Prose Translation Research Articles

ELingua Latina: Designing a classical-language e-learning resource

eLingua Latina is a computer-based reference and exercise-rehearsal resource designed to facilitate the learning of Latin. The design was undertaken as an exploration into Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) to create a self-learning reference tool helpful to the translation of latin prose and extendible to languages other than Latin and English. It uses the Whitaker Latin and WordNet English datasets. The work is currently at a prototypical, mid-development stage, before controlled and clinical testing and midway in data input, refinement and verification. The purpose of this paper is to advise on the existence and nature of the project, to elicit any expressions of interest in test participation, and to seek partners with linguistic and multilingual text-to-speech specialisms who might be interested in the program's extensibility to their domains. This paper begins by justifying Latin as a starting point for its discussion of issues affecting the design of multimedia, multilingual resources generally. It describes the nature and functionality of the eLingua Latina prototype, what it can do and what it cannot do but would like to try, and its potential as an experimental testbed for CALL research into the design of e-Learning reference tools.

ON TRANSLATING CHINESE PROSE PRESENTATIONS

Following the lead of Harman (2006), this is an analysis of the English prose translations of four Chinese university presentations on the Internet. Thanks to its spectacular progress in economics, China has gained worldwide attention. It is therefore no surprise that many Chinese universities feel that they must join the world competition in offering openings in higher education. The Internet is naturally their first choice for advertising their study programs and for enhancing their chances for international collaboration. This article argues that many English translations of the presentations are unlikely to fulfill the mission. They are fairly unreadable because there is too much superfluous information which is, furthermore, often culture-bound and “culturally unchanged”. The analysis is primarily intended to call attention to some of the features also noted by English translators in Chinese prose. In another perspective, it may help raise the awareness of Chinese translators of cultural differences, so as to make for smoother communication. The article briefly refers to the Skopos theory and questions concerning cultural values in the globalized world.

La postérité d’Ovide:Tristes 4, 10 et l’autobiogrphie en vers de l'humaniste Johannes Fabricius Montanus

The famous poem which seals the fourth book of Ovid'sTristia is a piece on the poet's vocation and sacred character, in which Ovid wants to make an understanding friend of his reader, thanks to whom he will achieve immortality. When the humanist and reformer Johannes Fabricius Montanus is writing his verse autobiography, he has the poem of his ancient predecessor clearly in mind: the borrowings and literary echoes are numerous. The poem's theme, as that of its model, is the poet's vocation, which plays an essential role in the life of our humanist. Although the problematic is the same, the answers are different. Montanus uses the ancient model in a subtle way to support new thoughts, often opposed to Ovid's. In giving the reader the example of his life, Montanus's aim is to show the superiority of Christian humanist thought which resolves the existential problems shared with the Roman poet. Montanus' autobiography is undoubtedly an example of a successful partial assimilation of an ancient model.—This article is concluded with a continuous French prose translation of Montanus's verse autobiography.

Dick Davis. Sunset of Empire. Stories from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. Volume III, Translation from the Persian by Dick Davis, Washington DC, Mage Publishers, 2004, 552 p.

This volume – Sunset of Empire – is the last of three, presenting stories of the Shahnameh in a prose translation, with some verse interludes. In his introduction to this volume, the translator, Dick Davies, explains that the previous volume – Fathers and Sons – ended with the appearance of the future founder of the Sasanian dynasty and thus, the so-called historical part of the Sāh-nāme. This part starts with the two brief reigns of the Achaemenid kings, Darab and Dara, continued in the leng...

THREE POEMS

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Answers given by children in a London primary school when asked where eggs and potatoes came from. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSteven Winduo(For Steven Winduo’s biography see p. 93)Martin BennettMartin Bennett lives in Rome where he works as a university teacher and part‐time translator.Shanta AcharyaShanta Acharya was born in Cuttack, in the eastern state of Orissa, India. She studied at Ravenshaw College, Oxford, and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard. Since 1985 she has lived in London. Her poetry has been widely anthologized. Her most recent collection is Shringara (Shoestring Press, UK, 2006).Kaiser HaqKaiser Haq is Professor of English at Dhaka University. He is author of five volumes of poetry, e.g. A Happy Farewell, Black Orchid, The Logopathic Reviewer’s Song; several translations of poetry and prose from Bengali, and editor of an anthology of Indian poetry in English. His poetry has been widely anthologized. He was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at SOAS in 2002–03.Alamgir HashmiAlamgir Hashmi, author of many volumes of English poetry and literary criticism, currently lives in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he has been University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He has also taught in Europe and America.

The Translational Island : Plurilingualism, Language Lessons and the Third Space

In this essay it is argued that if translation acted as the crucible for the emergence of a distinctive literature in Hiberno-English in Modern Ireland, translation is once more playing a role in the reconfiguration of the relationship between Irish and English in Late Modern Ireland. The reconfiguration is one that is altering the terms of exchange between the two languages and points to a set of strategies that undermine some of the more conventional assumptions about the relationship between language and politics in Ireland. The essay examines recent poetry translation from Irish into English and claims that the hybrid plurilingualism found in these translations implies a different kind of reader from the one summoned into being by the rural vernacular of Hyde's prose translations or the Kiltartanese of Lady Gregory's Molière translations. The translations are situated in debates in late modernity around translingualism and in the wider context of the significant changes in the language communities on the island of Ireland.

To the Silenced, and: The Fishermen Sleep (review)

Reviewed by: To the Silenced, and: The Fishermen Sleep Ritchie Robertson Georg Trakl : To the Silenced. Translated and introduced by Will Stone (Arc Translations). Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2005. Pp. 165. Pb. £10.95. Sabine Lange : The Fishermen Sleep. Translated by Jenny Williams, introduced by Mary O'Donnell (Arc Visible Poets). Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2005. Pp. 116. Pb. £8.95. These welcome volumes belong to two separate series, both edited by Jean Boase-Beier, designed to ease our access to European (including Turkish) poetry. Both volumes print the original German with a facing-page translation. Will Stone's introduction to his translations from Trakl contains an [End Page 281] admirable declaration of principle: 'As a translator of poetry I must in the end have a real poem to show for my struggle, not a collection of carefully constructed lines which read like a poem but are in fact already decomposing before they reach the page.' He has struggled with considerable success. His versions of Trakl do read like real poems, and, to a very large extent, are valid equivalents to the haunting and mysterious originals. If I seem to stress my reservations, that is not from any wish to find fault with Stone's achievement, but to note possible amendments that could be made in a revised edition. Given Trakl's obscurity, his translator must render his language as precisely as possible, introducing no further ambiguities, so that the reader can explore this unique poetic landscape. Stone makes few outright mistakes, though 'hand' ('Kaspar Hauser Song', p. 99) should be 'heart', and 'wind' ('To One who Died Young', p. 107) should be 'friend'. However, while many poems are flawlessly translated, others contain subtler and inexplicable departures from the original. Stone has a curious habit of making singular nouns plural, and vice versa. There are three examples in a single sixteen-line poem, 'Winter Dusk', and, without hunting systematically, I noticed ten other instances. The most regrettable is the transformation of the last line of 'Grodek', 'Die ungebornen Enkel', into 'The grandson still unborn', which loses the suggestion that the First World War has destroyed a whole future generation. Several times, and again for no apparent reason, Stone changes the tense of a verb (e.g. 'Ruft' becomes 'called' in 'Helian III'), and fails to notice that the accusative case indicates motion: thus,again in 'To One who Died Young', the phrase 'stieg … In seine stillere Kindheit' should become 'descended … Into his calmer childhood'. Occasionally Stone introduces unnecessary puzzles by complicating Trakl's simple language. In the first poem, 'The Horror', läßt is rendered 'commands', although the unobtrusive 'makes' would have been better. The simple, evocative word Leib ('body') is translated as 'remains' in 'De Profundis' and 'frame' in 'Lament (II)'. The original genitive constructions could have been retained instead of the odd phrases 'olive tree darkness' (p. 69), 'incense sweetness' (p. 75), and 'poppy sap' (p. 89, where 'juice' would anyway have been more accurate). The children in 'Psalm' need not 'surrender play' butonly 'stop playing'. I cannot quite see how Stone arrives at 'chosen fire chasms' ('Mankind') or 'stripped leaf stars' ('In the East'). Stone's introduction tells us much about Trakl's drug habit and mental disturbance. 'There is no doubt', he asserts, 'that the natureof Trakl's poetry was heavily influenced by his mental disease'. Presumably, but does this conjecture help us to appreciate the poetry? [End Page 282] Since Stone rightly invokes Hölderlin and Rimbaud, whom Traklread intensively, it might have been better to remind us how Rimbaud created, and Trakl developed, a new poetic language based on non-referential images. He does, however, locate Trakl firmly and vividly in his native Salzburg. And his own versions enable us to consider Trakl's relation both to Symbolism and to more recent European poetry. The penultimate line of 'Psalm', 'In his grave the white magician plays with his serpents', leaps off the page as an anticipation of a key line in Paul Celan's 'Death Fugue'. Although I cannot rate this volume quite as highly as Alexander Stillmark's translation of Trakl's Poems and Prose (reviewed in Translation and Literature, 11 (2002), 118-23), anybody...

János Batsányi's Early Translations of Ossianic Poems

The translation of "The Death of Oscar" is János Batsányi's second Ossianic work published in Magyar Museum (1788/1789), and the only one among the altogether seven extant fragments in which he experimented with the hexametric form. Although two Hungarian scholars of Ossian in the early 20th century, Gusztáv Heinrich and Sándor Maller, do point to Michael Denis's rendering as a possible source, the critical editors of Batsányi's complete works, Keresztury and Tarnai, believed the poem could not be found among Denis's Ossianic translations and thus located two German prose translations as source-texts. This paper, besides offering an explanation of why Batsányi chose this poem, aims to prove through a close textual analysis that the main source for his translation was Denis's Latin hexametric poem, "Mors Oscaris." As the textual analysis shows that even if Batsányi, despite his own established rules of translation, followed Denis almost verbatim, he did enrich and paraphrase the original and probably made the poem more available to the Hungarian reader.

Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours. A Bilingual Edition by Robert Kehew, Ezra Pound, W. D. Snodgrass

i io6 Reviews The third part of the book measures the lingering impact of Chretien de Troyes's romances. Annie Combes examines the Continuations of the Conte du Graal, not ing, for example, the prevalence of non-resolution within the text. Michelle Szkilnik considers the influence that Chretien's romances had so shortly after being writ ten, detailing the numerous translations and adaptations penned by foreign writers. Although this section of the Companion deals principally with works that appeared during the years immediately following Chretien's career, the collection offers an extensive bibliography that may point the reader to further critical works outlining Chretien's presence and importance within contemporary literature. Each of the contributors enters into great detail when considering the history and enduring impact of Chretien's works. For this reason, the Companion offers worth while insights for students of medieval literature who have a grounding inmedieval literary tradition and, more specifically, in the works of Chretien de Troyes, and wish to further their study. All scholars will find useful the considerable quantity of infor mation concerning manuscripts and adaptations assembled here. EMORYUNIVERSITY ANN MCCULLOUGH Lark in theMorning: The Verses of the Troubadours. A Bilingual Edition. Ed. by ROBERT KEHEW. Trans. by EZRA POUND, W. D. SNODGRASS, and ROBERT KE HEW. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005. 280 pp.; 4 halftones. 335 (pbk ki6). ISBN o-226-42932-6 (pbk o-226-42933-4). This anthology is uncompromisingly aimed at a readership acquainted with English poetry, with the aim of giving the anglophone reader an introduction to the formal features, rather than the language, of troubadour poetry. Kehew, who describes him self modestly as 'an enthusiast', but who knows his material well, has assembled a collection of verse translations, some by Ezra Pound, some byW. D. Snodgrass, others based on the prose translations of previous anthologies, especially that by Frede Jensen (Troubadour Lyrics: A Bilingual Anthology (New York: Peter Lang, I998)). While we are warned that form, not content, is the aim of these verse translations, some of the endnotes do attempt to rectify obscurities and errors. Kehew also provides an appendix with literal translations for Cercamon's 'Quant l'aura doussa s'amarzis' and Folquet de Marseille's 'Tant m'abellis l'amoros pessamens', to set against Pound's freer treatments. This anthology is probably of more use to the general reader (espe cially one interested inmodernist reception ofmedieval lyric poetry) than to a student, as I am sceptical about the potential of assessing verse translations without a glossary of terms. In this instance, itwould have helped towarn the reader that Old Occitan verse, while apparently simple, is replete with wordplay and constellations of terms such as joi, gaieza, alegria that need a gloss. Kehew's warnings against Pound's early taste for archaisms do not soften the blow of moving from Arnaut Daniel's 'Can chai la fueilla Idels ausors entrecims' to Pound's peculiar lines: 'When sere leaf falleth I from the high forked tips' (for clarification, a literal translation would be 'When the leaf falls from the high between-[tree]-tops', which is horrible but gives you a sense of what Pound is tackling and why Arnaut Daniel has inspired him to call warblings 'wribles'). The structure of the anthology reflects troubadour chansonniers in that each selection is prefaced by a short biographical and historical commentary. Bernart de Ventadorn, Bertran de Born, and Arnaut Daniel have six songs each, and Kehew does not omit lesser figures such as Peirol and Peire Bremon loTort. The only gap, aminor one, is the Catalan troubadour tradition, but in this respect, as in others, the selection reflects Ezra Pound's Dantist perspective on the corpus. However, unlike the chansonniers, the collection is divided on chronological rather than generic lines. MLR, I0I .4, 2oo6 I I07 Part I covers the early tomid-twelfth century, Part II the period up to about I200, and Part III the thirteenth century, viewed as a period of war and decline. There is a brisk and informative introduction and a sound bibliography which directs the reader towards scholarly material inEnglish. Kehew has been thorough in addressing recent shifts in troubadour studies; for example, he...

Two Textual Problems In Vergil's Aeneid (5.325, 10.141)1

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The text cited for both passages is that of M. Geymonat, P. Vergili Maronis Opera (Turin, 1973). I am grateful to Monika Asztalos for helpful discussion. 2. David West, Virgil: The Aeneid. A New Prose Translation (Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 114. 3. H. R. Fairclough (rev. G. P. Goold), Virgil Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI (Cambridge, MA 1999), p. 495. 4. See the material collected by S. J. Harrison, Vergil: Aeneid 10 (Oxford, 1991), p. 90. 5. J. M. Trappes-Lomax, ‘Hiatus in Vergil and in Horace's Odes’, PCPS 50 (2004: 141–57 at p. 148). I hereby modify my views as argued at Harrison (1991: 99); this hiatus would not be Grecising and is therefore more difficult than that at 10.136. 6. See Harrison (1991: 157) for other Vergilian examples and J. Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford, 1980), pp. 103–27.

Ken Russell's The Debussy film (1965)

First telecast on 18 May 1965 as part of the BBC's Monitor series, The Debussy Film was Ken Russell's first fully-realized composer biopic—‘one of Russell's major contributions to the art of film b...

Cicero and the Art of Translation

SummaryCicero makes it plain in his remarks on translation that he holds lexical operations as an acceptable way of procedure for a competent translator (contrary to interpretes indiserti). This is supported by the methodological analysis of his translations. Comparing a prose translation and a poetical one, we can show the relative frequency of different lexical operations in their connection with the requirements of the genres, and with the predilections of the translator as well. We can find that these are used not only when the systemic differences between source and target language make them necessary, but they also become a means of aemulatio with the source text, which, by Cicero’s age, had become an essential component of artistic translation.

Poetry Project: Irish Germanists Interpret German Verse by Florian Krobb , Jeff Morrison (review)

ii 14 Reviews of officialdocuments. A detailed reading of subtexts in Semprun's works is followed by an insightful interpretation of Weiss's Der Schatten des Korpers des Kutschers as an early example of an aesthetic of submerged remembering and indirection. The inclusion of both non-German-language writers and marginalized figuressuch as Backer, Achternbusch, and even Walter Kempowski, who have not received the detailed attention they deserve, is extremely laudable. However, Dunker's theoretical exposition is not always as sharp as one might wish: for instance, in the introduction he follows all too readily Hayden White's assertion that the formal characteristics of high modernism offerthe only prospect of an adequate representation of the Holo? caust (p. 18). In his summary Dunker then claims that the metonymic discourse and symptomatic narratives that are the focal point of his study should be understood as examples of postmodern writing and as a result of the moral turn of postmodernity (p. 293). Surely a brief reflection on the categories of modernism/postmodernism in the context of the historicizing of the Holocaust would have been warranted at some p>6int.Nevertheless, with its emphasis on detailed readings and literary contextualization Dunker's book makes a much-needed German contribution to the ongoing debate about 'writing on how to write about Auschwitz'. University College Dublin Anne Fuchs Poetry Project: Irish GermanistsInterpret German Verse. Ed. by Florian Krobb and Jeff Morrison. (British and Irish Studies in German Language and Literature, 25) Oxford, Bern, and Berlin: Peter Lang. 2003. 276 pp. ?29. ISBN 3-90676645 -4. These forty interpretations of German poetry from Andreas Gryphius to Durs Griinbein reflectthe growing involvement of the authors with poems of their choice. As the introduction explains, many ofthe poems were written in reaction to situations of social or historical crisis. Timeless themes are included, and a few experiments ap? pear among several traditional forms. The editors hope to encourage more reading of poetry, and this aim is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of the texts followed by prose translations. Eoin Bourke contributes seven items, Joachim Fischer, Florian Krobb, Beate Dreike, Sabine Egger, and Gert Reifarth two each, all other authors each a single interpretation of about six pages. The overall quality is high, sometimes exceptional, and always interesting. The poems are seen in context, and the contribu? tors provide just enough technical analysis to show the uniqueness of each example. From the fifteeninterpretations of pre-twentieth-century poems the reader gains insights into the effectsofthe Thirty Years War (Gryphius), peasant faith(Claudius), the interplay of nature and the individual (Klopstock) and of nature and art (Goethe), and a vision of the loss of self despite a serene natural background (Holderlin). Two interpreters give Goethe's 'Gingo Biloba' informative and personal treatment. Chamisso's 'Der Invalid im Irrenhaus' is revealed as a complex and ambiguous ex? pression of outrage, the historical reception of Hoffmann von Fallersleben's 'Lied der Deutschen' is traced, and Droste-Hulshoff's 'Am Turme' presented as an expression of the author's painful conflict between passive acceptance of her role and her urge for independent action, while in her 'Der Knabe im Moor' psychological sufferingis foregrounded. Weerth's 'Deutscher und Ire' represents early Marxism pointing an accusatory fingerat Britain forsocial conditions in Ireland and Germany. The incendiary quality of Heine's depiction of revolution and his 'Jammertal' are revealed in their bleakness and use of stylistic disruption. Kempner's 'Drei Schlagworte' merits inclusion for its historical documentation of a woman's struggle in the nineteenth century. In contrast, Fontane's dramatic 'Die Brucke am Tay' is shown still to be unsettling and relevant today. MLRy 99.4, 2004 1115 An original reading of Rilke's 'Der Pan ther' as a text constructed over what it does not say is one of the highlights in the book. More detail on the potentials of the rhythmic patterns, especially when the poem is read aloud, could have given further sup? port. Lasker-Schuler's 'Mein Volk' and Stefan George's 'Der Widerchrist' provide an effectivecontrast in message and style, with texts and interpretations equally compelling . The varied moods and styles of Expressionism are seen in Van Hoddis's 'Weltende...

A Bibliography of Ovidian Translations and Imitations in English

This is a listing of translations and the more direct kinds of imitations, adaptations, parodies, etc., published from 1500 to the present.1 It adopts most of the conventions of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, This means, for example, that original titles may be abbreviated and their capitalization and punctuation normalized; that after the first six issues of an item are recorded, further reprints are shown only if bibliographically significant; that place of publication is London except where stated. For the period from 1800 to the present, this listing routinely excludes translations intended for use in schools, as well as other prose translations unless of particular importance. Translations are in verse unless otherwise stated. The most wide-ranging modern selection from this material is Ovid in English, edited by Christopher Martin (Harmondsworth, 1998).

Patterns of Marginality in French Prose Fiction, 1701-1800

Patterns of Marginality in French Prose Fiction, 1701-1800 Richard L. Frautschi and Angus Martín Widi an assessment ofover 1 1,000 first editions and dieir reissues for die fordicoming Bibliographie du genre romanesquefrançais, 1 700-1800 (MMF2) , we have confirmed die coming ofage ofa once ill-considered prose form.1 During a search for works of narrative fiction in French and an elaboration of content summaries, we have encountered a modest number ofitems diat defy rejection, yetwhich we hesitate to present as mainstream prose fiction. In 1977, with die publication of our French prose fiction bibliography for the second halfofdie century (MMFl), the problem ofsuch indeterminate works had already arisen, and we identified as "marginal" certain tides containing para-fictive, if not non-fictive, components.2 This article presents areviewofdiree prevalent categories ofsuch hybrids, situated in the generic borderlands offullyfledged or "standard" prose fiction. As in Maurice Lever's listing ofseventeendi-century French fiction, MMF2 will include a list ofworks widi titles diat suggest prose fiction, while dieir actual non-fictive subject matterjustifies rejection.3 Genre markers in titles, it should be noted, are far from reliable in deciding what is prose fiction and what is not. Poèmes can be in prose and 1 See Frautschi and Martin, "French Prose Fiction Published between 1700 and 1751: ANew Profile ofProduction," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14:3-4 (2002), 735-56. 2 Angus Martin, Vivienne G. Mylne, and Richard Frautschi, Bibliographie du genre romanesque français, 1751-1800 (London: Mansell; Paris: France-Expansion, 1977). 3 La Fiction narrative au XVIIe siècle: répertoire bibliographique du genre romanesque ¡600-1 700 (Paris: CNRS, 1976). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 4,JuIy 2004 544 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION narrative in form and contes and nouvelles can be in verse. The terms histoires and mémoires have long been appropriated by novelists, historians, and biographers. The use of die term roman in a tide can refer to a play, as in Melfort's Les Amazones révoltées, roman moderne (1738), or to a dissertation, as in die anonymous Leroman cabalistique (1750). Lesprincipales aventures de l'admirabledon (Quichotte (1746) turns out to be a collection ofengravings, and de Groot's Les agréments de la campagne (1750) describes die construction ofcountry houses. Not all such tides can, however, be so easily rejected. In MMFl and again in MMF2, we have included, but classified widi die marker "m" (for "marginal"), avariety oftypes ofwork diat combine characteristics offictive prose narrative widi atypical or non-fictive components. Some ofthese are whatmaybe termed generic crossovers: for example, prose translations from verse originals, be diey epic poems, narrative ballads, or pastoral idylls. Aldiough theatrical forms are regularly excluded from our listings, exceptional cases do exist, such as Bret's Essai decontes morauxetdramatiques (1765), where die authorexplicidypresents stories as reading matter radier dian for stage production. As well as diese atypical forms of prose narrative, die fictional/factual status of die contents is unclear in odier forms. Hesitations about die classification ofsome narrations either as history or as fiction can frequently occur in works purporting to be memoirs, biographies, travel narratives, descriptions of social life in spa towns, faits divers, scandals, wordiy deeds, legal cases, or hagiography. For example, Bret's Mémoires surla vie de mademoiselle de L'Enclos is usually considered to be history, but Damour's Lettres deNinon deLéñelos au marquis de Sévignéis accepted as fiction. The appurtenances of historical writing, such as dates, notes, eyewitness reports, and odier marginalia, are at times used for fictive verisimilitude and also forsatirical orburlesque effect: for example, the anonymous Histoire des rats (1737). In our bibliography, we do not include stories published in periodicals, unless later republished in book form: for example, Lettres d'un sauvage dépaysé (1738).4 However, some of die marginal formulae discussed in this article are close to methods of the journalistic periodical, be diey miscellanies widi occasional stories or essays where a "spectator" observes social behaviour and illustrates it with embedded portraits and vignettes. Such minimal fictive 4 That is, if die titles appear in Dictionnaire desjournaux, 1600-1 789, 2 vols., ed.Jean Sgard (Paris: Universitas; Oxford...

Balzac: La Littérature réfléchie. Discours et autoreprésentations by Françoise van Rossum-Guyon (review)

202 Reviews later nineteenth-century poets position themselves with respect to the mother text (Chapter i). This is developed in Chapter 2 in Hugo's figure of the echo. Boutin, in a finely tuned argument, here brings together a range of theoretical approaches to suggest that there is, in Hugo's notion of the echo, an implied interlocutor whom Lamartine seeks, only then to retreat into the self, whereas Desbordes-Valmore uses her poetic voice as a friendly echo of another, as a 'sonorous envelope' (p. 80). Boutin concludes that the Valmorean text creates a 'loving community of listeners', whereas 'the poetry of listening in Lamartine reveals a poetic subject listening to himself (p. 92). The heart ofthe book (Chapters 3 and 4) focuses on the maternal imagery of each poet to show, firstly,Lamartine's maternal landscape as a fatal regression, and then Desbordes-Valmore's as a contrastingly life-giving connection with past and fu? ture. In the concluding chapter, 'Towards a Maternal Society', Boutin makes the leap from imagery/the imaginary to a more historicized account of the significance of such maternal nostalgia. In this chapter she examines the nineteenth-century idealization of the mother figure (the emerging cult of motherhood and Marian devotion) and places Desbordes-Valmore's work in the context of Saint-Simonian utopian idealism and social advocacy. In contrast, Lamartine adopts the position ofthe Mater dolorosa 'forhis own purposes' (p. 172), seeking simultaneouslyto return to the maternal land? scape and to appropriate maternal (self-sacrificing and saintly) love. Boutin concludes her study with a positioning of this poetics of the maternal within the nineteenthcentury literary tradition and, perhaps more powerfully, within French and American feminist thought. Boutin's study is complex and persuasive. It opens up new critical perspectives on these two poets (also offering,in an appendix, prose translations of their poems for the anglophone reader), on the nineteenth century more generally, and on the maternal (and its paradoxes) in particular. Royal Holloway, London Sonya Stephens Balzac: La Litterature reflechie.Discours et autorepresentations. By Francoise van Rossum-Guyon. Montreal: Universite de Montreal, Departement d'Etudes francaises. 2002. xix + 2o6pp. $25. ISBN 2-921447-13-4. While the surge of activity around Balzac's birth and death centenaries is now fast receding, work on him continues apace. Alongside a number of noted collections and monographs published by Champion and SEDES (soon to be diverted to Christian Pirot in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire) comes this welcome firstvolume of articles devoted entirely to Balzac in the Paragraphes series edited by Stephane Vachon. This book has a number of positive features: it gathers together updated and reworked chapters by a leading balzacienne; it includes new, unpublished material, notably on Illusions perdues; van Rossum-Guyon's enviable familiarity with Balzac and Balzac criticism is informed and illuminated by her work on narrative theory and the nouveau roman. The result is a volume which complements and develops recent research on the complexities of the Balzacian enonciation, on Balzac's contribution to the notion and development ofthe novel, and on the relationship between literature, ethics, and 'the real'. Although the volume is conveniently divided into two sections, with one, entitled 'L'Auteur dans le texte', treating works such as Le Cousin Pons, La Cousine Bette, Le Pere Goriot, Le Cure de village, and Beatrix, and the other, entitled ' Illusions perdues ou la representation de la litterature', van Rossum-Guyon's concerns remain constant throughout: what is the Balzacian metatext as opposed to the Balzacian text, and what does the interplay between text and metatext contribute to a Balzacian hermeneu? tics? For van Rossum-Guyon, the firstof these questions can only be answered by MLRy 99. i, 2004 203 comparing the status and the meaning of Balzac's 'hors-textes'?such as the prefaces and the correspondence?with Balzac's intratextual pronouncements as author, with those of his delegated narrators, and with his characters' polylogic discussions about the status of art, literature, and 'reality'. For according to Rossum-Guyon, there is a constant interplay between the textual and the metatextual, which may, depending on the context and situation, be self-reinforcing or self-contradictory: poiesis can, for example, reinforce and...

‘Beowulf’: A Prose Translation, 2nd edn

‘Beowulf’: A Prose Translation, 2nd edn

Foreword

Foreword Raymond P. Scheindlin Most of this issue of Prooftexts is devoted to a single Hebrew poem, a work that is probably the most ambitious literary endeavor undertaken by a Hebrew poet in the Middle Ages, Miqdash meʿat by Moses da Rieti (1388-c. 1460). Begun in 1416 and stretching over more than 130 pages in the only printed edition (edited by Jacob Goldenthal, Vienna, 1851), the work is loosely modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy, being written in terza rima, divided into three parts made up of cantos (the third part is missing and may never have been composed), and including glimpses of unseen worlds as well as digests of philosophical, scientific, and religious lore. It may be described as an attempt to provide a broad view of the nature of the Jewish religion in a philosophical and kabbalistic vein, through visions, prayers, surveys of Jewish literary history, and epitomes of philosophical systems. Although it is often referred to in scholarly writing on medieval Hebrew literature, intellectual history, and philosophy, Miqdash meʿat is virtually unknown and practically inaccessible. Yet its importance and literary quality have been recognized in the past, as is attested by the numerous manuscripts in which it has been transmitted and by the fact that one of its cantos was used as a prayer in Italian synagogues and was early translated into Italian. Its importance has occasionally been recognized by moderns as well: two selections were included in T. Carmi's Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, and Dan Pagis, in private conversation, is said to have called Rieti a "poetic genius." Yet until the appearance of the article "Mosheh de Rieti (xive-xve siècle): Philosophe, scientifique et poète," by Alessandro Guetta in the Revue des études juives 158 (1999), not a single study had been devoted to it since the nineteenth century. This neglect may be due to the somewhat forbidding character of the work, arising from: the unfamiliarity of Rieti's Hebrew idiom (a combination of Tibbonide Hebrew and Italian-Hebrew diction); his innovative use of a difficult rhyme scheme that was completely new in Hebrew and that necessitated a certain amount of syntactic distortion; the complicated subject [End Page 1] matter; and the fact that the text published in the nineteenth century is unvocalized and provides no commentary to guide the reader. During the past several years, Alessandro Guetta (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales), Devora Bregman (Ben-Gurion University), and the undersigned, despite living and working on three different continents, have been finding opportunities to study Miqdash meʿat together. Professor Bregman is a specialist in medieval Hebrew literature, especially of Italy; Professor Guetta is a specialist in Jewish intellectual history in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, with a particular interest in Rieti and with a specialist's familiarity with Rieti's Italian writings; and the undersigned is a specialist in Hebrew literature of the Judeo-Arabic world with a strong interest in literary translation. Our collaboration began at the Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, where the three of us participated in a yearlong seminar (1998-99) devoted to medieval Hebrew poetry. During the summer of 2000, we put in a month of intensive work on the project together in Jerusalem. Since then, we have worked by correspondence, both electronic and conventional. Our hope was to produce an edition that would include a new and fully vocalized Hebrew text based on a complete survey of the many manuscripts, together with a commentary and a translation into English. In this issue of Prooftexts, we are presenting the first two cantos of Miqdash meʿat as a sample of our work. The division of labor was as follows: Professor Bregman took responsibility for the Hebrew text. I took notes during our deliberations in Philadelphia and Jerusalem and drafted a commentary in Hebrew, based on our discussions. This draft, as critiqued and revised by my colleagues, became the basis of the English commentary presented here. As part of the work on the commentary, I also prepared a line-by-line prose translation, which I later converted into the metrical, unrhymed translation published here...

King Alfred's Old English Prose Translation of the First Fifty Psalms. Patrick P. O'Neill

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsKing Alfred's Old English Prose Translation of the First Fifty Psalms. Patrick P. O'Neill Paul E. SzarmachPaul E. Szarmach Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 78, Number 1Jan., 2003 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S003871340009967X Views: 3Total views on this site Copyright 2003 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

La traición en la amistad (review)

REVIEWS Zayas y Sotomayor, María de. La traición en la amistad. Ed. Valerie Hegstrom. Friendship Betrayed. Trans. Catherine Larson. Lewisburg, PA; London: Bucknell University Press; Associated University Presses, 1999. 199 pp. This book is an edition with translation of Maria de Zayas's play La traición en la amistad, with introduction and notes. The edition was prepared by Valerie Hegstrom on the basis of the unique extant manuscript of Zayas's work. The volume consists of twenty-nine pages of introduction , a photographic reproduction of the first and last folios ofthe manuscript , and the 2914-line play-text itself, with the English prose translation of Catherine Larson printed facing the Spanish text. Hegstrom's aim in preparing this edition has been to make Zayas's play "available to undergraduate and graduate students and comedia specialists in the United States" (26), since three earlier editions (that of Serrano y Sanz from 1905, reprinted in 1975; that ofMelloni dating from 1983 with apparatus and introduction in Italian; and that of González Santamera and Doménech from 1994) are not easily accessible to American readers. While Hegstrom's edition was in final stages ofpreparation , Teresa Soufas's edition oíLa traición appeared in Women's Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain's Golden Age (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1997). Hegstrom plausibly argues that the Biblioteca Nacional Madrid manuscript (Res. 173) is not likely an autograph (14, 26), which opinion coincides with that of Serrano y Sanz in his 1905 edition (2: 590, nl), in contrast with Soufas in her edition, who, without presenting evidence, calls the manuscript an autograph (274). While Hegstrom has not attempted to date the hand ofthe manuscript, Serrano y Sanz dated it mid-seventeenth 201 202BCom, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2003) century. Soufas has convincingly proposed 1628-32 as the date of composition ofZayas's play, while Hegstrom, on the basis of evidence available to her, offers a further refinement ofthe date ofcomposition as 1632, or close to that year (16). In addition to being a carefully prepared edition, with helpful annotation relating to the unusual spelling ofwords, as well as problematic readings in the manuscript, the Hegstrom/Larson volume provides students and scholars a readable English translation of Zayas's play prepared by Catherine Larson. Hegstrom's annotation reflects her consultation of the three previously published editions in textual matters, and includes the clarification of lexical items. I have verified Hegstrom's transcription of the first and final folios reproduced in the volume (35, 199) and have found it to be accurate. The annotation provided by Larson to the English translation for the most part clarifies cultural contexts and secondarily comments on the subsequent relationship to the text in question. The respective notes to the Spanish and English texts complement one another effectively. I did find, however, that there was greater need for clarification of the language used by the lower-class characters, most notably that ofthe gracioso León. For example, the passage on pp. 52-58 requires greater annotation to illuminate further the levels of meaning in Leon's speeches. Hegstrom's criteria for regularization and modernization ofthe Spanish text follow those established by most Comedia scholars, retaining distinctive spelling practices that reflect pronunciation habits of certain characters or which are important for metrical or rhyming purposes (26-27). I have found a limited number of typographical errors in the Spanish text, in particular in words requiring accentuation near the end of the play; for example, "poder en él vivir ..." (v. 2501). One final criticism of the Spanish text relates to the orthoepy, for I have found one instance in which diéresis is necessary for proper line scansion ("si quieres que yo pueda confiada [sic for confiada]," an eleven-syllable line, v. 2073), and another verse in which diéresis is necessary on eitherfiel or criado for correct scansion ("¡Ay, León, ay, fiel criado!," an eight-syllable verse, v. 2156). These two cases lead me to suspect that there may be others, since this aspect of the poetry is not mentioned anywhere in the annotation to the Spanish text nor in the introduction. Another criticism has to...