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differentiate between his informative and stylistic gestures based upon context, as the scholarly
reception of his work has done up to present. 363
The problem then becomes one of meaning versus syntax. If Trevisa and “Trevisa” have
two different purposes (with the former representing the translator who explicates concepts and
the latter foiling a Latinate textual tradition) up to what extent can we simply assume that
Trevisa’s idiomatic “clarity” has a purely communicative purpose? What allows us to continue to
think that Trevisa’s use of English to convey “menyng” was understood as direct? How do we
understand the difference between Trevisa the translator and “Trevisa” the signature without
intruding with what Ronald Waldron calls “our twentieth-century intuitions of clarity and of
word order”? 364 One thing is clear; thinking of translation as interpretation cannot help us
negotiate the parts of Trevisa’s interventions that are “almost lyrical” or “often vigorous,
onomatopoeic” versus those in which, in D.C. Greetham’s words, “the principle of auctorial
fidelity”—the principle that a writer says what he means—prevents us from thinking that Trevisa
meant to do more than clearly convey concepts for his audience. 365
In fact, reevaluating the difference between Trevisa as a translator and “Trevisa” as an
authorial gesture requires us to formulate two basic questions about the role of translation and
363 See M.C. Seymour “Introduction,” On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus
Anglicus De Propietatibus Rerum, by John Trevisa, 3 vols, eds. Seymour, M.C. et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1975) vi.
364 Waldron “John Trevisa” 191.
365 See Fowler The Life 143; Berte Kinkade, The English Translations of Higden’s Polychronicon (Edwards
Brothers: Urbana, 1934) 8; and Greetham “Models” 149. Of these, I would like to quote D.C. Greetham’s take in
this problem as it shows the obvious scholarly double-speak on this aspect of Trevisa’s translations. In first
reflecting upon a comment upon the color of Ethiopians, whom Trevisa describes as being “rosteþ and tosteþ” by the
sun, Greetham writes, “are we then to assume that the principle of auctorial fidelity [which we have seen in Trevisa]
must put this fascinating little doublet down to scribal fancy, for it is no longer bound by even loose rules of
translation…Should we perhaps assume that the Latin is at fault…Certainly, any editor with a sense of humour
would be loath to sacrifice the marvelously idiosyncratic comment, which is present in all English MSS; but not
only is rhyme reinforcement very unusual in the standard Trevisa doublet, so is this humour we are so anxious to
preserve…Textual criticism must become aesthetic criticism at points like this, and the theoretical models will
retreat.” Greetham later recants this arbitrary distinction between “aesthetic” and “theoretical models” of translation,
which allowed him and most criticism to projects a modern standard of “clarity” on the text (D.C. Greetham,
“Uncoupled or How I Lost My Author(s),” Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation. 3.1 (2008): 46).
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