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- Title
Medieval Lyric: A Translatable or Untranslatable Zone?
- Authors
BUTTERFIELD, ARDIS
- Abstract
This article argues that the role of Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer in debates about ‘world literature’ needs to be re-assessed in the light of their field specialism as medievalists. Hailed as the pioneering founders of the discipline of Comparative Literature, their expertise in multiple medieval languages and literatures has been sidelined. New research into medieval plurilingualism, building on the linguistic skills and interests once taken for granted among these and other key figures of early 20th c medieval studies, affirms the need to understand ‘global’ poetry as being centrally about languages well beyond Anglophone perspectives. Medieval plurilingualism both challenges and extends modern thinking about the global because it heavily engages with rough translation. With examples of untranslatability from the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case to the troubadour Guilhem IX and Chaucer, it is argued that medieval lyric poetry shows the power of untranslatability to disrupt and re-make literary history.
- Subjects
COMPARATIVE literature; MEDIEVALISTS; AUERBACH, Erich, 1892-1957; SPITZER, Leo; MULTILINGUALISM
- Publication
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2019, Vol 88, Issue 2, p142
- ISSN
0042-0247
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3138/utq.88.2.05