this. We expand the abbreviation for and. The line over vowels indicates either m or n, and has been represented accordingly: hym (257), men (258), in (260, 263), monnes (264); but that over þagh (258) has been ignored, though it might be expanded, as by other editors, to (unetymological) ‐e. The ‐es abbreviation has been expanded in rattes (260), as have the customary short forms of with (257) and þat (259, 262). A final upward curl is taken to represent ‐e after r (were 259, coloure 263, lore 264), but not after other letters (long sythen 260). Editors differ in their practice on this point.
Line 262 presents editorial problems of a fairly typical kind. The scribe himself went wrong, correcting route to rote. Earlier in the line, some editors read ryue, that is, ryve, ‘tear asunder’; but, u being indistinguishable from n, we prefer to read ryne, ‘touch’. In either case, anyway, the line hardly makes sense as it stands: ‘[Your body may be embalmed, so it does not surprise me] that it need not touch/tear nor rot nor any foul worms’. We have therefore emended the first ne to no, assuming an error easily made by the scribe. This emendation turns rote into the noun ‘rot’ and makes it the subject of ryne – which is accordingly more appropriate than ryve, since rot can touch but hardly tear. So the line, in our version, means: ‘that no rot need touch it, nor any foul worms’. The word‐order object–verb–subject is common in Middle English verse.
The passage also illustrates the difficulties and responsibilities that face editors as they punctuate their texts. Most Middle English verse is not punctuated at all, as in the case of St Erkenwald, or has nothing but metrical punctuation such as marks the half‐lines in alliterative poems. So all punctuation in modern editions should be treated with scepticism, as representing nothing more authoritative than an editor’s judgement of the syntax and meaning of the original. Modern habits of punctuation, furthermore, are in many respects ill‐suited to the fluid and often colloquial structure of medieval sentences. Thus, the enclosing of the first half of line 258 between commas tends to disguise the fact that it belongs inside the clause that follows: ‘The bishop asks him further with anguish in his heart how it could be that, even though people had honoured him so, his clothes were so perfectly preserved’. Again, line 259 should slip into direct speech more easily than it does in our text, where modern punctuation has required a heavy stop, an inverted comma, and a capital letter. The comma after enbawmyd (261) is a deliberate underpointing, designed to keep the line and the sentence moving; but the awkwardly overemphatic dash in line 263 seems the only way of representing a usage hardly permissible in modern written English: coloure and clothe announce the subject of myʒt lye in the next line, to be recapitulated there by the pronoun hit (see 5.10).
Elsewhere in our texts, editorial punctuating involves more far‐reaching decisions about meaning. An extreme example, and one where the present editors have not been able to agree a solution, is presented by the opening lines of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (text 9 here). These appear as follows, without any punctuation, in the sole manuscript:
Siþen þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye
þe borʒ brittened and brent to brondez and askez
þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroʒt
Watz tried for his tricherie þe trewest on erthe
Hit watz Ennias þe athel and his highe kynde 5
þat siþen depreced provinces and patrounes bicome
Welneʒe of al þe wele in þe west iles
The question of interpretation at its most basic is: who is the tulk of line 3? Two answers have been proposed.
1 The tulk is Antenor who, according to well‐known accounts of the fall of Troy, betrayed the city to the Greeks. The opening sentence is built round a correlative pair of siþens, at lines 1 and 6: ‘After the siege and the assault of Troy were over, the city destroyed and burned to brands and ashes, … it was the noble Aeneas and his great descendants who after‐wards subjugated nations …’. On this reading, the Hit watz of line 5 points forward to what follows. Lines 3–4 are left as a parenthesis; and they should accordingly be set off by dashes: ‘– the man [Antenor] who carried out the treasonable schemes was famous for his treachery, the most notable on earth –’.
2 The tulk is Aeneas. Aeneas, according to the Troy story, at first conspired with Antenor to betray the city; but then he rescued the Trojan princess Polyxena from the clutches of the victorious Greeks. This further act of treachery, this time to the new masters of the city, was revealed to the Greeks who then exiled Aeneas from Troy. On this reading, the Hit watz of line 5 refers back to the tulk, identifying him as Aeneas, and so is best preceded by a colon at the end of line 4. Line 3 refers to the treason of Aeneas in betraying Troy; line 4 to his noble treachery in rescuing Polyxena: Aeneas ‘was exposed for his treachery, the most honourable on earth’.
Since the two present editors do not agree on this matter, and since in any case the issues would not have been as clear‐cut for a medieval reader or listener, we have adopted in our text a light and non‐committal punctuation.
8 Translating Middle English
‘Clerkes knoweþ wel ynow þat no synfol man doþ so wel þat he ne myʒte do betre, noþer makeþ so good a translacyon þat he ne myʒte make a betre.’ Trevisa.
8.1 Trevisa’s Dialogue
John Trevisa, chaplain at Berkeley Castle, translated three major Latin works at the command of his master Lord Berkeley. In his Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk (text 12), the preface to his translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, Trevisa imagines a conversation that raises fundamental issues about translation. The most basic of these is, what is the point of a translation? To answer this involves asking whom it is for. Because there are so many mutually incomprehensible languages, argues the Clerk, important works have been written in Latin, a lingua franca that scholars all over Europe understand; therefore there is no need to translate the Latin into English. Those who only understand English should learn Latin if they want to read the Polychronicon and other chronicles. The Lord points out that not everyone who would want to understand Latin works can read Latin easily, and not everyone has the opportunity to learn it. Citing the precedents of biblical translations from Hebrew to Greek and Greek to Latin, he argues that preachers give sermons on the Bible in English to those who do not know Latin. ‘Such Englysch prechyng ys verrey Englysch translacion, and such Englysch prechyng ys good and neodful; þanne Englysch translacion ys good and neodful’ (12/131–4). The Clerk raises a final objection, which is a strong one: that a translation risks misrepresenting the original. Conceding this point, the Lord explains that he does not demand a faultless work, ‘bote ich wolde have a skylfol translacion þat myʒt be knowe and understonde’ (12/143–4). The Clerk, accepting his brief, asks whether his translation should be in verse or prose. It may seem odd to envisage a translation of a Latin prose chronicle into verse, but that was an option for writers who wished to entertain as well as inform, with notable examples such as The Wars of Alexander. But the Lord asks for prose, since ‘prose ys more cleer þan ryme, more esy and more playn to knowe and understonde’ (12/147–8).
Trevisa thus makes the point that there is no one right way to make a translation: the nature of the translation must depend upon its purpose and the nature of the readership. A translation may be in prose or in verse; thus it may be more or less literal (but what does a ‘literal’ translation consist of?); there is no such thing as a perfect translation, for a text cannot be transposed intact from one language into another.
8.2 Words and Their Meanings
A translator, whether from German or Japanese to English, or Middle English to Modern English, must take an important consideration into account: a word in the source language is rarely