The extent to which translation moulded Middle English romance as an emerging genre remains largely unexamined. In this dissertation I identify the principal methodological difficulties that have prevented scholars from giving due attention to this problem, and offer a case study in which I look at how translational procedures shaped the romance of Sir Beves of Hampton, a translation of the Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone . / Having outlined the practical difficulties posed by the intricate textual tradition of Boeve and Beves, the multilingualism of medieval England, and the scarcity of concrete evidence regarding the audience for Middle English romance, I focus on methodological issues: the inability of equivalence-based definitions of translation to accommodate medieval translation practice, the futility of attempts to demarcate translation from adaptation, and the difficulty of integrating different textual levels in the study of translations. / In the first two analytical chapters of the dissertation I concentrate on those aspects of Beves that can best highlight the importance of translation processes in the constitution of the genre. I begin by examining the way in which the translator dealt with the most important translational constraints, some of which, like language, were beyond his control, while others, such as versification, were partly self-imposed. I then proceed to study the workings of the so-called laws of translation (explicitation, simplification, and repertorization) in the process whereby Boeve became Beves. The analyses carried out in these two chapters allow me to contest the received opinion according to which the author of Beves treated his original very freely. I show that, on the contrary, the distinctive features of the Middle English text result from a constant productive tension between source and target. / My study ends with an analysis of what happens when the translator's impulse to be faithful to his source is frustrated by the inaccessibility of the socio-historical context of the original. I examine the most closely translated sections of the poem to show how unrecognized topical references are flattened into literary cliches, which bring into the text their own generic connotations and disassemble some of the carefully constructed thematic parallels and analogies of the Anglo-Norman romance.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.82856 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Djordjevic, Ivana |
| Contributors | Williams, David (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001983939, proquestno: AAINQ88451, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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