RESCHEDULED From Romance to Romance: Translating Medieval and Early Modern Romance Vernacular Texts (13th-18th c.) – Day 1

RESCHEDULED go to new page https://cmrs.ucla.edu/event/from-romance-to-romance-1/ 

In the past decades, there have been many studies devoted to aspects of medieval translation. For example, the conferences on The Medieval Translator, and the series of collective monographs resulting from them, illustrate the wealth of approaches that have shed light on this important topic.

Clearly, the act of translating from one language into another was crucial in medieval culture. As an intellectual practice, translation finds its origins in the methods of Latin rhetoric, which fostered all sorts of rewritings from Quintilian through Late Antiquity. In the Middle Ages, translating became a technical skill, requiring skills that presupposed specialized training. This comes as no surprise, considering the importance of the task entrusted to translators: in the scientific field, they were to assimilate ancient works in order to provide scholars and readers with texts that had been unavailable in the West during the central Middle Ages. Translators also moved texts from their original clerical and student readership to a new one, different in terms of intellectual sophistication, social background, and geographic setting–a less examined variant of translatio studii.

From the 13th century onwards, one observes a new trend in medieval practices of translation.   “Vertical” translations from the literate to the less literate (i.e., from Latin to the vernacular) were still numerous at that point, but an increasingly large audience (often of lay and semi-literate readers) ordered books translated from one vernacular to another vernacular.  Literature is probably the first field to be touched by this phenomenon: French epics and romances were translated throughout Europe (into English, German, Norse, etc.). In the later Middle Ages, religious treatises in French were also translated into other vernaculars. Such topics, and the issues they raise in the linguistic areas of Western Europe (Scandinavia, the British Isles, the Dutch and German speaking areas, and France), have often been addressed, and they are still current topics of  research. In contrast, the circulation of vernacular works via translations from one Romance language to another is something of a blind spot.

This issue deserves further focused investigation that will allow us to understand better how Romance languages and cultures were interconnected during a (very) “long fifteenth century,” that is, from the 13th to the 19th century. Hence this conference seeks a better understanding of this topic, thanks to the gathering of specialists in Romance cultures. The focus will be on Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Italian languages, Ladino, and French.

Sponsored by UCLA Department of Spanish & Portuguese, UCLA CMRS, UCLA Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, and Sorbonne Université.

Organized by John Dagenais (Professor, UCLA Department of Spanish & Portuguese), Roxanna Colón-Cosme (Doctoral Candidate, UCLA Department of Spanish & Portuguese), Tania Varela (Doctoral Candidate, UCLA Department of Spanish & Portuguese), and Laura Muñoz (Faculty Fellow, UCLA Department of Spanish & Portuguese).

 Day 2 schedule for Friday, November 19, 2021.