DIALOGISM, HETEROGLOSSIA, AND LATE MEDIEVAL TRANSLATION

BY DANIEL J. PINTI

...bote God of hys mercy and grace haþ ordeyned doubel remedy [for the problem of different languages]. On ys þat som man lurneþ and knoweþ meny dyvers speches; and so bytwene strange men of þe whoche noþer understondeþ oþeres speche such a man may be mene and telle eyþer what þoþer wol mene.

John Trevisa (1387)

Myne author eyk in Bucolykis endytis,"The yong enfant fyrst with lauchtir delytisTo knaw his moder, quhen he is litil page;Quha lauchis not," quod he, "in thar barnage,Genyus the god delytyth not thar tabill,Nor Iuno thame to kepe in bed is habill." Gavin Douglas, Eneados (1513), 5 Prol., 22-27

In the first of these two passages from the Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk, which he appends to his translation of Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, John Trevisa portrays the translator in terms that may initially seem unremarkable: a translator is simply someone who is able to help people of different tongues understand one another.1 But Trevisa's portrait surely implies far more than this. Trevisa prominently figures the multi-lingual person, the translator, as a "mene," an intermediary--potentially an exceedingly powerful role since, as Trevisa punningly suggests, it is the translator who is a significant guide to what different people "wol mene." And this role is not limited to the translator's interaction with a monolingual readership. Consider the Dominus's reply to the objection that readers with Latin have no need of English translations:

Y denye þis argument; for þey I cunne speke and rede and understone Latyn, þer ys moche Latyn in þeus bokes of cronyks þat y can no t understonde, noþer þou wiþoute studyinge and avysement and lokyng of oþer bokes. (215)

Clearly the translator addresses the educated, bilingual audience, perhaps this audience as much as any; indeed, given what must have been a large number of bilingual or trilingual

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readers in 14th- and even 15th-century England, the translator had to recognize and, in some sense, to write for this audience.2

It is such a reader, after all, who would best be able to judge the value of the translation itself and who would most fully recognize and appreciate the kind of textual mediation in which the translator was engaged.

This mediating role of the translator, whose word at once looks back to an "original" utterance and forward to a wholly new audience, is more obvious in the second example, from the fifth prologue of Gavin Douglas's Eneados. Douglas begins this rather loose translation of Virgil's Ecloques IV.60-63 with "Myne author...endytis" and inserts the speech tag "quod he" in the middle of his translation.3 These additions call our attention to two properties of translation that I want to use, along with the role of the translator suggested in the Trevisa excerpt, as starting points for the following discussion. The first is that any translation has an implicit "he said" or "she said" accompanying it; that is, by definition translation can be understood, perhaps is best understood, as a form of indirect, reported discourse. The second is that a translation is always a response to a previous text and, hence, fundamentally dialogic; Douglas does not just offer a few lines from Virgil's Eclogues in Scots, but does so for his own rhetorical purposes--in this case, to bolster his own proverbial discourse with the auctoritas of Virgil--purposes shaped in large part by his own "answer" to Virgil's text. In short, and in Mikhail Bakhtin's terms, translation is a necessarily dialogic mode of writing.4

That a dialogue, so to speak, between Bakhtin and medieval translation theory can readily and advantageously be proposed is quite evident, especially in light of recent work on medieval translation. For example, Rita Copeland's extensive and thoroughly convincing research into medieval rhetorical theory and the hermeneutic function of the translation implicitly brings many of these connections to light. With regard to the "overlapping" of medieval rhetorical and grammatical functions and their constitutive relation to modes of invention and interpretation in medieval translation, Copeland writes:

The translator aspires to penetrate the language of the original by acute understanding; but once opened through this active understanding, the language of the original is expected to inform, to shape the translator's own language, the values of that original

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language to flow into, to penetrate, the translator's native medium in an enactment of a process of linguistic reception. ("Rhetoric" 48)5

One constructive way of understanding the "informing" of one language by another, the "shaping" of a translator's language by another's language, is dialogically. Of course, a good deal of very valuable work has already been done which applies dialogic theory to medieval literature, particularly, in the English tradition, to the writings of Chaucer.6 Nonetheless, despite many articles and even books on the subject, Bakhtin's thoughts on dialogism and the related concept of heteroglossia have rarely and only recently been applied in any systematic way to translation theory. Perhaps this is because Bakhtin never discusses translation overtly at any length. Caryl Emerson did ask in an article some years ago, "Does Bakhtin offer us a theory of translation?" and answered her own question, "In the widest sense, yes, inevitably: in essence translation is all man does" (23).7 In general, of course, Emerson is right; Bakhtinian theory, however, can be put to more sustained use than this with regard to translation.

For Bakhtin, as Emerson puts it, "To understand another person at any given moment...is to come to terms with meaning on the boundary between one's own and another's language: to translate" (24). But it is important not to oversimplify this interaction; as Bakhtin writes, "One cannot understand understanding as a translation from the other's language into one's own language" ("From Notes" 141). Understanding is itself a situation of dialogic interaction, and a translated text operates on just this boundary and in this kind of dialogic mode. "The event of the life of the text...," Bakhtin insists, "always develops on the boundary between two consciousnesses, two subjects" ("The Problem of the Text" 106). It is on this boundary, indeed as this boundary, that a translated text exists, representing as it does the interactive understanding of the source-language writer and the target-language writer.

Douglas Robinson, in The Translator's Turn, is to my knowledge the first writer to make precise and detailed use of the concept of dialogue as a metaphor for a new paradigm of translation. Concerned primarily with contemporary translation theory and practice, he insists that

...instead of pretending that the translator constructs a

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stable one-to-one pattern of correspondence or equivalence between the [source-language] and the [target-language] text (which proves to be ultimately impossible), we should recognize and, contextually, encourage the translator's poetic creativity. (xv)

For Robinson, the way to pursue such encouragement is through the appreciation and understanding of the "dialogics of translation," beginning with the acknowledgment that the translator is invariably "in hermeneutical dialogue with the [source-language] author" (xv). The translator can effectively dramatize this dialogue in his or her text by employing one of six "master tropes" (133)--metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor, irony, hyperbole, and metalepsis--each of which can be a "perspectivizing device" to enable the new text "to stand in some significant relation" to the original (138).8 What Robinson does not do, however, is utilize, or even much explore, Bakhtin's ideas on dialogue in any detailed fashion. Instead, he focuses more on the dialogic theories of Martin Buber, using these to undergird his project, and citing only "Discourse in the Novel" during the course of his discussion of Bakhtin (101-07). Robinson's book is interesting reading and useful for its emphasis on the "hermeneutical dialogue" of translation; but it is not, strictly speaking, an integration of Bakhtin's writings and translation theory.

Perhaps the closest Bakhtin comes to addressing in detail the problems surrounding translation is when he writes on "reported speech"; any translation, as I noted above, is, after all, a form of indirect discourse wherein the translator "reports" what someone (in another language) has "said." In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Voloshinov writes, "Reported speech is speech within speech, utterance within utterance, and at the same time also speech about speech, utterance about utterance" (115). Therefore, "what is expressed in the forms employed for reporting speech is an active relation of one message to another" (116). Translation is, I would propose, one of these forms, enacting or dramatizing this active relation. Moreover, behind these assertions lies the recognition that every "utterance," Bakhtin's fundamental unit of communication, exists as a response to preceding utterances: "Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account" (Bakhtin, "The Problem of Speech Genres" 91).9 A translation, I would add, not only does these things but makes use of, manufactures literary and cultural value from, the necessity of doing them. Of course,

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precisely what kind of literary or cultural value is decided by not only the writer but also the writer's audience(s).

In sum, then, once we recognize that translation is a form of reported speech, we must recognize that it is inherently dialogic and intrinsically responsive. Now I would like to extend this a step further and suggest that if a translation is necessarily dialogic, it is therefore necessarily heteroglossic, multi-voiced, as well. Closely related to Bakhtin's theory of the inherent responsiveness of the utterance, in fact standing as dialogue's enabling precondition, is his theory of heteroglossia. As Bakhtin writes in "Discourse in the Novel":

Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized). (263)10

Conventionally, we conceive of the translated text as in one language, other than the original, and thus (at least implicitly) in one "voice." But if we extend Bakhtin's ideas into the realm of translation, we can recognize that a translation is always (at least) "double-voiced." In our second opening example above, Virgil "endytis" the passage, but the "quod he" signifies, paradoxically perhaps, that it is in fact Douglas's narrator who is speaking. A translation is at once in the voice of the original and in the voice of the translator. This fundamental condition of simultaneity, of the relational event that the translated text represents, can open up new ways of reading medieval translations.11 Medieval texts, with their glosses, marginalia, corrections, illuminations, and so forth, are in their manuscript contexts very often conspicuously multi-voiced productions. As Ruth Morse reminds us, medieval texts were often

...mediated by commentaries, either in the margins, or as accompanying books. This created an impression of dialogue, almost of simultaneity: the poet's voice with constant accompaniment. This dialogue was a constant discussion of how to read. (Truth, 24; emphasis added)12

Not just the commentator, of course, performed this mediating

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function. In Trevisa's imaging, the translator, acting as a "mene," could perform this role as well and thus play an acknowledged and constitutive role in the creation of meaning himself. "The obsessive question at the heart of Bakhtin's thought," Michael Holquist insists, "is always `Who is talking'?" ("Answering" 307). When faced with a translation, we must phrase an answer in the plural.

I would like now to turn back to Douglas's Eneados, where we began, and offer two examples of how a Bakhtinian, dialogic approach to a translated text might be employed. Douglas's translation, in general, is an excellent source for examples, largely due to the fact that the poet makes such evident efforts to manipulate the dialogic nature of translated discourse as a means of bolstering the perceived auctoritas of his translation.13 One can approach this translated text (like so many other late medieval texts) in terms of the dialogic and heteroglossic relationship created between prologues and books, between Latin and the vernacular, between commentary and text.14 On the whole, though, I would argue that Douglas's Eneados embodies and enacts, by means of the original prologues Douglas appends to each of the books of the Aeneid, as well as within the translation itself, Douglas's dialogue with the auctor Virgil as a means of self-styling an auctor Douglas. The first example is from Chapter 7 of Eneados I, which contains the descriptions of the pictures of the fall of Troy, a "fully-developed ecphrasis," along with some dialogue between Aeneas and Achates (Williams I.192).15 Aeneas is herein figured as a witness to Trojan history and, interestingly, not primarily as an eyewitness (which he certainly had been at one point) but as the "audience" for a collection of scenes depicted on the walls of the temple. The artwork recapitulates the history of the fall of Troy; viewing them, Aeneas relives the scene in his mind and revives the story for Virgil's audience. The scene is of particular interest in the context of translation, for it parallels Douglas's "witnessing" of Virgil's text and his translation as a reporting of a past event--in this case, the dialogue of Douglas and Virgil--for a new audience.

Aeneas is enveloped in a cloud, so that "Amang the men he thrang, and nane hym saw" (I.7.41), his invisibility here contrasting markedly with the very visual nature of the whole scene. The hero spots the story of Troy depicted on the walls, whereupon Virgil describes Aeneas's initial reaction:

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uidet Iliacas ex ordine pugnas bellaque iam fama totum uulgata per orbem, Atridas Priamumque et saeuum ambobus Achillem. constitit et lacrimans, "quis iam locus," inquit, "Achate, quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? en Priamus. sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. solue metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem." sic ait atque animum pictura pascit inani multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine uultum. (I.456-65)16

Douglas's version serves as an interpretation of the scene that highlights the Scots poet's own authoritative role by emphasizing the heteroglossic character of the translation, in this case by paralleling Virgil's play with time-frames in this scene. To begin with, Douglas changes Virgil's present-tense uidet--obviously chosen by Virgil to heighten the immediacy of Aeneas's reaction for his audience--to the past tense. This change might be written off as a simple oversight were it not for the fact that Douglas continues to engage with Virgil in a dialogic shift of time signifiers. For example, Virgil's bellaque iam fama totum uulgata per orbem (457) becomes "The famus batellis, wlgat throu the warld or this" (I.7.69). Douglas's translation of uulgata manages at once to remain very literal, echoing the sound of the Latin, and also to create a pun that self-referentially points to the translated text, Douglas's "stile wlgar" mentioned in the first prologue (1 Prol. 492) and his own "wlgar Virgil" that he will praise at the end of his work ("Exclamatioun" 37). The pun hinges on the very dichotomy that distinguishes translated discourse--the text is at once the same as but nonetheless different from the original. Douglas toys with this paradox further as he expands per orbem to "throu the warld or this," invoking and multiplying a distinction between the past that is Troy and the present of Aeneas ("before this moment"), the past that is Aeneas and the present of Virgil ("before this Latin text"), and the past that is the Aeneid and the present of the Eneados ("before this Scots text"). The battles of Ilium were famous in the Latin world, "before this one," and that fame will be further extended in the world of Scots culture by means of exactly the "wlgar" text the Scots reader would have before him.17

Douglas further conflates "the world before this" when he changes constitit (459) to the present-tense "styntis" (72) and then has Aeneas ask, instead of quis iam locus...Achate, / quae

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regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?, "`Quhou now, quhilk place is this, my frend.'" (73). The demonstrative pronoun added in the translation more insistently places the scene before the reader's eyes, linking Aeneas and the audience. Moreover, Aeneas is linked with the author (Virgil and/or Douglas) as the hero continues to describe the pictures to his companion Achates. Virgil's en Priamus (461) becomes the emphatic "Allace, behald, se yondir Kyng Priam" (76), laying still more stress on the visual elements of the scene for the reader and reinforcing Douglas's translator's role as reporter of the Latin text.18 Perhaps most impressively, Douglas brilliantly transforms sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt (462) into "Thir lamentabyll takynnys passit befor / Our mortal myndis aucht to compassioun steir" (78-9). "Lamentabyll takynnys" at once captures the sound and some of the rhythm of the Latin line even as it adds something to the literal meaning only implicit in the original: the phrase calls more attention to the signs simultaneously beheld and recounted by Aeneas in this passage and simultaneously beheld and recounted by the narrator Douglas in his translated text. Finally, having recreated Aeneas as both an audience-figure and an author-figure in this scene, Douglas remakes tangunt into "aucht to compassioun steir," suggesting the guiding force of the authorial-commentative voice that is so often brought out in Douglas's translation. Aeneas's speech becomes not just a declamation of the pictures' effect, but a summary of their intended and appropriate effect, a small but telling analogue to Douglas's role as translator-poet. Ironically, and quite dialogically, Douglas collapses in the figure of Aeneas the author/audience dichotomy in order to assert (however implicitly) his own authorial status and to gain greater control over the "picture" of the Aeneid that his Scots audience actually "sees."

One final example from Douglas's Eneados will serve to show, I think, how a dialogic approach to medieval translation can illuminate otherwise bewildering passages. I would like to turn to Douglas's conclusion of Book I and the subsequent transition to Book II of the Aeneid. Douglas's most notable change is his rearrangement of the translation of Aeneid II.1-13 as Chapter 12 of Eneados I.19 Critics have tended to be either dismissive of or perplexed by such departures from Virgilian structure; Coldwell characterizes them as "minor textual adjustments" (I.54), while Bawcutt admits finding them "perhaps the most puzzling feature of Douglas's translation" (140). Charles Blyth offers some speculations on why Douglas divides the books as he

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does, arguing that Aeneas's "prologue" to his narrative within the narrative does not serve as an effective introduction for a medieval tragedy, and thus Douglas is compelled to offer a more fitting introduction to Aeneas's account, i.e., Douglas's own Prologue to Book II (181). I think, however, that Blyth insists on too much distinction between the two voices; I do not find what Blyth calls "the emotion[s] expressed" in the "preamble" and prologue to be very different from one another. Moreover, Blyth does not address the very intriguing element of authorial competition implied by Douglas's providing, in Blyth's words, a "preferable introduction" to the story (181). Careful attention to the dialogic tenor of the voices in this section suggests a more complete explanation for Douglas's alteration at the end of this book.

Virgil ends Aeneid I with Dido's fateful request, in the form of direct discourse, for Aeneas to tell the story of the fall of Troy and of his wanderings. Aeneas's response, however, does not immediately open Aeneid II; rather, Virgil begins with the dramatic lines, Conticvere omnes intentique ora tenebant; / inde toro pater Aeneas sic orsus ab alto (II.1-2). Clearly, part of what Virgil is doing is putting Aeneas in the position of the epic storyteller, with Dido and the rest as audience figures analogous to Virgil's own audience who themselves are waiting eagerly for Aeneas to begin. By creating a dialogic response to Virgil's text, Douglas makes his own connection between the figure of the hero and the figure of the poet, identifying his own narrator all the more with the authoritative figure of pater Aeneas, who commands such rapt attention.

The 12th chapter of Eneados I translates, as I mentioned above, Aeneid II.1-13; the lines serve as Aeneas's short "prologue" to his story of the last days of the Trojan war. Aeneas begins by mentioning the "ontellabill sorow" (I.12.6) his audience has asked him to relive and then prefaces the tragic nature of the impending tale with a generalized rhetorical question:

Quhat Myrmydon or Gregion DolopesOr knyght wageor to cruel Vlixes,Sik materis to rehers and yit to heir,Mycht thame conteyn fra weping mony a teir? (11-14)20

Thereupon Eueados I ends with the hero's specific address to Dido, further underscoring the tragedy of the story Aeneas is about to tell:

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And now the hevin ourquhelmys the donk nycht,Quhen the declynyng of the sternys brychtTo sleip and rest perswadis our appetite.Bot sen thou hast sic plesour and delyteTo knaw our chancis and fal of Troy in weyr,And schortly the last end tharof wald heir,Albeit my spreit abhorris and doith grysTharon forto remembir, and oftsysMurnand eschewis tharfra with gret dyseys,Yit than I sal begyn yow forto pleys. (15-24)

Aeneas's conditional clause in Virgil posits Dido's amor, here something like "passionate longing," to hear the story Troiae supremum...laborem (II.10-11); Douglas accentuates Aeneas's role as poet, and thereby links his voice closely to Aeneas's, by remaking amor as "sic plesour and delyte" that an audience can derive from poetry per se. Indeed, even Aeneas's simple final word in these prefatory remarks, incipiam (II.13), is expanded to include this poet figure's interest in pleasing his audience: "Yit than I sal begyn yow forto pleys." In short, Douglas's text becomes manifestly heteroglot, as the words are simultaneously voiced by Aeneas and Douglas.

This connection between the hero and the poet is extended when Douglas introduces another voice into the dialogue of his translation of the transition between books: the prologue to Eneados II. While Aeneas's "prologue" to the story he is about to tell stresses the tragic nature of the narrative, Prologue 2, on the heels of what has now become, thanks to Douglas's rearrangement, an introductory speech for that prologue, picks up and augments Aeneas's theme in the voice of the prologue-poet:

Dyrk byn my muse with dolorus armony. Melpomene, on the wald clerkis callFortill compyle this dedly tragedyTwiching of Troy the subuersioun and fall;Bot sen I follow the poet principall,Quhat nedis purches fenyeit termys new?God grant me grace hym dyngly to ensew! (2 Prol., 1-7)

On the one hand, the analogy between Douglas and Aeneas is expanded to include a close connection between Douglas and Virgil, whose own words, Douglas implies, will be relied on to tell an "ontellabill" narrative. But the "I" following the "poet

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principall" in this case is still following the "poet" from the end of Eneados I, Aeneas himself. The question of line 6 thus becomes laced with ironic and powerfully dialogic overtones: no need of a transcendent muse here, and no need for even intimations of poetic fakery or for acquiring terms from elsewhere, since the "old words" are dialogically still present, albeit "re-voiced" in Scots. There is no small irony in that Douglas claims accuracy in the midst of one of his most obvious changes to Virgil's text, the rearrangement of the first part of Book II--an authoritative assertion of his own right to rewrite. And just as striking is the extension and conflation of Virgil's, Aeneas's, and Douglas's voices in the final stanza of the second prologue:

Harkis, ladeis, your bewte was the caws;Harkis, knychtis, the wod fury of Mart;Wys men, attendis mony sorofull claws;And, ye dyssavouris, reid heir your proper art;And fynaly, to specify euery part,Heir verifeit is that proverbe eching so,`All erdly glaidnes fynysith with wo.' (2 Prol., 15-21)

Here Douglas's address to his implied audience of "ladeis" and "knychtis" echoes Aeneas's own address to his figural audience in the narrative. The learned and moralizing voice of the commentator is drawn into the proverbial final line (and implied in the criticism of Dido) and broadens, of course, Aeneas's stated motive above, to grant Dido's request for the story and offer "plesour and delyte." Finally, as a dialogic response to Aeneas's introductory speech to Book II, the prologue implicitly warns against deriving too much pleasure from a worldly story of "dedly tragedy."

Gavin Douglas's Eneados, as a text that acts to supplement and extend a monumental poem like Virgil's Aeneid, is perhaps only the most obviously multi-voiced translation from the late Middle Ages; its prologues, marginal commentary, additions, and expansions serve to highlight the translator's business of orchestrating voices in dialogue. If the very act of translation itself, however, does produce some kind of heteroglossia, then any "translated" text--that is, any text that configures itself in relation to one or more sources--could well be theorized and analyzed in dialogical terms, whether or not readers might typically read such a text as a translation. Standing at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Eneados, a poem like

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Chaucer's House of Fame, for instance, includes its own exceedingly brief "translation" of Virgil's Aeneid. Moreover, Rita Copeland argues that although it "is not typically studied as a translation, precisely because it has so convincingly differentiated itself from its sources," Gower's Confessio amantis "is very much a product of the tradition of academic translation" (Rhetoric 202). Translated prose is no less at issue; Lord Berners' translation of Froissart's Chronicles is surely its own kind of complex dialogue with English history. One thinks, too, of the possibilities for reading gendered voices in the works of medieval women translators such as Dame Eleanor Hull or Juliana Berners, not to mention in Middle English translations, quite possibly if not likely made by male translators, of the writings of Christine de Pisan or Catherine of Siena--Hoccleve's version of L'Épistre de Cupide but one famous example.21 In short, I hope I have shown that approaching medieval translated texts in light of Bakhtin's ideas of dialogism and heteroglossia is not only congruent with medieval vernacular translation theory, but also especially illuminating for contemporary readers, and that the implications of R. A. Shoaf's forceful assertion that "medieval poetry without translation is unthinkable" ("Literary Theory" 85) do not just extend to the "grand translateur" and renowned author Chaucer. A Bakhtinian theory of translation applies equally well to many lesser-read writers who are too often viewed as "mere" translators, or anonymous texts that are "only" translations. Trevisa's "mene" moderated a dialogue that was one of the fundamental modes of medieval textual production. Once we make space in our reading for more voices in the medieval translated text--just as late medieval translators like Gavin Douglas did themselves--we will be able to appreciate and understand all the more fully texts that form the basis of so much of the literary culture of the later Middle Ages. Indeed, we will be better able to understand medieval writers' and readers' dialogues with their cultural pasts.

NOTES

1.The passage quoted is taken from Burrow and Turville-Petre, A Book of Middle English, 215. For a full critical edition with variants, see Waldron, "Trevisa's Original Prefaces on Translation." A further discussion of Trevisa can be found in Waldron, "John Trevisa," and Lawler.

2.For a general discussion of education in the upper ranks of English society, including the teaching of English, French,

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and Latin into the 15th century, see Orme. As he notes, "when [medieval children] first practised recognising and pronouncing words, the texts were...in Latin, so that every literate child was a minimal reader and speaker of that language" (80). On medieval literacy more generally, see Bäuml.

3.The Latin reads, "Incipe, parue puer, risu cognoscere matrem / (matri longa decem tulerunt fastidia menses) / incipe parue puer: qui non risere parenti, / nec deus hunc mensa, dea nec dignata cubili est." Quotations from Virgil are taken from Mynors' Oxford edition; quotations from the Eneados are from Coldwell's edition.

4.For readings of specific Middle English texts as dialogic translations, see Pinti, "Translation and the Aesthetics of Synecdoche" and "Alter Maro, Alter Maphaeus." I would like to take the opportunity in this essay to articulate in greater detail some of the methodological ideas underwriting these articles and to offer a more direct analysis of Bakhtin's theories in relation to translation.

5.For a fuller discussion, see Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation; for further work on medieval translation theory, see also Ellis, Shoaf, and Vance.

6.See, for only a few examples, Ganim, Knapp, Engle, and McClellan.

7.We do not necessarily need Bakhtin to get us this far, though. See Steiner, After Babel, Chapter 1 ("Understanding as Translation") for a similar argument.

8.Useful as I believe his categories are, Robinson does forthrightly admit to the "tentativeness and contingency" of his proposed categories, and invites his readers to invent others (141). I should say I am not convinced by every part of Robinson's argument, particularly his emphasis on "dialogical bodies" and what seems to me his tendency to oversimplify medieval translation theory and practice.

9.Bakhtin distinguishes the "utterance" from the "sentence," the latter being for Bakhtin "a unit of language," the former "a unit of speech communication" ("The Problem of Speech Genres" 73).

10.Needless to say, I do not mean to imply all translations somehow constitute "novels": I mainly want to recognize that, inasmuch as the dialogization of any (particularly any authoritative) discourse undermines what Bakhtin characterizes as the centripetal forces of language, a translation is an instance of the "novelization" of a

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source-text, an act of appropriation that occurred in different modes throughout the Middle Ages.

11.For interesting thoughts on the relation of simultaneity to dialogism, see Holquist, Dialogism, 18-20.

12.See the articles by Baswell and Irvine, respectively, for further discussion of the importance of commentary and marginalia for the study of medieval texts. As Irvine remarks, "A commentary is thus an `enarrated' text, and a gloss in any format stood in a dialogic relation with the source text" (90)--a particularly interesting comment in light of the fact that, as Copeland has shown (in Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation), medieval translation amounts to in so many ways a new "format" for academic commentary.

13.See Note 3 above. The standard scholarly work on Gavin Douglas is Bawcutt. For the most recent published work on the Eneados, see Canitz, and Pinti.

14.Although she does not explore the term or its ramifications in any detail, Ruth Morse, "Off Eloquence," does refer to Douglas's marginal commentary to the Eneados as "dialogic" (113).

15.Following by and large the format of the printed edition of Virgil published by Jodocus Badius Ascensius (Paris, 1501) from which he was working, Douglas divides each of the Aeneid's 12 books into chapters. See Bawcutt, 105-08.

16.For reference purposes I include here the whole passage in Douglas's translation:

He saw perordour all the sege of Troy, The famus batellis, wlgat throu the warld or this, Of Kyng Pryam and athir Attrides, And, baldar than thame baith, the fers Achil. He styntis, and wepand said Achates tyll: "Quhou now, quhilk place is this, my frend," quod he, "Quhat regioun in erd may fundyn be Quhar our mysforton is nocht fully proclame? Allace, behald, se yondir Kyng Priam, Lo, heir his wirschip is haldin in memor. Thir lamentabyll takynnys passit befor Our mortal myndis aucht to compassioun steir. Away with dreid, and tak na langar feir! Quhat, wenys thou na this fame sall do the gude?" Thus said he and fed hys mynd, quhar he stude, With thir plesand fenyeit ymagery, Murnand sair and wepand tendyrly, The flude of terys halyng our hys face... (I.7.68-85)17.On Douglas's Eneados functioning as a "wlgar Virgill," see

15

Bawcutt, 93-95.18.A role that Douglas calls attention to from the first

translated line of the Aeneid. In place of Arma uireumque cano, Douglas writes "The batalis and the man I wil discrive," beginning with a striking substitution for an easily translated word--a substitution that underscores his descriptive "witnessing" of the Latin text for a Scots audience. See Pinti, "The Vernacular Gloss(ed) in Gavin Douglas' Eneados," for further discussion on this point.

19.Douglas makes similar changes between Eneados V and VI, VI and VII, and VII and VIII. As Bawcutt notes, these changes are in all of the Eneados manuscripts and there seems to be no doubt they are Douglas's own (139-41).

20.Virgil's text reads, "quis talia fando / Myrmidonum Dolopumue aut duri miles Vlixi / temperet a lacrimis?" (II.6-8).

21.For a useful anthology of selections from these and other women writers, see Barratt, ed., Women's Writing in Middle

English.

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