Abstracts for panel #637, Englishing the French Renaissance
Organized by Phillip John Usher (Barnard College)
at MLA meeting in Philadelphia, December 2009
8:30–9:45 a.m., Loews Philadelphia
A special session
Selected for inclusion in this year's Presidential Forum theme, "The Tasks of Translation in the Twenty-First Century."
Preserved in Translation: The Perilous Future of French Renaissance Texts in American Universities
Dora E. Polachek, Binghamton University
In 1549, Joachim Du Bellay's Deffense et Illustration de la langue française extolled the power of the French language and served as a rallying cry for writers to create -- in French -- texts that could rival those of antiquity. Now, in 2009, sixteenth century French literary creations continue to fascinate those of us still capable of reading them. My paper's thesis is that these texts risk disappearing forever because of the rapidly dwindling number of happy few still capable of reading them in the original French. I will support this claim by focusing not only on personal observations, but also on the sobering statistics found in two studies based on reliable data bases: (1)the MLA's latest report on Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2006 (which gathered information from close to 2800 American colleges and universities), as well (2) the last ten years of The French Review's section on “Dissertations in Progress,” including those defended. I shall begin by summarizing the findings of these reports and contextualizing their significance in terms of current trends in faculty hiring and course offerings in American universities, and how these trends are likely to accelerate given our current economic meltdown. To be sure, those of us who teach French Renaissance courses know how much students gain by being able to work closely with the texts in their original language. But Michael Holquist's observation that fluency in a foreign language is not what our students are after is something that those of us who teach in foreign language departments are witnessing more and more each year. And without a high level of fluency, being able to understand French Renaissance texts in their original becomes an impossibility. As much as we may resist facing it, these unambiguous trends point to a glaring fact: if we don't wish French Renaissance texts to disappear completely from our college curriculum, we need to quickly begin engaging in a concerted effort of translating them into an English that is comprehensible now and that will continue being so in the future. But how does one go about undertaking such a project? The rest of my paper will address how to avoid the scattershot approach that has characterized translation efforts up to now, and how to incorporate newly rediscovered Renaissance French texts that have become part of the new canon in the last twenty years. In that light, I shall outline how we can begin to engage in a concerted, three-pronged effort of assessment, production, and pedagogical dissemination of what we have produced. I shall give examples of translation initiatives that are currently taking place in the United States, Canada, England and Europe, and ways in which they can be enhanced, broadened, and unified. I shall incorporate into my presentation relevant findings that will be generated at an international conference taking place in Geneva in May, 2009, where I have co-organized and will be chairing a panel consisting of academics from the United States, Switzerland, and France who will address the following question: “Sixteenth Century French Literature Studies: Where Are We and Where Do We Go From Here?” By focusing in this way on the tangible roadblocks facing us as a discipline, I hope to show how by proactively facing the challenges I have outlined, we can incorporate translation as an essential tool that can assure our existence as a discipline that is viable now and in the future.
"Translating Renaissance Hybridity: Dietetic Morality in La Condamnation de Banquet"
Timothy Tomasik, Valparaiso University
Printed for the first time in 1507, La Condamnation de Banquet harks back to the morality plays of the fifteenth century and is considered by some scholars to be the most successful representative of this relatively neglected genre. Given that the authorship of the play has been recently put into question and that an English translation is currently in the works, the time has perhaps come for a reappraisal of La Condamnation's status not just in the early modern French literary repertoire but also as a particularly curious case of translation. La Condamnation stages the crimes and subsequent trial of the allegorical figure "Banquet." Supplanting a moral argument against gluttony with a dietetic one, this morality stages the tension between dietetics and the table, a tension seen in early modern French dietetic treatises and cookbooks. In his prologue, the author clearly presents the text as a play to be performed before an audience, including detailed didascalia and advice on the spatial organization of the stage. Yet he also envisions private, individual readings of his text which would be more associated with the reception of a learned treatise. To this end, the margins of the play are peppered with numerous glosses that cite specific sources for the author's medical rationale and that adduce explanations of dietetic principles. The result is a hybrid text--half morality play, half dietetic treatise--that attempts to reach as wide an audience as possible. In transcending both theatrical and learned secular discourses, La Condamnation offers unique challenges to the modern translator. Faced with such a text from a pre-classical age in which boundaries of genre and language remain in flux, the modern translator must carefully navigate the shifting currents that flow between the Scylla of producing an un-performable play and the Charybdis of publishing a dramatically unreadable treatise.
Translating and interpreting texts are closely related activities, both of which were being reconsidered in the literary world of Renaissance Lyon. Narratives that once were obscure and difficult to approach were becoming increasingly transparent and accessible through the hard work of authors and their public as they (re)wrote and (re)read classical texts. Ovid’sMetamorphoses is a case in point of this transformation. This work was ubiquitous in late medieval Europe, though the traditional, allegorical method of interpreting its myths quickly became outmoded in the first half of the sixteenth century. This paper will consider a translation of an Ovidian myth produced in the literary environment of Renaissance Lyon, Jeanne Flore’s translation of the Narcissus tale, published in her collection of short stories Les Comptes amoureux par Madame Jeanne Flore (1540) and my effort to translate this work into Modern English for inclusion in the series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. As we attempt to make such a work accessible to today’s students and scholars, it is helpful to consider Renaissance notions and ideals of translation. Renaissance authors were first and foremost avid readers, scholars of ancient, medieval and contemporary texts and a large portion of their training as writers consisted in the imitation of their reading, that is, in the process of translation. Consequently, two opposing, though not necessarily irreconcilable, camps developed in the first half of the sixteenth century. Purists such as Etienne Dolet prescribed complete faithfulness to the source text and language, aiming to deliver to a new public an unadulterated copy of the original. Innovators such as Erasmus saw texts as living bodies and strove to make them relevant to contemporary readers. What can and should we glean from this debate in translating Renaissance texts in the twenty-first century? Which stance did Jeanne Flore favor in her translation? While our author does not explicitly discuss her strategic decisions, her contemporary Clement Marot reflects at length on his translation process and goals in the preface to his translation of the first two books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1534). This paratext provides pertinent clues as to how translations were produced and consumed in Jeanne Flore’s literary world. How can we transmit Jeanne Flore’s translation to our students and colleagues while helping them understand how her contemporaries consumed translations?