[In the following essay, Johnson examines Henryson's skillful synthesis of source materials with his own creative art in his Orpheus and Eurydice.]

It seems fruitful for modern scholars interested in medieval translation and its role in cultural history to use oppositional or binaristic concepts and terms like “contest”, “appropriation”, “supplanting”, “displacement”, “dominance”, “dependence” and “supplement(arity)”.¹ This is often accompanied by an understandable reliance on the general idea that, as the Middle Ages “progress”, the vernacular, an autonomous (if rather subjected) phenomenon, determinedly expropriates the auctoritas of Latin according to its own distinctively “vernacular” agenda. This agenda is palpably definable against that of learned, often clerical, Latin culture. The inherent binarism of this approach insists on the “conflicted” nature of discourses and linguistic cultures. This can lead to an overlooking of the intertextual and ideological complementarity and the shareable complexities to be found in the translational transactions of Latin and vernacular texts and traditions. It can also lead to a diversion of scholarly and critical attention from the varied intravernacular contexts of translation.

One of the most important (and oft-accepted) understandings of how Latin and vernacular works relate, for example, sees medieval exegesis and translation as having an agenda and effect of displacement of the source text, or, as Rita Copeland puts it:

Medieval vernacular translation of the classical auctores […] takes over the function of commentary on the auctores, and in so doing replicates the characteristic move of academic exegesis, that of displacing the very text it proposes to serve. Like commentary, translation tends to represent itself as “service” to an authoritative source; but also like commentary, translation actually displaces the originary force of its models.²

All vocabulary, concepts and imagery customarily used to describe and understand the immensely complex business of translating in the medieval and early-modern periods have their advantages and drawbacks. There are particular difficulties as well as benefits in applying the idea of displacement to medieval translation. A translation of a classical work, may, for example, valorise that work and its auctor as much as displace them. In the same vein, if a text is rendered for an audience which cannot understand the source, it may by no means be easy to discern where and how the alleged phenomenon of displacement would necessarily occur. Moreover, the translating of a work does not per se serve to diminish the sway of an original as it exerts authority from its source-culture. Let us take, for example, one particularly illustrious translator of a European classic, Gavin Douglas. He would doubtless have loved to have been feted as the Scottish Virgil. His translation sought to do justice to the sententia and the eloquence of the original with the clear purpose of becoming the Scots Aeneid; but it always was and always will be rooted in the authority, value, fame and irreplaceability of the original, as Douglas' own designation, “wlgar Virgill”, indicates.³ Gavin Douglas may be exemplary as an exegete in utilising text and commentary (which Priscilla Bawcutt has shown he uses plenteously and intelligently).⁴ Yet for all his own exegetical activity, Virgil is, in Douglas' eyes, resolutely undisplaceable. Douglas declares himself to be bound to Virgil's enduringly present text, whatever he might inflict on it in his rendering: “Hys wark remanys, my schame I may nocht hyde.”⁵

The lesson the Bishop offers himself and us is that sources do not necessarily go away. Neither, for that matter, do commentaries, translations and other treatments of related materials, all of which witness to the fact that translators have to make choices.⁶ An understanding of the repertoires of medieval translators, who were routinely at home on both sides of linguistic borders and familiar with the cross-cultural practices of Latin and vernacular, will be hindered or distorted by too great an emphasis on perceived agendas of the separateness of, and mutual antagonism between, Latin and vernacular language and culture. A concern to see textual systems as stories of dominance, control or supplementarity, therefore, can only take us so far. Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice, for example, demands rather different critical treatment. Indeed Rita Copeland's book contains illuminating and advanced discussion of this work which goes well beyond relatively straightforward considerations of exegetical displacement.⁷ What I propose to look at in this essay is how Henryson's Orpheus offers remarkably subtle interconnections amongst text, gloss and the poet's own additions arising from his own rhetorical inventiveness.⁸ These “interconnections” have varying degrees of discernibility. In some cases, they may be put there to display the poet-translator's art, whereas others may be more a matter of the implicit, to be suspected or inferred as threads of suggestibility, and begetting perhaps further expositions in excess of the initial suggestion. Their particularity will become evident as we proceed with a woeful Orpheus on his way through hell.

A reminder of the story and its expository tradition would, at the outset, be a good idea. Henryson's intriguing treatment of this myth is based on the twin pillars of III, met. 12 of De consolatione philosophiae and its greatest medieval Latin commentary, the early fourteenth-century glosses of the English Dominican, Nicholas Trivet.⁹ The Boethian metre opens with a declaration that happy is he who can look on the clear fount of good and loose himself from the bonds of the heavy earth. Then, the story proper starts: Orpheus bewails the loss of his wife in songs which move nature but not the Olympian Gods; so he proceeds to Hades, where the inmates' torments are alleviated by his weeping measures, and where the Lord of Tartarus agrees to return Eurydice on condition that Orpheus does not look back at her until he is in the upper day. But he looks back, and, alas, loses her. The metre concludes with moralising allegoresis picked up on by subsequent commentators, including Trivet: he who would lead his mind up to the clear light of day, if he looks back down below, will lose whatever excellence he may have gained.

For Trivet, Orpheus is the intellective part of the soul instructed in wisdom and eloquence, and Eurydice the affective part sunken into sensuality and worldliness, the pit of Hades. The Orphic intellectus, moving the will by eloquence, rescues the Eurydicean affectus, but pitifully, the intellectus, instead of keeping its eye (aspectus) on the summum bonum above, looks down, and the will/affectus is lost again.

As is the case with his fables, Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice consists of narratio and moralitas, the latter being dominated by a condensed recitatio of Trivet's commentary, which also casts a subtle influence on the telling of the story and not on the moralitas only. We join Orpheus after his harp has sent Cerberus to sleep and induced slumber in the Furies, who cease turning Ixion's wheel. At the sound of the Orphic music, the relieved Ixion, no longer in rotary torment, “out of the quhele can crepe / And stall away” (ll. 272-3). The unhappy Tantalus, who in his earthly life chopped up his son and fed him to the gods because he was too miserly to provide them with normal fare, is the next to be helped. For his punishment he is immersed in “a wonder grisely flude” (l. 275), from which he is cruelly prevented from slaking his perpetual thirst. To make things worse, an apple dangles in front of him; but each time the famished victim reaches out the fruit evades his grasp. Whereas Boethius accords “the gay hostelere” (l. 520), as Henryson calls him in the moralitas, only two lines:

Et longa siti perditus
Spernit flumina Tantalus,

(ll. 36-7)

the Scottish poet devotes two stanzas to him:

Syne come he till a wonder grisely flude,
Droubly and depe, that rathly doun can ryn,
Quhare Tantalus nakit full thristy stude,
And yit the water yede abone his chyn;
Thouch he gapit, thare wald na drop cum in;
Quhen he dulkit, the water wald descend;
Thus gat he noucht his thrist to slake no mend.
Before his face ane apill hang also,
Fast at his mouth, apon a tolter threde;
Quhen he gapit, it rokkit to and fro,
And fled as it refusit hym to fede.
Than Orpheus had reuth of his grete nede;
Tuke out his harp and fast on it can clink;
The water stude, and Tantalus gat drink.

(ll. 275-88)

These lines are evidently based on Trivet:

[…] dicitur habere aquam usque mentum, et poma ante os suum pendencia, et tamen fame et siti deficere, quia cum uult pomum uel aquam carpere, statim fugiunt.

(p. 389)

Henryson adds to Trivet a more elaborated dramatic narrative, with appropriately uncomfortable details of the process of the torment. In Boethius and Trivet, the extraordinary effects of the harping are not linked to any compassionate desire on Orpheus' part to alleviate the torments of the inhabitants of the Underworld. The Scottish poet, however, introduces the theme of Orpheus' “reuth”, the pity befitting a chivalrous king in the romance tradition of Sir Orfeo (For pite renneth soone in gentil harpe).

The final line, “The water stude, and Tantalus gat drink”, departs significantly from what both Boethius and Trivet say at this point in the metrum. They make no mention of the water standing, nor of Tantalus getting drink. On the contrary, the Tantalus of Latin text and gloss rejects/ignores the waters: “spernit flumina”. So where does Henryson's line come from? Denton Fox points out in his notes, “[p]erhaps [this is] derived from Boethius' remark that Orpheus made the rivers (on earth) stand still: amnes stare coegerat” (p. 405). Henryson's still waters run fittingly deep, then, into the original source, the Vulgate Boethius. This demonstrates that Trivet's exegetical mediation has not, in effect, displaced the text it proposes to serve. What, moreover, at this juncture of the text, Fox does not see, is that the very same sentence of the original that generated this addition conceivably suggested to Henryson (or at the very least coloured) the next “addition”, the immediately subsequent transitional passage, in which Orpheus, traversing wild moorland, is protected from savage thorns by his assuaging harp:

Syne our a mure wyth thornis thik and scharp,
Weping allone, a wilsum way he went,
And had noucht bene throu suffrage of his harp,
Wyth scharp pikis he had bene schorne and schent […].

(ll. 289-93)

This is influenced by the lines from that earlier part of the Boethian metre in which Orpheus not only stills the streams but also moves the woods:

[…] flebilibus modis
Silvas currere mobiles,
Amnes stare coegerat […].

(ll. 7-9; italics mine)

The woods and streams are governed in the original by the same verb, “coegerat”. In this parallel construction they partner each other as Orphic miracles. In the same vein, the marvellously arrested waters, applied novelly to Tantalus, presage the immediately subsequent complement of harp-driven mobile greenery, presumably dodging to make way for the grieving poet.

There is more to the interpretative logic of this choice than lexical suggestibility and play alone, for there is a commentary-implicated significance, in terms of expositio sententie, to the thorny wilderness and its rubbery shrubbery.¹⁰ Although Henryson goes back past Trivet to the original, and is flexible enough to take a suggestion from a different part of the narratio and apply it at a point later in the story, he does so, it seems, for intelligent exegetical reasons in which the commentary of Trivet is implicated (but cannot thereby be deemed to be displacing Boethius). The interpolated moorland is described as “wilsum”, which can mean “lonely” and “wild”. The choice of “wilsum” can be linked with Trivet, who glosses the associated “silvas” from that earlier, suggestible, part of the Boethian metre as “siluestres homines” (p. 386), i.e. wild/salvage/savage men (a brutish humanity in a state of nature governed only by affecciones and untouched by wisdom and eloquence), or as Trivet puts it a little earlier in his exposition:

Iste autem Orpheus per suauitatem cythare, id est elloquentie, homines brutales et siluestres reduxit ad normam rationis. Propter quod dictus est bruta et siluas mouere sicut infra exponetur.

(p. 385)

This gloss could conceivably have influenced Henryson's word-choice, “wilsum”, perhaps motivating in some degree the introduction of this episode, with its specifically wild setting, for the exercise of his harp's powers. However, it also fits in with the vein of romance which Henryson brings into his poem. That this word-choice is no mere fanciful association is confirmed in Henryson's moralitas, which explicitly equates thorns (or rather, briars) with the loss of control of the affecciouns. The wretched soul is pictured here as caught on the briars of the flesh and worldly distractions: “tedirit on this warldis breris, / Quhile on the flesch, quhyle on this worldis wrak” (l. 456-7). These “breris” characterise the fallen condition of the affectus in this world, its fleshly attachments and its “wrak”. Intriguingly, “wrak” is glossed by Fox as “worldly possessions” and also as “rubbish”—a soundly Boethian pairing of senses showing Henryson's brilliant lexical tact; for possessions are only gifts of fortune, of no real value and no better than rubbish. The reader, presented with the moralitas, cannot now help but look back at those earlier thorns of the narratio as moralised thorns bearing similar significance. Such allusive interplay and networked threads of discriminating suggestibility are a testimony to the possibilities of invention in Henryson's use of Latin texts and commentary-tradition. John Walton is comparable in his earlier Trivet-influenced rendering of Boethius.¹¹ Both Walton and Henryson exemplify the sensibility and wit of the late-medieval vernacular translator as rhetor-exegete. A binarist paradigm does not shed too much illumination here either.

A final example of the agility with which the Scottish poet responds to sources may be found in Orpheus' closing heartbroken address to love. It will be recalled that, at the end of the Latin metre, Boethius provides medieval culture with some of the most memorable words in the literature of love: “Quis legem det amantibus? / Maior lex amor est sibi” (ll. 47-8). These famous lines, spoken by the narrating voice of Lady Philosophy in the Consolation, are cleverly reworked by Henryson as words spoken by Orpheus himself who, asking love what love is and how it may be defined, declares feelingly: “‘Hard is thy law, thi bandis vnbrekable’” (l. 405). Sympathise as we might with the “woful wedow” (l. 414), we also know that it is possible and desirable to break the fetters of the affections. Here Henryson is conceivably flagging this up allusively by using the word “bandis” (fetters), which immediately brings to mind the over-riding and countermanding maxim from the beginning of the metre: “Felix qui potuit gravis / Terre solvere vincla” (ll. 3-4). Orpheus' tragically tainted declaration may be compared with the misguided words of another benighted lover, Chaucer's Troilus. His famous and despairingly determinist monologue of love-loss is in fact taken from an argument in the Consolation spoken by the Boethius-persona. In the original this argument is swiftly refuted for its erroneous fatalism by Lady Philosophy, and further undermined in the Chaucerian text by poor Troilus' woefully undeterministic prayer to the gods to help him out of his distress.¹²

Henryson's nimbleness with Boethian materiae and Trivet's gloss invite reconsideration of how to describe his activity critically.¹³ To say that the Scottish poet's reworking of Trivet's commentary makes Trivet supplementary to his fable would not be to give the whole picture, because the expository section provides adjudication of moral and philosophical meanings from a position of ostensible judgemental “dominance” over the narrative. Moreover, in its authoritatively orthodox didacticism the moralitas can be seen to stand on its own feet as a reiteration of moral, philosophical and religious orthodoxy not needing the company of a fable to make it true. Furthermore, fable and exposition are different genres whose momentum of meaning is partly generated through their own generic logic. Nor is there reason to regard the narratio as being more vernacular than the section which adapts Trivet, for the fabular narratio also springs very much from Latin sources and traditions. Moreover, the narratio, as we have seen, is influenced in its own right by Trivet's interpretation of the Orpheus myth. Whereas it may be said that Henryson subsumes Trivet's gloss into the “textual system” of his poem, it may also be said that the procedures and preoccupations of academic discourse occupy a key part of the vernacular work and have an informing role in the imaginative and literary logic of Orpheus and Eurydice.

The sheer complexity of relationships between Latin and vernacular revealed in the detailed transactions of translating serves to highlight some of the limitations of a “binarist” approach. Vernacularity is only one circumstance of a vernacular text, and the vernacular is but one element in a larger, composite, cultural picture. Many translations, in fact, may fruitfully be seen as incomplete but worthwhile intertextual and metatextual (re)performances, at once witnessing to their origins (and/or their potential for having been different), yet differing from those origins whilst still confirming them.

It is helpful to be aware of complementary play amongst texts. It is also helpful to be aware of the limitations of binaries like displacement, dominance and supplementarity. (To be sure, the notion of complementarity also has limits to its own usefulness.) Nevertheless, whatever terms are used to aid our understanding of medieval translation, it is not just a matter of grasping how translations were actually written; it is perhaps more significant to try to glimpse the contingencies of their production and the possibilities for their varied reception. In attempting to understand which textual choices were, were not, or could have been made, we can usefully imagine a cultural repertoire of what else might have been. In the case of Henryson we can see a free agent at work who had capacity to spare, both in his materials and in his own inventiveness: he might have done otherwise. The sanction of the protean articulations of actual and potential texts underpins and lends meaning and significance to the precious early Scottish translations left to us by such as Henryson and Douglas; and they, I hope, are not to be displaced.¹⁴

Notes

1. The most notable and influential example of this is the extremely important study by Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991); see p. 223 for an explicit delineation of such an approach. It must be stressed, however, that Copeland frequently develops her analysis well beyond a restrictive use of such terminology.

2. Ibid., p. 4.

3. G. Douglas, Virgil's “Aeneid” Translated into Scottish Verse, ed. D. F. C. Coldwell, STS 3rd series 25, 27, 28, 30 (1957-64), Vol. 4, Book XIII, Exclamation, l. 37.

4. Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas: A Critical Study (Edinburgh, 1976), esp. pp. 92-127.

5. Douglas, Aeneid, Prologue to Book I, l. 302. For more extensive discussion of displacement and Gavin Douglas, see I. Johnson, “Placing Walton's Boethius”, in: Boethius in the Middle Ages: Latin and Vernacular Traditions of the “Consolatio philosophiae”, ed. J. F. M. Hoenen & L. Nauta (Leiden, New York & Cologne, 1997), pp. 217-42 (esp. pp. 236-8).

6. For discussion of Middle English translators' choices, see R. Ellis, “The Choices of the Translator in the Late Middle English Period”, in: The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers read at Dartington Hall, July 1982, ed. M. Glasscoe (Exeter, 1982), pp. 18-46.

7. See Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation, pp. 228-9.

8. See The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. D. Fox (Oxford, 1981), pp. 132-53. References in the main text of this article are to this edition.

9. For the Vulgate Boethius I am grateful for access to the text of De consolatione philosophiae as provisionally edited by Tim Machan and Alastair Minnis for inclusion in the “Variorum Chaucer” edition of Boece. For Trivet's commentary, I have used the convenient transcription of the glosses on the Orpheus metre in Fox's edition of Henryson, pp. 384-91. There is, however, a complete though unfinalised unpublished edition of Trivet by the late Professor E. T. Silk. For discussion of the traditions of this metre and of John Walton's early fifteenth-century version of Boethius, see I. R. Johnson, “Walton's Sapient Orpheus”, in: The Medieval Boethius: Studies in the Vernacular Translations of “De Consolatione Philosophiae”, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 139-68.

10. See John of Genoa, Catholicon, s.v. glossa (Venice, 1483), unfol., for the standard medieval definition of translation as a form of exposition of the deeper meaning or teaching of a text: “translatio, id est expositio sententie per aliam linguam”.

11. See generally Johnson, “Walton's Sapient Orpheus”.

12. For Troilus and Criseyde, see Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. L. D. Benson (Oxford, 1987), pp. 471-585 (Book IV, ll. 974-1078). For critical discussion, see A. J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 93-9, and I. Johnson, “This Brigous Questioun: Translating Free Will and Predestination in Walton's Boethius and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde”, Carmina Philosophiae 3 (1994), 1-21.

13. This paragraph responds in part to the interesting discussion of Henryson's Orpheus in Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation, pp. 228-9.

14. I am grateful to Alastair Minnis for comments on an earlier draft of this article.