"Translating the Middle Ages"
AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
SPONSORED BY THE PROGRAM IN MEDIEVAL STUDIES
AND CENTER FOR TRANSLATION STUDIES
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
OCTOBER 28 and 29, 2008

We invited submissions for papers on the theory and practice of translation in the Middle Ages, including textual and visual translation. Who translates what, how and why, and to what effect? Papers may address, for example, genre and translation (poetic translations, romance, hagiography, chronicle, scientific, or biblical texts—what gets translated), the cultural context of translation (patronage, circulation, gender, canon formation—who translates for whom), or the practice of translation in the Middle Ages (dictionaries, the transition from manuscript to print, the voice of the translator—how is translation performed in the Middle Ages). The scope is interpreted broadly to include Europe, Iceland, Byzantium and the Islamic Mediterranean. Featured speakers include Christopher Kleinhenz, Brian Merrilees, Rita Copeland, Jeanette Beer, Lars Boje Mortensen, Catherine Batt, and Aden Kumler.

An evening event will focus on translations of medieval texts and culture by two renowned contemporary authors who will read from and discuss their work:  W. S. Merwin, poet and translator of  Dante’s Purgatorio and former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, translator of Dante’s Inferno.

Participants will submit completed papers by October 1 to be circulated to the other members of their panel. Selected papers will be published in a volume.

Abstracts for papers to be presented:

Description

Description [PDF, 85kb]

Invited Presenters

Abstracts

Sponsors

ROBERT BARRETT
Putting the Whitsuntide Back Into the Chester Whitsun Plays
abstract [PDF, 38kb]

Catherine Batt
Translating Devotional Literature from Fourteenth-century England: Culture and Practice
abstract [PDF, 9kb]

Jeanette Beer
Translating Julius Caesar: Fidelity and Ingenuity in ‘Li Fet des Romains’
abstract [PDF, 11kb]

Rita Copeland
Horace’s Ars poetica in the Medieval Classroom and Beyond: Translating Translation Precept
abstract [PDF, 8kb]

Alison Cornish
Traces of the Translators in Late Medieval Italian Vernacularizations
abstract [PDF, 13kb]

Réka Forrai
Greek in the West: The Medieval Papacy and the Western Translation Projects
abstract [PDF, 121kb]

Anne D. Hedeman
The Practice of Visual Translation in Late Medieval France
abstract [PDF, 10kb]

Russell Hopley
The Translation of Nature: al-Sharif al-Idrissi on the Plant Life of the Western Mediterranean
abstract [PDF, 10kb]

Ann Hubert
Ælfric’s Colloquy: Constructing National Identity in Anglo-Saxon England
abstract [PDF, 9kb]

Douglas A. Kibbee
Translation and the Formation of the Standard Language in France
abstract [PDF, 11kb]

CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ
Dante’s Commedia: The Poetics of Translation
abstract [PDF, 11kb]

ADEN KUMLER
Translating the Reader-Viewer: Visual appropriation and the promises of devotional literature in Paris, BnF, MS n. a. fr. 4338
abstract [PDF, 9kb]

Bonnie Mak
Technological Translations: Digitising the Medieval Manuscript and Early Printed Book
abstract [PDF, 10kb]

BRIAN MERRILEEs
Dictionaries, Definitions and Databases
abstract [PDF, 8kb]

Elizabeth Morrison
From Sacred to Secular: Translating Religious Imagery into Secular Narrative in Thirteenth-Century France
abstract [PDF, 8kb]

Lars Boje Mortensen
Textual Transfer as Re-enactment of the Past – in Latin and Vernacular
abstract [PDF, 11kb]

Derek Pearsall
Chaucer and John Walton at Work on the Metres of Boethius
abstract [PDF, 8kb]

Rebecca Stephenson
The Politics of Prefaces: The Translation Theory of Ælfric of Eynsham
abstract [PDF, 8kb]

Charles Russell Stone
John Lydgate’s ‘Ugly’ Orpheus: Translation and Transformation in The Fall of Princes
abstract [PDF, 9kb]

Nora Stoppino
The Author as a Reader: Strategies of Self-Authorization in the Fiore
abstract [PDF, 11kb]

Ryan Szpiech
Translation and Transliteration in the Polemics of Raymond Martini, O.P.
abstract [PDF, 9kb]

Boris A. Todorov
Monks and History: Byzantine Chronicles in Church Slavic during the Ottoman Period
abstract [PDF, 10kb]