Global medievalism and translation I2 CANDACE BARRINGTON Global medievalism and translation In August 2012, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival premiered Ufuoma Overo­ Tarimo's play, Wahala Dey O!I Set in twenty-first-century Lagos and studded with Nigerian pidgin English, it tells the story of a middle-class household: a jealous, unsophisticated husband; his young, free-spending wife; her clandestine, in-house lover; and a pair of mischievous, nosy ser­ vants. Two years later, a Reykjavik performance framed the play as the contribution by a character named Miller Rabiu to a tale-telling exchange during one of Lagos' familiar blackouts; a group of stranded hotel guests - politicians, nuns, scholars, musicians, and businessmen - shared stories and drank cocktails, while waiting for the electricity to return.2 Viewers familiar with Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales will already suspect that Miller Rabiu, like his Chaucerian model, is very drunk and that his tale's lovers successfully dupe the befuddled husband. Beyond supplying a comic narrative, the Chaucerian source provides Wahala Dey O! with a powerful nexus of canonical tropes. Not the usual academic reconstruction that seeks 'to freeze the past, reify it, and protect it from the present', Wahala Dey O! creatively appropriates a medieval British text in order to comment on the challenges facing Nigerians and to suggest the combination of indigenous and imported cultural traditions enlivening and sustaining Lagos' residents. 3 By translating an icon of medieval English culture into a twenty-first-century Nigerian con­ text and setting it on a global stage, Overo-Tarimo taps into global medieval­ ism, the resurrection of medieval culture in post-medieval times outside the Figure 13 Wahala Dey O! Official poster for Edinburgh Fringe Festival performance. limits of W estero Euro pe; she thereby crea tes a dialogic transfer between a Reproduced with permission ofUfuoma Overo-Tarimo. European medieval past anda non-European present. (see Figure 13). Global medievalisms like Overo-Tarimo's add another link in the long on the multiple denotations embedded in translatio - to transport from one chain of translatio imperii et studii; this medieval concept explaining how time period to another, to carry from one place to another, to move from one medieval culture imagined its relationship to ancient predecessors can also be language to another - translatio imperii et studii explained how ancient used to explain how medieval culture has been transmitted into twenty-first­ Greek learning was absorbed and refined by the conquering Romans, then century global culture. The concept of translatio imperii et studii conjoins the spread across the centuries throughout Europe as Roman Christendom dis­ ways that conquest and culture often come together as a package. Drawing placed Germanic paganism. When Europeans established colonies on every 180 181 CANDACE BARRINGTON Global medievalism and translation continent, translatio reappeared and was felt most acutely where those Ages, 'medieval' provided an ever-ready set of pejorative associations that colonies became settler colonies and colonists brought their native could be used to tar alíen peoples and enemy nations: barbarie violence, European culture with them. In the United States, Canada, and Australasia, irrational religiosity, intellectual stagnation, and artistic naiveté. (In fact, British culture became the standard against which the homegrown culture these derogatory senses carry the original meaning of 'medieval'. 6 ) The measured itself. In Quebec, it was French culture; in Brazil, Portuguese; and Middle Ages were simultaneously elevated as the wellspríng of eternal, in the rest of Central and South America, Spanish. These European cultural national virtues and debased as the ash heap of smouldering, alíen vices. and linguistic ties provided a Western-European basis for newly elite cultures When medieval texts (and those inspired by medieval ideas) were carried to in the former colonies. Following the centuries-old translatio traditions, colonies old and new, the ambivalences travelled abroad as well. settlers displaced the perceived barbarisms of frontier culture with the These persistent ambivalences shape medievalism's global reach, allowing Christian sureties of Europe. This modero translatio ensured the imported it to translate medieval trapes across chronological gaps, geographical dis­ dramas of Shakespeare and Sophocles were part of the settlers' domesticated tances, and linguistic differences. Not limited to seeing the European medie­ diet, while the indigenous tales of the Narragansett, Apache, Iroquois, Inca, val past as a mirror for interpreting contemporaneous European culture, Inuit, Aboriginal, and other native peoples were exotic fare for transplanted global medievalism goes beyond nationalist medievalism and uses the Europeans, suiting neither their sensibilities nor their palates. Repeatedly, European medieval past as prism for interpreting, shaping, and binding European cultures supplanted indigenous ones and were treated as if they cultures outside the Western European nation-states. Deploying medieval­ were native, though they were, in fact, in lands far from European shores. ism's simultaneous nostalgia and loathing for the past, Europeans could Medieval non-religious texts were not initially included in the European imagine themselves as embodying medieval virtues while attributing medie­ culture transported to the New World. During colonial expansion's first 300 val vices to outsiders. This same double move then becomes available when years, the books accompanying conquest were primarily religious, such as non-Europeans appropriate Europe's medieval past. Generally, global Bibles, devotionals, and theological tracts. After Romanticism reclaimed the appropriations of medieval Europe have been subsumed under the broader Middle Ages in the nineteenth century, however, medievalism in the form of categories of colonialism and orientalism. While I will attend to these phe­ such novels and verse as Scott's Ivanhoe and Wordsworth's Chaucerian nomena, I find they blur important distinctions. For this reason, I will translations were exported and widely read beyond European shores. consider global medievalisms as operating in three primary modes parallel Before long, medieval books - and eventually other remnants of medieval to the three denotations embedded in translatio: temporal, spatial, and material culture - became frequent stowaways. In this way, European colo­ linguistíc. Primarily, these three modes are distinguished by the relationship nial regimes spread medieval legend and líterature across the globe, with new to medieval Europe that the ones deploying the medievalism claim. Though medievalísms emergíng in the cultures of the Americas, Africa, and Asía, the these three modes do not account for ali instances of global medievalism, result of índígenous and European traditions íntermingling.4 they do allow a useful way to see what Michelle R. Warren calls 'the stealthy Embedded in the Romantícs' appropríatíon of the medieval in various work of medievalizing discourse'. 7 European countríes was a deep nationalist nostalgia, encompassing both Examining the case of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, we will see how 'longing and critique'. 5 On the one hand, this nationalism was an inward­ each mode of global medievalism foregrounds its 'contrapunta! co-presence' looking quest to heal a nation's people fragmented by industrialisation and with the European Middle Ages, thereby granting us a means for under­ contaminated by foreign influences. Artists and politicians alike found in the standing the dialogue between medieval and post-medieval texts. 8 Not only Middle Ages the balm of a common, premodern language and medieval will these three modes help us understand how Chaucer's Oxbridge Robín virtues - chivalric honour, religious faith, enlightened rationality, and honest the Miller becomes Overo-Tarimo's Nigerian Miller Rabiu, but, in ways that creativity - that neatly corresponded with modern values; when Tennyson might initially surprise, they bring us toan understanding of Chaucer's Tales reimagined the Arthurian legend in Idylls of the King (1842-1885) and we might not otherwise recognise. Wagner reconceived Germany's national epic in Der Ring Des Nibelungen Temporal global medievalism occurs when modern European cultures use (1848-1874), they were tapping into this affirmative strain. On the other medievalism as a prism for understanding coeval non-Western cultures. For hand, nationalist medievalism was also an outward-focused attitude for global medievalism (as with other medievalisms), translating across time judging outsiders. Energised by early modern prejudices against the Middle means either casting the present in terms of the medieval past or redefining 182 183 CANDACE BARRINGTON Global medievalism and translation the medieval past in terms of the modern present. In both cases, temporal imagine two coeval cultures as occupying two different time zones or translation places the Middle Ages in synchronous rather than chronological historical chronologies. The Western European is considered to occupy relationship to the modern. As orientalism studies have highlighted, this the modern 'now', while others are perceived as occupying a medieval synchronicity has, to sorne extent, paradoxical limits. Thus, where mediev­ 'then', a dark age from which Western Europe emerged in the sixteenth alism can be used to bring