Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England by Mary Kate Hurley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England by Mary Kate Hurley Stephen Harris mary kate hurley, Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021. Pp. 226. isbn: 978-0-8142-1471-8. $99.95. A challenge faced by any book on a broad theme like translation is to quarry a small number of texts for something widely applicable. The challenge is made more difficult if one's aim is to reveal 'community,' which has to be abstracted from dozens of familial, tribal, ethnic, legal, religious, and linguistic groupings across centuries, evinced (in Britain) in at least four languages, and encrypted within conventions of genre. The challenge seems to me insurmountable except as a thought-experiment, itself much complicated by addressing readers who entertain modern prejudices, expectations, and unfamiliarity with source material. In that view, Translation Effects is an instructive thought experiment. Mary Kate Hurley interprets a variety of medieval translations in order to propose their 'imagined political, cultural, and linguistic communities' (p. 1). These imagined communities are the 'translation effects' of her title. Hurley's first chapter discusses the Old English (OE) translation of Paulus Orosius' History Against the Pagans, written in Latin. Hurley focuses on a handful of instances when the OE translator writes, 'Orosius said.' This phrase, Hurley claims, 'constructs an audience located in two distinct times: the fifth-century Roman world … and the ninth-century Old English-speaking world' (p. 27). A subtle effect on a reader of the OE Orosius, this trans-temporal community exemplifies Hurley's 'translation effect.' The second chapter concerns the Catholic abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, who around the year 1000 recorded a set of saints' lives in OE. By translating some local lives from Latin, especially that of Saint Oswald, King of England, Ælfric creates a 'protonationalist' tradition around which an Anglo-Saxon community can form (p. 70). In Chapter Three, Hurley adopts a trope from Christine Schott: the 'community of the page,' which comprises readers, scribes, and glossators of a manuscript. The post-Conquest glossator known as the Tremulous Hand of Worcester returned often to a manuscript and therefore had a 'multitemporal relationship' to it (p. 98). In another manuscript, an illustrator has marked Latin phrases with red ink, while another marked OE sentences with red ink, thereby indicating 'the multilinguality of the text' (p. 102). Scribes are aware of translations and have methods to help future readers (p. 108). Thus, the manuscript invites readers who are multilingual and who can add information to what they find there. Chapter Four concerns the story of Constance as retold by Nicholas Trevet, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer. The three authors are 'united by their temporally heterogeneous portrayals of an emerging sense of "Engelond"' (p. 128). My knowledge of these authors is too limited to be able to assess the success of Hurley's argument. The last chapter concerns Beowulf. In it, Hurley explores moments in the poem 'in which the process of community formation and dissolution is worked out through the telling and retelling of stories' (p. 154). It is a terrific meditation on how the poem portrays the vicissitudes of human community. This chapter reveals a critic who has thought deeply and well about this poem. [End Page 152] Hurley contributes to a scholarly conversation about English identity that focuses on idealized communities as a source of political and social aspiration. For decades scholars have tried to isolate sources of ethnic and national identity in the early medieval world and to weigh both their credibility and their effects. A common assumption in this conversation is that stories, especially historical ones, bore a 'kernel of identity' (in Herwig Wolfram's phrase) around which communities could—but not necessarily did—form. Readers can entertain ideas they never act on. And stories of identity are always provisional, a point Hurley illustrates extremely well in her final chapter. The contributing role of stories to a shared potential identity opened the door to literary critics. Critics, this reviewer among them, mined literary texts for ideals of community. I'm not sure that the effort yielded much that was useful to...