Translation of Medieval Arthurian Literature

Summary

The continuing popularity of Arthurian literature, especially in the Englishspeaking world, has created a veritable cottage industry of translation, adding a great many Arthurian texts to the thousands originally composed in English. A through survey of that translated literature is thus entirely impossible. One can hope only to offer an acceptable compromise between a simple listing of texts, on the one hand, and a proper evaluation of their quality, on the other. Such a compromise exacts a price: some significant titles will be omitted, whereas the information given about many others will necessarily be skeletal. The result is thus not so much a critical analysis of certain important works as it is a rapid overview of the state of modern Arthurian translation, which began in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century, accelerated around the turn of the twentieth, and virtually exploded from the 1970s forward.

This essay treats only medieval texts translated into English. The volume of Arthuriana put into languages other than English is modest by comparison but is by no means insignificant, and its exclusion from this chapter is purely a matter of practical necessity. Similarly, I have been unable to treat translations of post-medieval texts – Italian, French, etc. – into English. I therefore leave untouched enough material for more than one future study.

The Middle Ages had its own understanding of ‘translation’ (translatio), which referred most often to a historical or cultural transfer rather than the literary activity that produces one text out of another one, from a different language. The latter kind of translation was common, of course, but most often the goal was less the reproduction of the source text – or texts – than the extraction, almost the confection, of a new work based on, or even inspired by, that source. That generalization does not always hold, however, and some medieval English texts are recognizably, if often loosely, the product of the same activity that we would today call ‘translation’. Others may be adaptations or paraphrases of another work, or they may be, as suggested, fundamentally new compositions.

In an Arthurian context, medieval English translations (or adaptations) of other medieval texts are numerous, especially among chronicles.