, and in her choice to “excise references” to the term as her response to the recent controversies surrounding it. “It is, ultimately,” she admits, “a very small alteration to make in pursuit of a more vibrant and diverse scholarship for our field” (p. 13). It is, I think, a very minimal response, even a kind of Band-Aid (fortunately, the study performs much more substantial and meaningful interventions in the course of the book). What I mean to say is that there is more wrong with the term than its political connotations. It stands for something unreal, as Catherine Karkov most recently has explained quite fully. It is not as though there is a coherent entity that can simply be called by another, less objectionable name. Oddly, for me, the current state of the field vis-à-vis its inherited narratives about the past could stand to be considered with exactly the apparatus Hurley develops in her book. The imagined community we have outlined across time between ourselves and the medieval English past is complex, heterotemporal, and always changing—the product of countless effects of translation, of bringing the past and its works into the present. Yet the book mostly declines to address this convergence, offering more circumspect gestures toward the state of the field. This is certainly understandable given both the nature of a first book and the extreme pressurization of the atmosphere in the field of late. I would simply offer encouragement that the methodology of the book is absolutely a valid one, with potential to help us move forward and imagine better, more capacious communities.