Techniques of Translation: Chaucer’s Boece by Tim William Machan

Abstract

REVIEWS TIM WILLIAM MACHAN. Techniques of Translation: Chaucer's Boece. Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1985. Pp. ix, 163. $31.95. As T. W. Machan rightly says at the beginning of this admirably lucid study, "Understanding of the theory and practice of medieval translation in general, compared to understanding of medieval poetics, is still regret­ tably inadequate" (p. 3). His own attempt to improve matters consists of an essentially grammatical study of Chaucer's vocabulary, syntax, and style in the Boece, which then proceeds to define certain implications of Chau­ cer's translation technique and to lay down some ground rules for evaluat­ ing Chaucer as a translator. The Boece, Machan explains, serves as a particularly good introduction to Chaucer as translator for a number of reasons: its manuscript sources have been identified with more certainty than have those of Chaucer's other translations; it is the longest of Chaucer's translations, so that it offers ample opportunity for studying his various techniques; it has never before been adequately described; and it is, as I hope to show, a work which is greatly misunderstood and underestimated. [P. 9] Anyone who has read his way through the small but utterly conflicting and often hopelessly impressionistic corpus of modern comment on the Boece will agree that Machan has everything to play for. In his discussion of Chaucer's lexicon the medieval Latin-English and English-Latin wordlists are enlisted as an aid to our understanding of the tradition of translating individual words in the Middle Ages. Since the earliest ofthe extant works in this genre, the Promptorium parvu/orum (ca. 1440) and the Medulla grammatice (ca. 1460) are considerably later than theBoece, they have to be used with due care and discretion, and the claim which Machan makes for them is rightly cautious: "One cannot presume that Chaucer had access to early versions of them. One can assume, however, if one or more of the wordlists translates a given Latin word in a certain way, that there was a 'tradition' oftranslation for that word" (p. 13). Thus armed, Machan proceeds to analyze three lexical techniques used by Chaucer in the Boece: the substitution of native words for source words, circumlocutoryways ofexpressingsource words, and the adoption ofsource words in his own language. The first of these is the most common tech­ nique, and in this case the wordlists confirm many predictable translations, account for some ofthe unpredictable ones, and often explain those which 225 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER might seem odd or incorrect to the modern ear. Chaucer's calques, pe­ riphrases, doublets, and even his occasional mistakes are also illuminated by Machan's use ofthe wordlist materials alongside the two main sources of the Boece, Jean de Meun's Old French Boethius and the Latin original. Eventually the conclusion is reached that in the Boece Chaucer "is not a slavish imitator but a word-loving innovator" who has a "philologist's joy in experimenting with words and their structures" (pp. 54, 55). Powerful support for this hypothesis is afforded by the large number of neo­ logisms-some 517, according to Machan-in the text, this being a higher figure than those deducible from Chaucer's other prose translations. All of this is admirable and carefully done, and one can warmly recommend the application of such methods of analysis to other Middle English transla­ tions. Traugott Lawler's stimulating article "On the Properties of John Trevisa's Major Translations," Viator 14(1984):266-88, should also be consulted in this regard. It may be added that the antecedents ofthe wordlists, the Latin diction­ aries produced in the Middle Ages, deserve a major place in future studies oftranslations in all the major European vernaculars. In Papias's Elemen­ tarium (finished ca. 1053), the Magnae derivationes of Hugutio of Pisa (who died in 1210), and the Catha/icon which Giovanni de'Balbi ofGenoa completed around 1286, one can find etymologies of Latin terms which make considerable sense of many of the lexical choices made by the translators ofthe Old French and Middle English Boethius versions, to cite the case ofthe reception ofbut one text. In dictionaries such as these one is touching the very...