EC 24/10/2013 Chapter Two The Limits of Translation in the Writing of Marie de France Like some of the authors mentioned in the previous chapter, the writer known today as ‘Marie de France’ ranks among a not inconsiderable number of women writing in Anglo-Norman England in the late twelfth century.1 It is by no means to be taken for granted that the same author composed all of the works conventionally attributed to Marie, though there are certainly some interesting similarities in the way this signature is associated with posterity and memory in different texts.2 Though I will for the sake of convenience retain this authorial designation in the present chapter and will examine together texts identified with ‘Marie’, I shall also emphasize the extent to which some of the concerns with remembrance and written posterity often associated with Marie de France’s work are shared with contemporary writers working in the French of England. I will also tease out differences as well as similarities between the attitudes to translation in different works associated with Marie. As I will suggest, there is, I think, a case to be made for seeing certain elements of the engagement with translation and memory in works attributed to Marie as distinctive, but this does not amount to a single attitude to translation and the distinctiveness of the approaches taken in these texts comes into better perspective when considered as part of the wider literary context in which they were produced. Attributed to Marie are several French works, all of which make some reference to translation: the Lais (which claim to derive from oral Breton stories), the Fables (translated from Latin, or possibly from a lost Anglo-Saxon text) and the Espurgatoire (a translation of an identifiable Latin source). A case has also been made for Marie’s authorship of the Vie sainte Audrée – a saint’s life based on a Latin antecedent – though this attribution remains more controversial.3 It is thought that 1 As scholars have often noted, this name is not contemporary with Marie herself; it was initially coined in the sixteenth century to refer to the author of the Fables. Later, it was applied to the authors of the Espurgatoire and the Lais: texts which make mention of authors similarly named ‘Marie’. 2 For intelligent critique of the notion of a single creative subjectivity identified with Marie de France, see Miranda Griffin, ‘Gender and Authority in the Medieval French Lai’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 35 (1999), 42-56; Richard Baum, Recherches sur les oeuvres attribuées à Marie de France (Heidelberg, 1968), pp. 132-5; Bernadette A. Masters, Esthétique et Manuscripture: Le ‘Moulin à paroles’ au moyen âge (Heidelberg, 1992), pp. 152-3. On the signatures in work attributed to Marie, see Gaunt, Retelling the Tale, pp. ?? 3 June Hall McCash, ‘La vie seinte Audree : A Fourth Text by Marie de France?’ Speculum, 77:3 (2002), 744-77. Logan E. Whalen, Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory (Washington D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), pp. 159-73. Carla Rossi uses McCash’s argument to 1 EC 24/10/2013 Marie wrote in the final decades of the twelfth century, from the 1160s to the 1190s, which would make her a contemporary of continental writers such as Chrétien and Evrat (discussed elsewhere in this book) and of the Anglo-Norman writers mentioned in Chapter One. Though the present chapter deals separately with some of the works attributed to Marie, Chapter One provides an important context for my discussion here. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the attitude to translation expressed in these works has much in common with the views of translation found in contemporary Anglo-Norman literature. To a large extent, Marie follows the example of other Anglo-Norman authors in speaking about her translation of material into French. More unusually, her work contains references to languages which include Breton and English vernaculars, as well as written idioms such as Latin. As others have noted, this multilingual frame of reference situates Marie within the linguistic environment of Angevin Britain, with its Francophone court, bilingual elite of English and French speakers, mass population of Anglophones, and Celtic and Danish speaking minorities.4 If the full complexity of this cultural situation gets little explicit discussion in Marie’s writing, the texts associated with her nonetheless draw more explicitly and more broadly than we have seen so far upon the multilingual context in which Anglo-Norman authors of this period are likely to have lived and worked. Scholarship on Marie de France has often focused on her attitude to translation, especially as this is articulated in the prologue to the Lais; however, it is only relatively recently that serious attention has been paid to how the multilingual context in which she wrote may have influenced the work she produced. Focusing on the Lais and the Espurgatoire, this chapter considers how the often quite fleeting allusions to translation between vernacular languages or from Latin to French constitute part of a more general – though not necessarily univocal – concern with translation as a theme in work attributed to Marie. Within this setting, I focus on the different ways in which the limits of translation figure in a number of these texts. In the Lais, I argue, multilingual references often draw attention to what cannot be translated in a way that comments on key questions explored by the stories in which they feature. In the Espurgatoire, I suggest that the limits of translation are more propose a new historical identification for Marie: Marie de France et les érudits de Cantorbéry, Recherches littéraires médiévales, 1 (Paris: Éditions Classiques Garnier, 2009), pp.151-201. 4 Sharon Kinoshita and Peggy McCracken, Marie de France: A Critical Companion (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), pp. 6-10, 17-20. 2 EC 24/10/2013 clearly related to the limitations of human language and understanding in a way that has an impact both on the experiences represented within the work and for Marie’s presentation of herself as the work’s translator. The General Prologue to the Lais As noted in Chapter One, the model of translatio that Marie outlines in the General Prologue to the Lais shares common features with other contemporary Anglo-Norman prologues.5 The obligation to reveal one’s knowledge is a topos used in the prologues to Wace’s Vie de saint Nicolas, to Clemence’s Vie de sainte Catherine d’Alexandrie and to Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, where there is also mention of the transmission of ancient wisdom and the communal flourishing of the work as it is shared with others.6 In a way that chimes with Marie’s concerns, in the prologue to the Roman de Thèbes the injunction to the wise to speak out is additionally connected to the importance of remembering that which is deserving of memory as well as to the remembrance of authors past and present.7 However, whereas these other authors associate the obligation to pass on what one knows with the translation of material written in ancient languages, Marie is more ambiguous. The nature of the knowledge (escïence) that she mentions in the first line is never specifically connected to clerical learning and is somewhat unusually associated – and rhymed – with the gift of eloquence that similarly obliges one to speak out (Prologue, 1-2).8 Though the break with convention in the first lines remains subtle, this anticipates the way in which Marie subsequently abandons the tradition of translation from Latin that she goes on to outline in favour of recording oral stores in Breton. The innovation of this move is highlighted by the way in which the General Prologue makes use of many of the themes of the prologues to the Roman de Thèbes (c. 1150) and Roman de Troie (1165), which similarly stress the importance of sharing knowledge which otherwise risks being forgotten.9 In both of these romans antiques – 5 Unless otherwise indicated, the edition of the Lais referred to throughout this chapter is Ewert’s: Marie de France, Lais with introduction and bibliography by Glyn S. Burgess, ed. Alfred Ewert, 2nd edn (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1995, repr. 2001). In-text references give the title of the lai or the prologue in italics, followed by line numbers. 6 See above, pp. 00-00. Other instances of this topos are found in the prologues to Erec et Enide, Athés et Prophilias, Durmart li Galois, Guillaume de Palerne, and Aymeri de Narbonne. 7 Roman de Thèbes, 1-12. 8 Zanoni argues that the reference to eloquence alludes to the section De usu in the Praeexercitamina. Mary-Louise Zanoni, ‘“Ceo testimoine Precïens”: Priscian and the Prologue to the Lais of Marie de France’, Traditio, 36 (1980), 407-15. 9 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Roman de Troie, 1-24. 3 EC 24/10/2013 which are similarly associated with the Plantagenet court and dated to the decades surrounding the composition of Marie’s Lais and General Prologue – the obligation to pass on one’s knowledge is explicitly presented as a continuation of ancient tradition, rather than a departure from it.10 By contrast, Marie claims she considers translating from Latin into French (romaunz), but then decides against it on the basis that others (such as Benoît, presumably) have done quite enough of that already (Prologue, 28- 32). In an extraordinary redirection of the perpetual remembrance of the learned men of history lauded in these romans antiques, Marie instead proposes to remember lais that she has heard, thereby rescuing for posterity an altogether different kind of wisdom from that described by her clerical contemporaries.