Contest, Translation, and the Chaucerian Text

Abstract

Olivia Robinson's Contest, Translation, and the Chaucerian Text is a fine addition to a spate of recent medievalist work employing the tools of manuscript study to reevaluate long-standing questions of authorship, canonicity, and translation. This book joins studies by Rory Critten, Matthew Fisher, Aditi Nafde, and Daniel Wakelin, among many others, in according to manuscripts and their producers a generatively disruptive power in ongoing critical debates about the role of the author, and auctor, in late medieval French and English literature. The author around which Robinson's book pointedly does not want to circle is Chaucer, and it decenters him in a variety of ways. Robinson focuses, first, on complicating the geographic and linguistic assumptions that underlie our working approaches to translation: translatio, she argues, travels not in a single direction—from “source” to “target” language, original to derivative work, auctor to author—but along multiple vectors shaped by copyists, artists, readers, and revisers. This approach becomes especially fruitful, Robinson shows, when applied to works that have occupied the periphery of the Chaucer canon, either because they have been counted as “Chaucerian” in style and/or because they have been seen as his early, “derivative” efforts: the Romaunt of the Rose, Richard Roos's The Belle Dame Sans Mercy, and Chaucer's An ABC to the Virgin. Finally, Robinson situates these works within a larger cross-Channel culture of querelles, literary debates that circulated alongside works such as Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose and Alain Chartier's La Belle dame sans mercy. Moving between theories of translation and the local particularities of manuscript design and copying, Robinson demonstrates the hard-won rewards of pairing close reading with sharp attention to codicological detail.The introduction maps the contours of this argument. Chrétien de Troyes’ well-known account of the movement of translatio studii et imperii at the beginning of Cligès offers Robinson an opening case study for demonstrating the book's larger method. Chrétien imagines the “deeds of the ancients” (fez des anciens) (p. 17) following a path that travels from ancient Greece to Rome to a book in his more proximate library of St. Peter's in Beauvais, from which he has found/invented (from the French trover) the material for his own translation into the vernacular. Building on the foundational work of A. J. Minnis and Rita Copeland, Robinson argues that the idiosyncrasies of copying, illustrating, and refashioning medieval books—“the making of new texts and codices out of old” (p. 19), as she puts it—complicates the fantasy at the heart of Chrétien's vision of translatio: that a translation might carry forward its source unchanged. Chaucer becomes crucial to this project because he occupies both the position of auctor, source to later poets, and of translator, a follower or renderer of the words of others. In this hybrid role, Chaucer serves as the measure of literary originality (what is “Chaucer's” versus merely “Chaucerian” in style), while literary originality serves as the measure of Chaucer (which works constitute his “mature” versus “early” efforts.) Missing from our critical discussion over the boundaries of the Chaucerian text, Robinson argues, is a wider appreciation for the degree to which debates over sources, translations, authorship, and originality were built into cross-Channel literary culture, in the circulation of the books themselves and the wider arguments they sponsored.The first half of the book devotes itself to the Roman de la Rose and its Middle English translation, the Romaunt of the Rose. Chapter two, “Contesting the Roman de la Rose,” provides an overview of multiple strands of Rose scholarship. Focusing on the ambiguously belated moment at which Jean de Meun makes his presence as continuator known to the reader, Robinson interprets the Rose as a constitutively open text—one that invites insertions, reworkings, and commentary. The culture of debate and revision surrounding the Rose is most evident in the Querelle du Roman de la Rose, the series of letters written by Christine de Pizan, Gontier Col, Pierre Col, Jean Gerson, and Jean de Montreuil arguing over the degree to which de Meun as “aucteur” might be held responsible for the obscenities of his text (p. 43). Robinson pairs these philosophical debates with the bibliographic history of the Querelle itself, analyzing the ways Christine shaped the circulation of the letters to highlight her own role as author and critic. This debate, she suggests, echoed across the Channel in contemporary translations of Christine's work by Thomas Hoccleve.Chapter three, “Translating the Rose,” constitutes the heart of the book and its longest chapter. Here, Robinson offers an extended analysis of the Romaunt of the Rose, a text that has long hovered at the edges of the Chaucer canon and, as Robinson notes, at the edges of the Riverside Chaucer, too. Criticism of this text has inevitably centered on the question of Chaucer's authorship, closely linked to questions of the text's coherence or wholeness. The Romaunt survives in a single fifteenth-century manuscript (Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 409 [MS G]); a 1532 print copy, based on MS G; and a single manuscript leaf, from a different textual tradition. Since the nineteenth century, it has traditionally been thought of in terms of Fragments A, B, and C, with debate ranging over which of the fragments—A and C, or just A—could plausibly represent the work of Chaucer. Robinson suggests that the focus on Chaucer's authorship, in tandem with an assumption that such “derivative” translation work must represent his juvenilia, has distorted our view of the evidence that survives. Through close, detailed analysis of the decorative mis-en-page of MS G, Robinson positions the Romaunt within the broader textual traditions of the Rose—as “an example, not of incomplete translation or survival of mere ‘remnants’ of text ‘patched together,’ but of an approach to translating the Rose which attempted to take actively into account its extremely complex textual history” (p. 81).The next two chapters similarly pair a French text and its querelle with a Middle English translation. Chapter four considers Chartier's La Belle dame sans mercy, a text that, like the Rose, problematized the author function in complex, intertextual ways, with a narrator who purports merely to record a debate overheard between a lover and the lady who rejects him. Vital to Robinson's argument are the host of poetic responses and continuations that circulated alongside Chartier's poem in various manuscript configurations, which collectively bear the title of Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy. As in the previous chapter, Robinson scrutinizes the details of manuscript copying and decoration, showing how the work of dividing and attributing speakers, sections, and texts across both the Belle dame and the Querelle complicates any easy delineation of “original” and “derivative” materials.Having affirmed the circulation of the French Querelle tradition in England, Robinson turns in Chapter five to Richard Roos's Middle English version of Chartier's text. As both translator and continuator of the narrative, Roos marks his contribution to the tradition by adding his own enclosing prologue and envoy that mirror the framing structure Chartier himself devised. Reading Roos's translation alongside French Querelle responses, Robinson argues that we might productively view his text not as a simple translation of the original work but as its own original contribution to the Querelle tradition. If Roos's Belle Dame suffers in its status as translation, it also suffers in its reputation as “Chaucerian,” imitative of a canonical author whose work will always implicitly stand as the authoritative model.A final chapter, on Chaucer's ABC to the Virgin, approaches the problem of the Chaucerian text from the direction of the “minor poem.” Moving, as has been the method throughout, between close readings and codicological analysis of surviving manuscripts, Robinson constructs an artful lineage for An ABC, from the two versions preserved across Guillaume de Deguileville's revised Pèlerinage de vie humaine to Chaucer's version, copied both within and beyond Middle English renderings of the Pèlerinage. In Robinson's view, Chaucer becomes at once “absent and present” (p. 189) to the poem that he composed (as Lydgate would put it) “Affter the Frenche” (p. 191). But as Robinson shows, there is nothing simple in the temporalities, or practical exigencies, of translation. The work of bearing literature across the distances of time, language, geography, and readerly interpretation is multifarious and unstable.Contest, Translation, and the Chaucerian Text is full of sharp, illuminating local readings of texts and manuscripts, with the discussion of the Romaunt in particular exemplifying the capacious breadth and depth of Robinson's scholarship. The book faces a struggle endemic to almost all works that seek to decenter Chaucer in the canon: namely, that even from the margins, Chaucer has a way of turning the conversation back towards him. Robinson's book shows us, however, that we might treat the porous, ever-shifting boundaries of the “Chaucerian” as an intriguing iteration, rather than the fixed source, of the ongoing work of literary commentary, revision, and debate in which we take part.