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Th e Me d i e v a l Tr a n s l ato r
Tr a d u i r e a u Mo y e n Âg e
TMT_10_VW.indd 131-10-2007 09:51:08

Th e Me d i e v a l Tr a n s l ato r
Tr a d u i r e a u Mo y e n Âg e
Vo l u m e 10
General Editors
Catherine Ba t t
Roger El l i s
René Ti x i e r

Edited by
Jacqueline Jenkins
and
Olivier Bertrand
H
F
Th e Me d i e v a l Tr a n s l ato r
Tr a d u i r e a u Mo y e n Âg e
Vo l u m e 10

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
© 2007, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2007/0095/163
ISBN 978-2-503-52535-8
Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper.
Cover illustration
: The Creation, Lothian Bible,
(Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.791, f. 4v)
TMT_10_VW.indd 431-10-2007 09:51:09

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Notes About the Contributors xi
Introduction xix

Henry Watson, ‘Apprentyse of London’ and ‘Translatoure’
of Romance and Satire
BRENDA M. HOSINGTON 1
L’exposition du savoir chirurgical en français à la fin du Moyen Âge:
Les traductions françaises (
XVe siècle) de la Chirurgia Magna
de Guy de Chauliac
SYLVIE BAZIN-TACCHELLA 27
From Vulgate to Vernacular:
Creation and Fall in Early Middle English Texts
DIANE SPEED 45
La réécriture argumentative impliquée par la traduction
du livre de la Genèse: L’exemple des énoncés car q
XAVIER-LAURENT SALVADOR 63
‘Seli timinge’:
Traduction et ‘structure d’intention’ dans Genesis and Exodus
JEAN-PASCAL POUZET 77
Parallel Parables:
Julian of Norwich’s Lord and Servant and the Biblical Good Samaritan
JENNY REBECCA RYTTING 95

Gilding the Lily: The Enhancement of Spiritual Affectivity in a Middle
English Translation of Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum
MARSHA L. DUTTON 109
‘Opyn þin hert as a boke’: Translation Practice and
Manuscript Circulation in The Doctrine of the Hert
DENIS RENEVEY AND CHRISTIANIA WHITEHEAD 125
The Radical Mary:
Gonzalo de Berceo’s Re-interpretation of the Miracles of our Lady
MARTHA M. DAAS 149
Continental Holy Women and the Textual Relics of Prayers
in Late-Medieval England
C. ANNETTE GRISÉ 165
‘Painted with the Colour of Ancientie’:
Two Early-Modern Versions of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica
RAELEEN CHAI-ELSHOLZ 179
La diffusion de L’Histoire de Griselda en France ( XIVe–XVIe siècles)
VÉRONIQUE DUCHÉ-GAVET 193
Les traductions françaises et italiennes du De falconibus d’Albert le
Grand: Étude comparative de la structure et du lexique médical
AN SMETS 207
Les Faits des Romains:
Première traduction de Salluste en langue vernaculaire
ETIENNE ROUZIES 223
Originality in Translation: The Case of Elisabeth of Nassau-Saarbrücken
CHRISTINE MCWEBB 241
‘Le Grant Translateur’ between ‘Sir Thopas’ and ‘The Tale of Melibee’
IVANA DJORDJEVIĆ 255
Brièveté et prolixité des traducteurs en langue vernaculaire
à la fin du Moyen Âge
CAROLINE BOUCHER 271
‘Et samble qu’il woeille dire . . .’:
Evrart de Conty traducteur de Pierre d’Abano
PIETER DE LEEMANS AND MICHÈLE GOYENS 285
Le transfert des concepts de mouvement: Analyse des stratégies maniées
par Evrart de Conty traducteur des Problemata pseudo-aristotéliciens
ANNELIES BLOEM (WITH MARIA FREDRIKSSON) 303

Translation and Cultural Transformation of a Hero:
The Anglo-Norman and Middle English Romances of Guy of Warwick
SARAH GORDON 319
Translation and Lancastrian Politics: Duke Humphrey and
the Prologue to Book IV of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes
ALESSANDRA PETRINA 333
Translating Power and Knowledge at the
Fifteenth-Century Court of Burgundy
DAVID WRISLEY 349
How to Translate a Werewolf
SUSAN CRANE 365
The Generous Surplus:
Marie de France’s Lai le Fresne and a Miracle of the Virgin
ANNE SAVAGE 375
Analyse traductologique du Le lai du chèvrefeuille de Marie de
France dans les traductions françaises et espagnoles du XXe siècle
FERNANDO NAVARRO-DOMÍNGUEZ 389
‘De celle mordure vient la mort dure’: Perspectives on Puns and their
Translation in Henry, Duke of Lancaster’s Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines
CATHERINE BATT 405
Verse versus Poetry: Translating Medieval Narrative Verse
F. REGINA PSAKI 419
Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres:
Words and Sense in the Staging of Late-Medieval Drama
ELISABETH DUTTON 435

Select Bibliography 449

Index 457

Acknowledgements
he essays that appear in this volume were first presented in Paris, 17–23 July
2004, and the organizers/editors wish to thank the various institutions who
helped to make the Eighth International Conference on the Theory and Prac-
tice of Translation in the Middle Ages happen: the Université de Paris III–Sorbonne
Nouvelle, which hosted the event; and the University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada),
the Unités de Formation et de Recherche de Lettres et d’Etudes du monde anglo-
phone de l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, and the University of Wales, Car-
diff, all of whom sponsored the conference in various ways.
The editors would also like to express their sincerest gratitude to the following in-
dividuals for their assistance in producing this volume: Roger Ellis and René Tixier
for the care and the detail with which they responded to the essays in this volume,
and for their continued interest in and support for both the conference and the vol-
umes of essays the conferences produce, and to Roger, in addition, for preparing the
index to the volume; Christophe Lebbe of Brepols for all of his advice and patient
encouragement; and our wonderful copyeditor, Juleen Audrey Eichinger. For per-
mission to reprint the images which accompany Diane Speed’s essay, we would like
to thank The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, and The Pierpont Mor-
gan Library, New York.
And finally, we wish to express our gratitude to and appreciation of all the con-
tributors, without whom this volume would never have been possible.

T

Notes About the Contributors
Catherine Batt is Senior Lecturer in the School of English, University of Leeds. Her
research interests include translation, gender, multilingual cultures, and medievalism.
She has published on Anglo-Norman, Middle English, and twentieth-century litera-
ture, and her work includes a monograph on Malory (2002). Her latest project is a
translation of Henry, duke of Lancaster’s Livre de Seyntz Medicines.

Sylvie Bazin-Tacchella is professor of Diachronic Linguistics at the University of
Nancy and a member of the CNRS/ATILF laboratory. She teaches French Medieval
Linguistics and Literature. Known as a specialist of the vulgarization of Chirurgia
Manga of Guy de Chauliac, one of the main chirurgical works in the late Middle
Ages, she is currently completing the critical edition of a French translation from the
fifteenth century. Her research areas include medical and scientific vocabulary and
all linguistic consequences of transmission of medical texts in Middle French. She
has published an Initiation à l’ancien français (Hachette, 2001, 2003).

Olivier Bertrand is Associate Professor of French Medieval Linguistics and Litera-
ture at the University of Savoie and at the Ecole Polytechnique (France). He is a
member of the CNRS/ATILF laboratory and works on political neologisms in the
late Middle Ages. He recently published Du vocabulaire religieux à la théorie politique
en France au 14e siècle (Connaissances & Savoirs, 2005) and coedited the Lexiques
scientifiques et techniques (Editions de l’Ecole Polytechnique, 2007).

Annelies Bloem is a researcher in the Department of French linguistics at the Katho-
lieke Universiteit Leuven. She is currently completing her PhD in which she studies
the semantico-syntactic evolution of the verbs mouvoir and émouvoir. She also fo-
cuses on the evolution of technical and scientific vocabulary in general, as it is found
in the works of Évrart de Conty and similar texts.

xii N OTES ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Caroline Boucher is a postdoctoral fellow of the Swedish Research Council, working
in the Department of Historical Studies at Umeå University, Sweden. Her research
concerns the history of translation in the late Middle Ages. She wrote her PhD disserta-
tion at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, on thirteenth- and fourteenth-
century translations of authoritative texts into vernacular, specifically into Middle
French, which she is currently revising for publication as La mise en scène de la vul-
garisation. Les traductions d’autorités en langue vulgaire aux
XIIIe et XIVe siècles.

Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, an independent scholar, is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College
and the Université Paris Sorbonne–Paris IV. Her primary research areas have been
the historiography and hagiography of Anglo-Saxon England; at present she is pur-
suing work on science and religion in eighteenth-century Italy.

Susan Crane is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia Uni-
versity. She has published books on self-presentation and performance in medieval
courts, on Chaucer’s manipulations of romance in the Canterbury Tales, and on the
bilingual matrix of romance composition in post-conquest England. A book in pro-
gress will explore how animals, and human relations to animals, were imagined in
the later Middle Ages.

Martha Daas is Assistant Professor of Spanish literature at Old Dominion University.
Her research area focuses on the study of popular manifestations of religion in the
Spanish Middle Ages. She has recently published articles on religious parody in me-
dieval texts and on the medieval life of Saint Martha. She is currently completing a
monograph on the miracle tales of the Virgin in Spain entitled The Politics of Salva-
tion: Re-inventing the Mary Myth in Medieval Spain.

Ivana Djordjević is an Assistant Professor in the Liberal Arts College at Concordia
University, Montreal. She has published on Anglo-Norman and Middle English ro-
mance and on the poetics of rewriting, especially translation. She is the co-editor,
with Jennifer Fellows, of a forthcoming volume of essays on medieval versions of
the story of Bevis of Hampton.

Pieter De Leemans is postdoctoral researcher in the De Wulf-Mansion Centre for
Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at the K.U.Leuven (Belgium) and the scientific
secretary of the Aristoteles Latinus project. His research areas include medieval
Greek–Latin translations of Aristotle and the reception of Aristotle’s biological
thought in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He has recently co-edited (with M.
Goyens) Aristotle’s Problemata in Different Times and Tongues (Leuven University
Press, 2006). He is currently completing the critical edition of the medieval transla-
tions of Aristotle’s De motu animalium and De progressu animalium.

Notes About the Contributors xiii
Véronique Duché-Gavet is Professor of French Literature at the University of Pau
(France). Her research areas include novels of the Renaissance and Middles Ages,
especially translated from Spanish or Latin. She has edited many sentimental or chi-
valric Renaissance novels. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Recher-
ches sur les romans sentimentaux traduits de l’espagnol en France au
XVIe siècle
(1525–1554).

Elisabeth Dutton is Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, University of Ox-
ford. Her research areas include Middle English mystical and devotional writings,
codicology and palaeography, and medieval drama; she has published on Julian of
Norwich, Hadewijch, and medieval compilation texts. Her book on Julian and late-
medieval devotional literature will be published in 2008: she is currently working on
secular medieval drama.

Marsha L. Dutton is Professor of English at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio (USA).
Her research focuses on the sermons and treatises of twelfth-century English Cister-
cian abbots Aelred of Rievaulx and Gilbert of Hoyland. She is the editor of the two
Cistercian Publications volumes of English translations of Aelred’s seven historical
works and is preparing critical editions of three of those works, Relatio Standardii,
Lamentatio Davidis, and De miraculum mirabile. She is about to complete the criti-
cal edition of the complete works of Gilbert of Hoyland, to be published in Brepols
Publishers’ Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, and is the editor of A
Companion to Aelred of Rievaulx, forthcoming from Brill Academic Publishers.

Maria Fredriksson defended her PhD thesis, Esculapius’ De stomacho. Edited with
an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary at the University of Uppsala in
March 2002. She was a collaborator on the project ‘From Source- to Goal-language
in the Middle Ages: Expressing Motion and Change in the Meieval Translations of
Aristotle’s Problemata’ at the K.U. Leuven.

Sarah Gordon is Assistant Professor of French at Utah State University. She earned her
PhD from Washington University and MPhil from Oxford. She is author of Culinary
Comedy in Medieval French Literature (Purdue University Press, 2006) and of articles
on parody and humor in journals such as Medievalia & Humanistica, LIT, and The
Critic. She has been awarded fellowships from the NEH, Mellon, and the MLA.

Michèle Goyens is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of
Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven). Her research areas include French dia-
chronic linguistics, syntax as well as semantics. She has studied the development of
the article system from Latin to Modern French. Currently she is the director of sev-
eral research projects on medieval translations, both in Latin and in the vernacular,
focusing on the development of scientific vocabulary in Middle French.

xiv N OTES ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
C. Annette Grisé is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Cultural
Studies at McMaster University. She has published articles and essays on Middle
English devotional literature, gender and literary reception, and manuscripts and
early printed texts for late-medieval religious and lay audiences. She is completing a
book on the cult of the continental female mystics in late-medieval England. She is
also co-editing a book of essays on reading and readers in medieval English devo-
tional literature.

Brenda M. Hosington is Professeure honoraire in the Département de linguistique et
traduction, Université de Montréal, and Research Associate at the Centre for the
Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. She has published widely on
medieval and Renaissance translation and on Neo-Latin writings. At present she is
writing a book entitled ‘Weaving the Web’: Early Modern English Women Transla-
tors 1500–1660. She is also directing a three-year Leverhulme Trust–funded project
at the University of Warwick to produce a web-based descriptive catalogue of all the
translations printed in Britain between 1473 and 1640.

Jacqueline Jenkins is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Univer-
sity of Calgary. Her research areas include the Middle English lives of St. Katherine of
Alexandria, manuscript production and late-medieval women’s reading habits, ver-
nacular devotional literature, and medieval drama and performance. She has recently
co-edited (with Nicholas Watson) The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision
Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love (Penn State Press and Bre-
pols, 2006). She is currently completing a monograph entitled ‘Public Piety: Gender
and Identity in Guild Celebrations of St Katherine in Late Medieval Bath.’

Christine McWebb is Associate Professor in the Department of French Studies at the
University of Waterloo. Her areas of research are the literature and culture of late
medieval France and Germany, particularly the Roman de la rose, Christine de Pi-
zan, and Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken. She has recently published Debating
the Roman de la rose: A Critical Anthology (Routledge, 2007). She is one of the
principal researchers of the MARGOT on-line project (http://margot.uwaterloo.ca).

Fernando Navarro-Domínguez, Professor of Translation and Director of the Depart-
ment of Translation at the University of Alicante (Spain), has done research on the
reception of La Chanson de Roland in Spain — prose and verse translations and the
interpretation of the twelve critical editions of the text — (Literatura y Cristiandad en
la Edad Media (Granada University Press, 2001) and on the reception of the works of
François Villon (La traductologie dans tous ses états (2007). He also does research on
discourse and textual linguistics (Analyse du discours et des proverbes chez Balzac
(L’Harmattan, 2000). Currently he is working on the texts of Tristan and Isolde in the
Middle Ages in France and Spain.

Notes About the Contributors xv
Alessandra Petrina is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Università di
Padova, Italy. She has published a monograph on The Kingis Quair and a number of
articles on late-medieval and Renaissance literature and intellectual history, as well
as on modern children’s literature. She has edited the volume Imperi moderni: L’eroe
tra apoteosi e parodia, and has recently published Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-
century England. The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (Brill, 2004). She is
currently working on early translations of Machiavelli in the British Isles and pre-
paring an edition of a late sixteenth-century Scottish translation of The Prince.

F. Regina Psaki is the Giustina Family Professor of Italian Language and Literature
at the University of Oregon. She has translated the Roman de Silence, the Roman de
la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, and the Tristano Riccardiano into English. Her
published work includes essays on Dante, Boccaccio, the Roman de Silence, and
Italian romance, among other topics, and her work in progress focuses on medieval
French and Italian writing in praise and blame of women.

Jean-Pascal Pouzet is a Lecturer in English at the University of Limoges, and an Asso-
ciate Lecturer at Paris IV–Sorbonne (Centres d’Etudes Médiévales Anglaises). His
research interests include medieval English book production, the manuscript context of
insular Latin and vernacular texts, the libraries of the religious orders in England, and
literary theory (poetics). Among other projects, he is currently working on two books:
one on the Middle English Genesis and Exodus, the other on ‘Augustinian Canonical
Communities and their Books in England, c. 1150–1530’ — of which the following
publication is a prequel: ‘Quelques aspects de l’influence des chanoines augustins sur
la production et la transmission littéraire vernaculaire en Angleterre (
XIIIe–XVe
siècles’, Académie des Inscriptions & Belles-Lettres (Comptes rendus des séances de
l’année 2004) (Paris: De Boccard, 2006 [for 2004]), 169–213.

Denis Renevey is Professor of Medieval Language and Literature in the Department
of English at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He works in the field of ver-
nacular theology. He is currently co-editing with Christiania Whitehead the Middle
English Doctrine of the Hert and a companion volume to it (University of Exeter
Press). His other forthcoming publications include a chapter in the Cambridge Com-
panion to Medieval English Mysticism, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Samuel Fanous
and a book, Medieval Texts in Context, co-edited with Graham Caie (Routledge,
2007).

Etienne Rouziès is archivist-paleographer and librarian at Reims Public Library. His
research areas include the medieval lectures of Sallust, the reception of antiquity,
and, more generally, the book history (manuscript and printing). He has recently
published ‘Sallust in the medieval libraries’, in D’une Antiquité l’autre (ENS, 2006)
and a catalogue called La Gravure et le Livre (2007).

xvi N OTES ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Jenny Rebecca Rytting is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at North-
west Missouri State University. Her research interests include medieval women vision-
aries, Middle English sermons, and the Pearl-poet. She completed her PhD at Arizona
State University in 2005; her dissertation places Julian of Norwich in the context of an
oral-literate culture, with a focus on the vernacular preaching tradition.

Xavier-Laurent Salvador teaches in the Department of Foreign Languages and Litera-
tures at the University of Bologna (Italy). His research area focuses on the study of the
translations of the Bible throughout the French thirteenth century. He recently pub-
lished a book entitled Vérité et écriture(e)s (Champion, 2006) and currently works on
the edition of the Livre de la Genèse de la Bible Historiale by Guyart des Moulins.

Anne Savage is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Stud-
ies at McMaster University in Ontario. She has published on Old and Middle English
literature, particularly the anchoritic texts and solitary life; on translation in the mid-
dle ages and on the translation of medieval texts into the present. Her current book
project, The Cell of the Self, examines the dissemination of attitudes to incarnation
and salvation across the boundary of the anchorhold to the secular world.

An Smets is research fellow in the research unit French, Italian and Comparative
Linguistics at the K.U.Leuven (Belgium). Her research areas include the origin and
creation of a scientific vocabulary in vernacular languages starting from the (Middle
French) translations of scientific texts in medieval Latin, medieval (French) hunting
literature and the image of animals in medieval literature. Her monograph on the
Middle French translations of the treatise ‘De falconibus’ by Albertus Magnus will
be published in a near future.

Diane Speed has recently retired from lecturing in the Department of English at the
University of Sydney and is now an Honorary Associate there. Her publications have
been concerned particularly with medieval English romance, hagiography, and bibli-
cal literature, and these are amongst the areas of her ongoing research. Current pro-
jects include a translation of the previously unedited Anglo-Norman Otinel for the
French of England Translation Series, in a volume on Otinel and Fierabras jointly
with Marianne Ailes; a study of the South English Legendary sanctorale for Text
and Context in Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108, ed. Kimberly K. Bell and Julie
Nelson Couch; an extended study of biblical texts and images in early medieval Eng-
land; and a first-ever edition of the Anglo-Latin Gesta Romanorum for Oxford Me-
dieval Texts, Oxford University Press, jointly with Philippa Bright.

Christiania Whitehead is Associate Professor in the Department of English and
Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research areas include
medieval allegory, and religious writing for women in Latin and the vernacular. Re-
cent publications include Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural

Notes About the Contributors xvii
Allegory (University of Wales Press, 2003). She is currently completing (with Denis
Renevey) a critical edition of the Middle English Doctrine of the Hert, together with
a co-edited volume of essays on the Doctrine in its Latin and continental vernacular
contexts.

David Wrisley is Assistant Professor of Civilization Studies at the American Univer-
sity of Beirut. His research interests include both the fifteenth-century court of Bur-
gundy and the late medieval Mediterranean world. He has published articles on the
literary and ideological problematics of the mises en prose in Burgundy, late-medi-
eval travel narratives, hagiography, and medieval European images of Islam. He is
currently working on a monograph entitled ‘Burgundian Orients: Orientalism and
Crusade at the Court of Burgundy’.

Introduction
he beautiful city of Paris was the site of the Eighth International Conference
on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages in July 2004.
Hosted by Université de Paris III–Sorbonne Nouvelle, and sponsored by the
University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada), the Unités de Formation et de Recherche
de Lettres et d’Etudes du monde anglophone de l’Université de la Sorbonne Nou-
velle, and the University of Wales, Cardiff, the conference drew sixty-three present-
ers and over one hundred participants for the five days of sessions and activities. The
twenty-eight essays which comprise this volume represent the range of scholarly
interest in the topic of translation and medieval texts and represent, further, the shape
of the conference itself. Essays in the collection are presented in either of the two
official languages of the conference, and we begin the volume with full texts of the
two plenary lectures which framed the formal proceedings: Brenda M. Hosington’s
‘Henry Watson, “Apprentyse of London” and “Translatoure” of Romance and Sat-
ire’, which opened the conference on Tuesday, 20 July 2004, and Sylvie Bazin-
Tacchella’s ‘L’exposition du savoir chirurgical en français à la fin du Moyen Âge:
Les traductions françaises (
XVe siècle) de la Chirurgia Magna de Guy de Chauliac’,
which closed the conference on Friday, 23 July 2004.
As the following essays amply demonstrate, translation study remains firmly at
the centre of the study of medieval literature. Translation, as an area of scholarly in-
terest, intersects with a wide range of other critical interests, in both well-established
areas, such as biblical studies for instance, and areas emerging or newly defined
within medieval studies, such as the study of vernacularity and vernacular theory.
Translation, as a critical question, is implicit in the consideration of the dissemina-
tion of medieval texts across cultural or national boundaries, from one medieval lan-
guage to another, and across the boundaries defining class, status, and gender in the
Middle Ages. And, inevitably, translation is a central issue in all thinking about post-
medieval engagements with medieval texts. Some medieval writers emerge repeat-
edly in these essays, either as translators in their own right or for the forms and
T

xx I NTRODUCTION

numbers of translations of their texts in the medieval period, and thus translation
study is also invested in the narrative of literary and cultural auctoritas in the Middle
Ages: the narrative of medieval translation is also always a narrative about the en-
gagement in and negotiation of power, as the concept of translatio studii et imperii
makes explicit. Thus, translation is a sign equally of respect and competition,
1
a
paradox with which many of the essays in this collection provocatively grapple.
In ‘Henry Watson, “Apprentyse of London” and “Translatoure” of Romance and
Satire’, Brenda M. Hosington offers a new study of one of England’s first early-
modern translators, Henry Watson, who translated various works for Wynkyn de
Worde between 1508 and 1518. Focussing first on the prologues of his translations,
then on some of his translation strategies and literary techniques, Hosington resituates
Watson’s work in the context of late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century translation and
attempts to reconcile modern translation theory and early-modern translating practices.
Hosington argues that ‘especially in the case of literary translation, translators should
be seen as rewriters, repairing that broken vase, but doing so under the influence of
various ideologies and often with different goals and in new contexts’ (10).
In ‘L’exposition du savoir chirurgical en français à la fin du Moyen Âge: Les tra-
ductions françaises (
XVe siècle) de la Chirurgia Magna de Guy de Chauliac’, Sylvie
Bazin-Tacchella explores the way the Chirugia Magna was used, reproduced, and
translated throughout the Middle Ages. She shows how a specific lexicon of medical
thought was crucial in terms of its theoretical basis: Guy de Chauliac explicitly de-
fined a medical terminology for doctors of that time. Chauliac’s work comprises an
encyclopedia of contemporary medical knowledge. In this essay, Bazin-Tacchella
analyses not only the vocabulary used by Chauliac himself but also the differences
between the original model and the later translations, demonstrating the multiple
ways translators engaged medical discourse, medical theory, and the practice of
medicine.
The next group of essays, by Diane Speed, Xavier-Laurent Salvador, Jean-Pascal
Pouzet, and Jenny Rytting, engages the question of the difficulties inherent in trans-
lating sacred text and sacred language in the Middle Ages. In ‘From Vulgate to Ver-
nacular: Creation and Fall in Early Middle English Texts’, Speed focuses on the
translation of the Creation and Fall narrative from the Latin Vulgate Bible to the
anonymous, thirteenth-century Early Middle English Trinity Poem on Biblical His-
tory. Through a careful consideration of the unknown poet’s compositional strate-
gies, and the poem’s relationship to both verbal and visual retellings of the narrative
contemporary with this poem, Speed argues that the translation process visible in

1
Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic
Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); see also
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds., The Idea of
the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 314–30, esp 321.

Introduction xxi
this text is important for its ‘broader relevance for our understanding of the transmis-
sion of biblical teaching in medieval England’ (45).
In ‘La réécriture argumentative impliquée par la traduction du livre de la Genèse:
l’exemple des énoncés car q’, Xavier-Laurent Salvador also considers the challenges
of translating the Bible from the Latin to the vernacular. As Salvador concludes, ‘La
traduction des Bibles en prose est donc une forme d’invention d’une parole authen-
tiquement française, régie par les règles d’une colocution occidentale caractérisée
par un souci pédagogique d’appropriation des mots du discours’ (75).
In ‘“Seli timinge”: Traduction et “structure d’intention” dans Genesis and Exo-
dus’, Jean-Pascal Pouzet considers the relation between the late thirteenth-century
Middle English poem and the Latin commentaries of the Pentateuque by Pierre Co-
mestor from which the poem is translated. In his essay, Pouzet analyzes the relation
between the structure of the poem, the translation from Latin into English and, more
importantly, the various links between rhythm, scansion, and the ‘poetic’ aspect in
the writing process.
Jenny Rebecca Rytting also considers the relation between biblical narrative, in
this case the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and a Middle English re-telling of it in
‘Parallel Parables: Julian of Norwich’s Lord and Servant and the Biblical Good Sa-
maritan’. She argues that the allegory of the Lord and the Servant in Chapter 51 of
Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love is a subtle reworking of the parable depend-
ent on Julian’s own experience of the ways in which it might have been understood
and transmitted in her own lifetime. Rytting concludes in this essay that ‘the act of
translation, whether from language to language or from vision to text, is necessarily
conditioned by cultural awareness — not only of the connotations of individual
words but also of images and ideas — as much as by linguistic proficiency’ (107).
The essays by Marsha L. Dutton, Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead, and
Martha Daas address the translation of devotional writing from Latin into the ver-
nacular languages of medieval Europe, with an emphasis on the cultural work of
translation implicit in these texts. In ‘Gilding the Lily: The Enhancement of Spiritual
Affectivity in a Middle English Translation of Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione
inclusarum’, Marsha L. Dutton describes the movement of Aelred’s work from its
Latin original to the late-medieval Middle English translation, and considers the re-
sulting changes imposed on the new text by the translator in the light of shifting atti-
tudes towards affectivity; as she argues, in this case, the ‘additions and changes
made by the translator demonstrate that he was indeed not only a witness to change
but also its agent’ (110).
Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead consider a late-medieval Middle English
translation of the thirteenth-century De Doctrina Cordis in their co-authored double
essay, ‘“Opyn þin hert as a boke”: Translation Practice and Manuscript Circulation in
The Doctrine of the Hert’. In this study, they explore the tension between the transla-
tor’s awareness of his role both to the text and to his imagined audience, and the evi-
dence for the readership and dissemination of The Doctrine of the Hert implicit in the
text itself and in the surviving records of book ownership from the period.

xxii I NTRODUCTION

In ‘The Radical Mary: Gonzalo de Berceo’s Re-interpretation of the Miracles of
our Lady’, Martha Daas describes the relation between Gonzalo de Berceo’s depic-
tion of Mary in the thirteenth-century Milagros de Nuestra Señora and the Latin
source material from which his narratives are drawn. She demonstrates the ways in
which Berceo’s project allows modern readers the opportunity to nuance the idea of
‘translation’ and ‘translator’ in the Middle Ages.
In ‘Continental Holy Women and the Textual Relics of Prayers in Late-Medieval
England’, C. Annette Grisé also explores the possible meanings of ‘translation’ in
the context of the dissemination of the lives and texts of continental holy women in
medieval England. In particular, she considers the ‘parallel between two concepts of
translation — of the saint’s body from one location to another and of the mystic’s
text from one language to another’, arguing that the extracted prayers associated
with the female mystics become ‘a kind of “textual relic”’ (166).
Similarly, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, in ‘“Painted with the Colour of Ancientie”: Two
Early-Modern Versions of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’, also considers the kinds
of cultural work translation can perform when a text is removed from its original
context and reshaped according to a new set of religious imperatives. In this essay,
she focuses on two early-modern instances of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, one a
translation by the Catholic theologian Thomas Stapleton and the other an edition of
the Old English and Latin texts made by the Anglican cleric Abraham Wheelock,
showing how translation of early English texts became an important weapon in the
Anglican/Catholic debates raging through the period.
In the next three essays, the authors explore vernacular translations of key ‘au-
thoritative’ texts. In ‘La diffusion de L’Histoire de Griselda en France (
XIVe–XVIe
siècles)’, Véronique Duché-Gavet examines the literary status of ‘l’histoire de
Griselda’ in France between 1384 and 1547, in the period following Petrarch’s 1374
Latin version. She focuses on three vernacular translations of the text, Le chevalier
errant by Thomas de Saluces, Le Roumant du marquis de Saluces et de sa femme
Griselidys, and Le Mirouer des femmes.
An Smets, in ‘Les traductions françaises et italiennes du De falconibus d’Albert le
Grand: Étude comparative de la structure et du lexique médical’, compares a set of
medieval French and Italian translations of Albertus Magnus’s thirteenth-century
falconry treatise, De falconibus. The main discrepancies in the texts, she argues, do
not occur not between the contemporary vernacular translations but, more evidently,
between early medieval translations and late ones.
In ‘Les Faits des Romains: Première traduction de Salluste en langue vernacu-
laire’, Etienne Rouzies considers the early thirteenth-century anonymous compila-
tion, Faits des Romains, a text translating and adapting the works of César. Rouzies
shows that the process of creation is at least as important as the ‘plain’ translation of
Sallust’s work into French. Amplification and summary, he argues, are some of the
key aspects of the act of translation. Rouzies also analyses the importance of anach-
ronism in the medieval translated text.

Introduction xxiii
The next two essays, by Christine McWebb and Ivana Djordjević, address the ‘ef-
fects of the post-medieval dichotomy between “original” writing and “derivative”
procedures such as compilation and translation’ (Djordjević 256). In ‘‘Originality in
Translation: The Case of Elisabeth of Nassau-Saarbrücken’, McWebb reconsiders
Elisabeth of Nassau-Saarbrücken’s Huge Scheppel ‘through the lens of the medieval
understanding of translation as literary invention’ (242). McWebb concludes that the
fact that this author ‘has been classified as a translator rather than a writer has suc-
cessfully pushed her even further into the realm of the “forgotten”’ (253).
Similarly, in ‘“Le Grant Translateur” between “Sir Thopas” and “The Tale of Meli-
bee”’, Ivana Djordjević focuses on Chaucer’s translation activities. She pays particular
attention to the way that ‘[t]he incongruous pairing of “Thopas” and “Melibee” is,
among other things, an exploration of the paradoxes of original composition and trans-
lation, especially so-called close translation’ (257). She concludes that, ‘as Chaucer
knew, no matter how close, a translation will always be original’ (269).
In ‘Brièveté et prolixité des traducteurs en langue vernaculaire à la fin du Moyen
Âge’, Caroline Boucher considers the ‘contradiction apparente entre l’idéal de con-
cision et la prolixité manifeste des traductions’ (272), arguing that brevitas should be
read as a literary topos in vernacular translations, one which reinforces the relevance
of the translators’ glosses found in the texts.
The next pair of essays examines Evrart de Conty’s Middle French translation (ca
1380) of Aristotle’s Problemata. In ‘“Et samble qu’il woeille dire . . .”: Evrart de
Conty traducteur de Pierre d’Abano’, Pieter De Leemans and Michèle Goyens dis-
cuss the role of Pierre d’Abano’s Latin commentary (ca 1310) in de Conty’s transla-
tion (based on the thirteenth-century Latin translation of Barthélémy de Messine and
on Pietro d’Abano’s commentary). In ‘Le transfert des concepts de mouvement:
Analyse des stratégies maniées par Evrart de Conty traducteur des Problemata
pseudo-aristotéliciens’, Annelies Bloem and Maria Fredriksson consider the transla-
tion strategies employed by de Conty in the field of locomotion verbs.
The essays by Sarah Gordon, Alessandra Petrina, and David Wrisley all explore
the roles translation activity could play in the formation of cultural and political
identities. In ‘Translation and Cultural Transformation of a Hero: The Anglo-
Norman and Middle English Romances of Guy of Warwick’, Sarah Gordon focuses
on the fourteenth-century Middle English Guy of Warwick, a translation of the thir-
teenth-century Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic, demonstrating that ‘[w]hen ro-
mances are translated, romance heroes are also transformed for a new cultural
context’ (319). In the case of the translated Guy, she concludes, ‘[p]ride in English
as the language of translation seems linked to Guy’s pride in England and to the nar-
rator’s representation of him as an English knight’ (331).
In ‘Translation and Lancastrian Politics: Duke Humphrey and the Prologue to
Book
IV of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes’, Alessandra Petrina examines the role of
Duke Humphrey’s political ambitions in Lydgate’s translation of Boccaccio’s De
Casibus Virorum Illustrium. She concludes that ‘[i]n a country striving to find and
assert its identity also through the means of establishing its own language, Hum-

xxiv I NTRODUCTION

phrey’s cultural politics, whose scope is only partly known, certainly had an excep-
tional ally in the practice of translation’ (347).
David Wrisley, in ‘Translating Power and Knowledge at the Fifteenth-Century
Court of Burgundy’, focuses on the role of translation at the court of Philip the
Good. In this context, he argues, the ‘concept of “translation” functions as an um-
brella term for the different modes of representation — both visual and textual —
which structure court performances’ (349). Wrisley demonstrates in this essay that
the translations he considers ‘have all been significantly transformed by the spirit of
a new court and a new time, and have come to mirror a new climate, a new set of
power relations and the new tastes of new patrons’ (355).
Susan Crane, Anne Savage, and Fernando Navarro-Domínguez each discuss
Marie de France in their respective essays. Susan Crane, in ‘How to Translate a
Werewolf’, focuses on ‘Bisclavret’, demonstrating that the lay dramatizes Marie’s
‘ideas about translation’ (366). In the figure of the werewolf Bisclavret, she argues,
can be read three important aspects of Marie’s translation project: transformation,
patronage, and an awareness of Angevin colonization.
In ‘The Generous Surplus: Marie de France’s Lai le Fresne and a Miracle of the
Virgin’, Anne Savage compares the Lai le Fresne with an Anglo-Norman translation
of the Marian miracle of the pregnant abbess. Savage pays particular attention to the
movement of texts between different audiences, considering ‘[w]hat happens when
translation is directed at a reader-audience less professional than its original celibate
and Latinate one’ (375).
In contrast to these last two essays, which consider Marie de France as a medieval
translator, Fernando Navarro-Domínguez presents a critical analysis of twentieth-
century French and Spanish translations of Marie’s Lai du chèvrefeuille. For
Navarro-Domínguez, translating a medieval text first requires a clear modern inter-
pretation of it; he explores, as well, the many pitfalls modern translators of medieval
texts must avoid in their work.
The last three essays in the collection further address the issue of modern transla-
tion of medieval texts, with a keen awareness — based on experience — of both the
difficulties and riches associated with that task. In ‘“De celle mordure vient la mort
dure”: Perspectives on Puns and their Translation in Henry, duke of Lancaster’s Le
Livre de Seyntz Medicines’, Catherine Batt describes the problems inherent in trans-
lating ‘wordplay’ and puns specifically; she demonstrates that ‘the translation of
puns requires hard choices about the reach of one’s engagement with source and
target languages’, concluding that the translation of wordplay ‘inevitably marks, and
exposes the limits of, the possibility of “creative” literary response in academic
translation in general’ (409).
In ‘Verse versus Poetry: Translating Medieval Narrative Verse’, F. Regina Psaki
explores the advantages and disadvantages in the use of either verse or prose in
modern translations of medieval poetry. She argues that for modern translators,
‘[t]he challenge becomes to translate such works without accidentally reducing their
perceived beauty, gravity, and value for a modern audience — or inflating them ei-

Introduction xxv
ther, for that matter’ (420). And yet, translation of medieval poetry is essential, she
argues, and not just for reasons of accessibility: ‘Translation’, she remarks, ‘is the
activity that most palpably links modern Medieval Studies and the intellectual work
of the Middle Ages itself’ (419).
Finally, Elisabeth Dutton considers the similarities in the roles of a modern direc-
tor of a medieval play and a translator in ‘Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres:
Words and Sense in the Staging of Late-Medieval Drama’. ‘To substitute one word
for its literal equivalent in another language’, she argues, ‘is not necessarily to carry
across the meaning of the original’ (435). In this essay, she shows how ‘historiciza-
tion of a play can produce a reading that may be translatable, and that that translation
may appeal to a modern audience as the medieval play did to its contemporary audi-
ence’ (436).
The essays collected here demonstrate the wide range of critical approaches to the
question of translation in the Middle Ages and, we hope, capture the tone of the con-
ference the volume represents. The dialogues which emerge within the essays reflect
the vigorous and dynamic conversations which originated in both the sessions and
the less formal activities in Paris, in July 2004.

Henry Watson, ‘Apprentyse of London’ and
‘Translatoure’ of Romance and Satire
Brenda M. Hosington
ack in 1952, H. S. Bennett made what he called a ‘trial list’ of translations
printed in England between 1475 and 1560, saying that to date no-one had
attempted to assemble them.
1
His list has remained to this day a ‘trial’ one,
for no-one has worked on this particular area of printing history despite its undeni-
able importance and its significance for such diverse fields of research as translation
history, cultural studies, and literary scholarship to name but a few. Moreover, since
Bennett’s day, far more is known about early printing and the history of the book,
attributions and datings have been modified following new editions of the Short Title
Catalogue and projects such as Early English Books Online, while our ways of un-
derstanding translation have changed radically. In short, it is time for a new study of
early printed translations and their authors. This essay marks a small step in launch-
ing such a study, although it focuses on only one period — 1508–18 — on one
printer — Wynkyn de Worde — and on one translator — Henry Watson.
The Dutchman Wynkyn de Worde, who took over Caxton’s Westminster shop in
1492 before moving to Fleet Street in 1500, continued to print translations of all gen-
res and on all topics until his death in 1535. They represent just over one third of all
his printed books. Some texts he inherited from Caxton’s list along with the work-
shop, others he imported.
2
Translation was, after all, one of the less risky proposi-

1
H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1475 to 1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1952), p. 277.
2
For information on book importations and lists see Henry R. Plomer, ‘The Importation of
Books into England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: An Examination of the Culture
Rolls’, The Library, 4th series, vol. 4 (1923–24), 146–50; ‘The Importation of Low Country
B

2 B RENDA M. HOSINGTON
tions in the world of early printing: firstly, texts from the Continent were plentiful
and their popularity there had been market-tested; secondly, people were thirsting for
knowledge and new books, and translation provided the means for printers to satisfy
their demands; and thirdly, the humanists’ discovery of Classical texts led to new
translations for the unlettered, although in far fewer numbers in England than on the
Continent. Printers like Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde pragmatically bowed to the
ideology of the market place, although patrons’ tastes and requests, availability of
foreign originals, and the two printers’ personal preferences also played a role. De
Worde’s translations tended to be done at the request of patrons, whereas Caxton’s
were both of his own choosing and of his patrons’. The two men’s relationships with
those patrons were also very different.
3
Finally, unlike Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde
did not translate any works himself. Rather, he employed apprentice-translators or
hired freelance ones. These were of varying abilities and from varying backgrounds.
Only four are known by name. Robert Copland worked for de Worde as an apprentice-
translator between 1508 and 1514 and then went on to become a business partner, al-
though continuing to do translations up until 1535. Andrew Chertsey, a ‘gentleman’,
translated five French works of devotion and moral instruction on a free-lance basis.
Richard Whitford, a Brigittine monk of Syon Abbey, translated two religious texts
for de Worde. The fourth translator is the subject of this essay, Henry Watson.
Unfortunately, little is known about Watson. He seems to have joined de Worde’s
printing house shortly after 1500, but there is no mention of him until his name ap-
pears on his translation of the French prose romance Lystoire des deux vaillans
cheualiers Valentin et Orson, published without a date but thought by its modern
editor to have appeared between 1503 and 1505
although the STC dates it ca 1510
(STC 24571.3). His initials feature in 1508 in the prologue to his Gospelles of dys-
taues (STC 12091), and his full name appears in three other prologues: to his 1509
Shyppe of fooles (STC 3547), 1511 Chirche of euyll men and women (STC 5213),
and 1518 Olyuer of Castylle (STC 18808). All four works were published by de
Worde, and their prologues provide us with a few biographical details, which we will
address later.
The only other available information about Watson is that he was connected with
Hugo Goes, a Dutch printer who published the first book in York in 1509, a Directo-
rium, using de Worde’s Westminster press type. In 1512 and 1513, Watson and Goes
printed two books at Charing Cross with an imprint containing both their names.
4

This suggests his apprenticeship was by then at an end. It also makes Watson the
first native English Stationer to be identified as a printer, according to Peter Blayney,

and French Books into England, 1480 and 1502–03’, The Library, 4th series, vol. 9 (1928),
164–68; Wynkyn de Worde and his Contemporaries from the Death of Caxton to 1535
(London: Grafton & Co., 1925).
3
N. F. Blake, ‘Wynkyn de Worde: The Early Years’, Gutenberg Jahrbuch, 45 (1971), 62–69.
4
E. Gordon Duff, Early Printed Books (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1893), p. 177.

Henry Watson 3
for foreigners could not enjoy the status of Stationer.
5
This sets to rest the rumour
started by a French critic that Watson was a native Frenchman translating into a ‘for-
eign English’.
6
That he was himself from York is possible, for in Chapter 27 of the
Shyppe, he substitutes the city for Amiens, which he found in his French original.
7

After 1518, Watson drops out of view, except for reprints later in the century of
Valentine and Orson (1555 and 1565) and Olyuer of Castylle (1581/82). He does not
figure in de Worde’s will, nor are any other books or translations of his mentioned.
All efforts to trace him through public records and other sources have met with fail-
ure. Less frustrating is an examination of his prologues. I shall thus discuss the bio-
graphical information they supply, then pass to some of the translation strategies that
Watson used.
In his prologue to Valentine and Orson, Watson tells us that he has translated the
work ‘at the Instaunce of my worshypful mayster Wynkyn de Worde’, which suggests
that he is the printer’s apprentice. In his prologue to the Shyppe of fooles, he again
refers to his ‘worshypful mayster Wynkyn de Worde’, who this time has ‘requested’
he translate the text. A third prologue, accompanying his translation Olyuer of
Castylle, is more explicit as to his status: he describes himself as an ‘apprentyce of
London’, translating ‘at the commaundement of’ de Worde. Now although this edi-
tion is dated 1518, the prologue suggests for two reasons that the translation was
done earlier. Firstly, Watson would hardly still be an apprentice in 1518, some ten or
twelve years after his first translation and six after his foray into publishing at Char-
ing Cross. Secondly, the terms he chooses to describe his relations with de Worde in
the matter of translating certain texts is revealing: in 1505 he is working ‘at the in-
staunce of’; in 1509 ‘at the request of’; here, in his supposedly last work, ‘at the

5
Peter Blayney, The Stationers’ Company before the Charter, 1403–1557 (London:
Worshipful Co. of Stationers & Newspapermakers, 2003), pp. 24–25.
6
Bernard Quilliet, ‘Le Narrenschiff de Sebastian Brandt’, in Culture et marginalités au
XVIe siècle, ed. José Luis Alonso Hernández et al. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973), p. 119 n. 4. Gail
Orgelfinger correctly refutes Quilliet’s statement; see The Hystorye of Olyuer of Castylle, ed.
Gail Orgelfinger (New York and London: Garland, 1988), p. xxxii n. 55 (this is actually note
55 but an error in the endnote numbering makes it 40).
7
In Alumni cantabrigienses. A Biographical List of all Known Students [. . .] from the
Earliest Times to 1900, 2 parts in 10, compiled by John Venn and J. A. Venn (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1922–54), Part 1, a Henry Watson is identified as being vicar of
Barrington, Cambridgeshire who died in 1505. It is clearly not our Watson. A. B. Emden, in A
Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1963), p. 622, identifies a Henry Watson from a Yorkshire diocese as being
the translator of the ‘1505 Shyppe of fooles’ [sic]. However, the dates he gives for Watson’s
residence at the university, 1489–93, demonstrate that this is inaccurate. According to W. G.
Searle in his Grace Book Containing the Records of the University of Cambridge for the Years
1501–1542 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), vol. 1, there were no fewer than
five Yorkshire Henry Watsons at the university between 1467 and 1492.

4 B RENDA M. HOSINGTON
commaundement of’. The last noun is the strongest and most likely to be used by an
apprentice of his employer. Although we must bear in mind that Watson might have
been simply following the French, which has ‘commaundement’, he omits the ac-
companying word ‘requeste’. Watson also refers in his prologue to Valentine and
Orson to his youth, begging the reader to excuse on this account any mistranslations
he has made. It is not in the French, but it is of course a topos in medieval and early-
modern prologues. In fact, it occurs in the text Watson translated some four years
later, Drouyn’s Nef des folz, and he faithfully reproduces it in his own prologue to
the Shyppe, a point overlooked by Bennett.
8

Watson’s manner of translating prologues is a mix of quite fairly careful render-
ings and personal adaptations, or substitutions, which is fairly typical of fifteenth-
and early sixteenth-century practices. Valentine and Orson, a prose romance of the
Charlemagne cycle, is a translation of the French incunabular Valentin et Orson,
composed in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, in turn based on a lost French
manuscript version.
9
The earliest edition of the translation is a fragment of only four
leaves. According to its printing type and character, it dates from 1503–05. The sec-
ond edition, the only complete one, now in the Huntington Library, dates from 1548
and was used for this essay. It was reprinted in 1565–67 and is the last edition of de
Worde’s original text. It is unfortunately impossible to identify the French edition
that Watson used. Of the four early editions that we know of, none is really a candi-
date. One, the third, is no longer extant. The prologues, however, are uniform in all
early editions. In discussing the translation itself, and in order to get around the
vexed question of the missing edition, I have focused on passages and phrases found
common to all extant early editions.
In the prologue to Valentine and Orson, Watson starts out with a small mis-
translation, ‘all Prynces’ for ‘vous princes’, but continues accurately before adding
supplementary information to the description of the princes’ lineage: ‘Valentin et
Orson nepueux’ becomes ‘Valentyne and Orson, sonnes of the Emperoure of Grece
and Neuewes’. This constitutes an étoffement, or explanatory enrichment of the text,
intended to help the target audience. Another étoffement follows hard on its heels
with ‘Kynge Pepyn kynge of Fraunce’ for ‘roy Pepin’; his designation as king of France
is obviously added for the benefit of the English reader. At the same time, Watson
fails to point out that Pepin was ‘jadis’, ‘previously’, king and affords him only one
epithet, ‘myghty’, which encompasses the French ‘vaillant et redoubte’ [brave and

8
Bennett, p. 171.
9
Valentine and Orson, Translated from the French by Henry Watson, ed. Arthur Dickson,
EETS o.s. 204 (London: Oxford University Press, 1937) and [Valentin et Orson] End. Cy
finist lystoire des deux vaillans cheualiers Valentin et Orson filz de lempereur de grece (Lyon:
Jacques Maillet, 1489). All quotations will be taken from these two editions, and page
references are given in parentheses in the text. For a full discussion of the French and other
sources of the work see Arthur Dickson, Valentine and Orson: A Study in Late Medieval
Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929).

Henry Watson 5
powerful]. There then follows a typical Watsonian adaptation: he identifies himself
as translator and, in what is again a topos in medieval and early-modern prologues,
begs forgiveness for errors on account of his being ‘symple of vnderstondynge’.
The translating history of Sebastian Brant’s satire Das Narrenschiff is fairly com-
plicated. Written in German prose and printed in Basel in 1494, it was translated into
Latin three years later by Brant’s student Jacob Locher. Three French translations
were quickly produced: Pierre Rivière’s abbreviated and versified paraphrase, Paris
1497, was based on Locher’s Latin text; Jean Drouyn’s prose version was an abbre-
viated reworking of Rivière’s and was published in Lyons in 1498 and 1499; and an
anonymous version published by Marneff in Paris in 1499 was based on Locher’s
Latin rendering. In England, two translations appeared within five months of each
other. Watson’s Shyppe of fooles, an English prose rendering of Drouyn’s prose text,
was published 6 July 1509 and is extant in a beautiful vellum copy at the Biblio-
thèque nationale in Paris and in a more ordinary quarto edition of 1517 at the British
Library.
10
There are no variants in the two versions. Alexander Barclay’s Shyp of
folys of the worlde, a verse rendering of Locher’s Latin version published by Richard
Pynson, followed it on 15 December of that same year, 1509.
11

Drouyn’s prologue to his Grant nef des folz du monde is very long. Again, it is for
the most part quite carefully translated but not without some adaptation. Drouyn tells
us ‘ie me suis mis a translater ce livre [Rivière’s] nomme la grant nef des folz de
rime en prose’. Watson changes this to ‘I haue put myself to translate this presente
booke [. . .] out of frensshe in to Englysshe’, then accurately gives its history as
found in Drouyn. Four lines later he sensibly adds to the list of languages concerned
‘or Englysshe’. The next adaptation, however, does not quite work. Drouyn defends
his choice of prose by saying it is more familiar; Watson translates this but then adds
that that is why he is translating it into English, which does not make sense. He then
launches into his familiar self-introduction and topos of being ‘of symple vnder-
stondynge’, which is stronger than the French ‘indigne’ [unworthy]. Drouyn’s final
comment states he is translating the work not because its French predecessor is
poorly done but because its author [Rivière] deserves praise and renown. This Wat-
son ignores, instead concluding with an intriguing comment on the person responsi-
ble for the publication of the Shyppe. Margaret Beaufort, Henry
VIII’s grandmother,
had turned from Pynson to de Worde as her printer in 1508. She requested mostly

10
Jehan Drouyn, La grant nef des folz du monde auec plusieurs satyres et aditions
nouuellement adiousteez par le translateur (Lyon: Balsarin, 1498); and Henry Watson, The
Shyppe of fooles (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1509). All quotations will be from these
editions, and page references will be given in parentheses in the text.
11
For a discussion of Barclay’s translation see Brenda M. Hosington, ‘Sebastian Brant’s
Das Narrenschiff in Early Modern England: A Textual Voyage’, in Lexicography,
Terminology, and Translation. Text-Based Studies in Honour of Ingrid Meyer (Perpectives on
Translation), ed. Lynne Bowker (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006), pp. 18–29.

6 B RENDA M. HOSINGTON
works of a religious or an occasional nature, but with the Shyppe she allowed him to
adopt the title ‘printer to the princess Margaret’, which appears in the colophon.
12

Further information about the Shyppe and its translations appears in the ‘Argu-
ment’ of the work (iv
v
). Drouyn translated it from Rivière, who in turn had trans-
lated it from Locher. Watson makes the usual and appropriate adjustment by adding
‘our maternall tongue of Englysshe’ to the work’s various linguistic incarnations.
One comment, however, is of greater interest: Locher and his French successors
evoke the Ciceronian verbum verbo/sensum sensu dichotomy, although attributing it
to Flaccus (Horace), claiming of course that they have followed the sense-for-sense
method. Watson follows suit but adds ‘entyrely’ to strengthen his claim. Pompen, his
only but acerbic critic, of whom more later, accuses him of either incongruity or
mendacity because his translation almost throughout is word for word.
13
He does not
seem to realize that Watson is but translating Drouyn’s ‘Prolude’ and that in so do-
ing he is conforming to a practice used throughout the late-medieval period and well
into the early sixteenth century, namely translating prologues in the first person
without pointing out that the ‘je’ is that of the French author, but also without neces-
sarily intending to deceive or misrepresent. Such is the case for the Secreta Secreto-
rum, The Pilgrimage of Man, several of Caxton’s translations, and Barclay’s Shyp of
folys, to name but a few. Finally, the well-worn topos of the unworthy young transla-
tor is translated literally, Drouyn’s ‘moy indigne’ becoming ‘I [. . .] indygne’, but it
is harnessed to the notion of simple-mindedness introduced by Watson.
The Gospelles of dystaues, like the Shyppe of fooles, is a social satire but this time
limited to two milieux: the universe of women, represented by a group of garrulous,
superstitious and lascivious spinners; and that of clerks, represented by the man who
records their sayings by organizing them into gospels, chapters and glosses. The
work was composed between 1466 and 1474 in Picardy, and one of the manuscripts,
signed by Fouquart de Cambray, Antoine du Val, and Jehan d’Arras, belonged to
Marie de Luxembourg, whose autograph it bears. The work was printed no fewer
than nine times between 1479 and 1501. Watson’s translation, now extant in only
one copy at the Huntington Library, was probably made from a version printed by
Raulin Gaultier of Rouen, ca 1501.
14

12
Blake, pp. 128–38. See also Susan Powell, ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Books’, The
Library, 6th series, vol. 20.3 (1998), 197–240.
13
Aurelius Pompen, The English Versions of The Ship of Fools. A Contribution to the
History of the Early French Renaissance in England (London: Longmans, Green and Co.,
1935; repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1967), p. 282.
14
Les Évangiles des quenouilles. Édition critique, Introduction et Notes, ed. Madeleine
Jeay (Paris and Montreal: J. Vrin and Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1985); and The
Gospelles of distaues, trans. by H[enry] W[atson] (London: Wynkyn de Worde, ca 1510). All
quotations from these works are to these editions, and page references are given in parentheses
in the text.

Henry Watson 7
Watson’s prologue to the Gospelles of dystaues demonstrates the same blend of
fairly careful translation and personal adjustment as in his previous translations.
There are four omissions. The first is the repetition of the verb exauchier [to exalt]:
‘par contraire exauchier les dames et leurs euvangiles verifier et exauchier’ (pp. 77–
78) becomes simply ‘exalte the ladies and veryfye theyr gospelles’(aii). This results
in a stylistic loss but also a lessening of the sarcasm; exalted is not a word that springs
readily to mind in the company of these women. A more important omission is the
identification of the narrator as a ‘clerk’: ‘ay esté leur humble clerc et serviteur’ (p.
78) is reduced to ‘ben theyr humble seruaynt’. Perhaps the addition of ‘I haue stud-
ied’ in the English is intended to suggest the narrator’s clerkly nature, but if so it is
insufficiently explicit. Also omitted is the adverbial phrase ‘de pieca et mesmes’ [for
a very long time], underlining the long service the clerk has given the women.
Again, this constitutes a loss of both style and emphasis. Finally, the rhetorical ploy
by which the French clerk draws his reader into the narrative, ‘comme cy apres por-
rez veoir’ [as you will be able to see later], is omitted. An adjustment comes in the
final line. Instead of the French ‘ay [. . .] mis par escript et en ordre’ [I have written
and set down in order] we have ‘I, H. W., haue translated’.
A prologue also accompanies Watson’s 1511 translation of a French rendering of
part of a sermon by St Bernardino of Siena, The chirche of the euyll men and women.
This is not one of the works under discussion, since it is neither a romance nor a sat-
ire, but it is worth noting Watson’s use of his by-now-familiar ‘I, Henry Watson,
symple of vnderstondynge’ and the only comment he ever makes about any method
of translating, although it too could be a reworking of a phrase he found in the origi-
nal. Watson tells us that as the French text had been ‘visited by Parisian theologians’
who had made changes to the text, so ‘I haue submitted me under correcyon to trans-
late thys lytell treatyse in to our maternall tongue of Englysshe’. Perhaps the reli-
gious nature of this text made revision imperative; nowhere else does he refer to his
translations being supervised, and such admissions in prologues do not become more
usual until later in the century.
The final work containing a prologue, Olyuer of Castylle, is very different in
character, being the translation of the Burgundian chivalric romance Oliuier de Cas-
tile, composed between 1454 and 1456. The French original was first printed in Ge-
neva in 1482 and then appeared in five editions before 1521. The one Watson
probably used was the reissue of the 1505 Paris edition published by Jean Trepperel,
reprinted by Trepperel’s widow and Jehan Jehannot some time between 1511 and
1521.
15
Orgelfinger uses this as support for the argument that 1518 probably was the
date of Watson’s first edition, although he might have translated it earlier. However,

15
Oliuier de castille et Artus d’Algarbe. Nouuellement imprime a Paris [. . .] par la veufue
feu Jehan Trepperel et Jehan Iehannot Imprimeur (Paris: Trepperel and Jehanot, n.d.); and
Here endeth the hystorye of Olyuer of Castylle and of the fayre Helayne doughter vnto the
kynge of Englande [Colophon] (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1518). All quotations will be
from these editions and will be indicated in parentheses in the text.

8 B RENDA M. HOSINGTON
one could also argue that, seeing the success of Oliuier in France and the subsequent
new printing of Trepperel’s 1504 edition, de Worde decided to reissue his English
version too. Moreover, other factors suggest that the edition of 1518 was not the
first, as I argued above.
The French prologue is signed Philippe Le Camus, ‘translateur’ of a Latin original.
This claim is somewhat of a mystery, for no Latin original has ever been found. This
might well be a literary hoax. The tradition of claiming as a literary ancestor a romance
in a prestige language, Latin, was well established by the twelfth century, since the An-
glo-Norman poet Hue de Rotelande already made it an object of parody in his Ipome-
don. Le Camus might well be following in Hue’s, and others’, mocking footsteps. If so,
Watson probably did not get the joke, as the convention in English romances had never
enjoyed the same popularity as in their earlier French versions. Camus, however, con-
tinues it by swearing he will not surpass the Latin original with ‘plus beau langage’
[more beautiful language], which is humorous when seen in the context of the debate
over the relative merits of Latin and the vernaculars. Watson mistranslates this by prom-
ising not to produce a ‘more dyffuse’ [wordy] work than his source.
The prologue to Olyuer of Castylle, called by Watson ‘The presentacyon and in-
troyte’, is perhaps the most literally translated of all the prologues except for three
adaptations: the author’s name, ‘Je, Philippe Camus’, becomes ‘I Henry Watson ap-
prentyse of London’; the source and target languages concerned, ‘latin en francoys’,
are changed to ‘out of frensshe in to Englysshe’; and the name of the person respon-
sible for having the work produced is adjusted from Camus’s patron, the ‘tres re-
doubte [. . .] Jehan de Croy’, to Watson’s employer, ‘my worshypfull mayster
Wynkyn de Worde’.
In conclusion, one can say that Watson’s paratexts follow a pattern found in four-
teenth- and fifteenth-century translations, with their mix of carefully translated ele-
ments sitting side by side with substitutions. They also conform to the tradition of
being disappointingly free of any critical comment. Watson says nothing of his
method of translating. The one clichéd reference to the word-for-word versus sense-
for-sense type of translation is simply a translation of the French. He says nothing,
either, concerning the authority of his original. While this would be normal for those
of his source texts that were already translations, like the Shyppe of fooles or the The
chirche of the euyll men and women, original compositions like Valentin et Orson,
Les euangiles des quenoilles, and Oliuier de Castille might have elicited some com-
ments on textual or authorial hierarchy. Such are certainly not unknown in late-
medieval prologues. Watson’s paratexts, however, conform to the prevailing custom
of saying as little as possible about the translating methods used or the rapport be-
tween source and target texts. As Amos has said in Early Theories of Translation,
prologues increased in quantity in the sixteenth century but not in quality and this is
certainly true of Waston’s.
16

16
Flora Ross Amos, Early Theories of Translation (New York: Columbia University Press,
1920; repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1973), pp. 43–44. Samuel K.Workman, in Fifteenth

Henry Watson 9
Before turning to the works themselves, a few words should be said about how
developments in the field of traductologie, or translation studies, have changed our
ways of thinking about translation. They give us pause for thought when reading
older works on translation like Pompen’s, Amos’s, or Workman’s, not to mention
those on translated Middle English romances. Older commentators — and even some
still today — think of these early translations as ‘bumbling’, ‘inept’, and either ‘slav-
ish’ or ‘very free’; they are but unsophisticated versions of sophisticated French
originals, done by ‘hack’ translators, a term found over and over again and which is
still current. Nonetheless, some editors and critics have praised translators for ‘im-
proving’ the original by abbreviating speeches, omitting incidents, and generally
‘tightening up the narrative’. Needless to say, such commentators also apply binary
terms such as ‘faithful/unfaithful’, ‘literal/free’, and ‘good/bad’, along with meaningless
adjectives like ‘elegant’ or the more frequent ‘clumsy’. Today, translation specialists
tend to shy away from such generalities. It is not enough to state that a translation is
faithful or unfaithful. One must ask to what? To content? To style? Equally impor-
tant, to context, goal, audience, ideology?
The old binary concept of verbum verbo/sensum sensu articulated by Cicero and
St Jerome and continuing through the centuries was made a little more complex by
Eugene Nida and his theory of dynamic equivalence in the 1960s.
17
In dynamic
translation, the translator puts communication of the message at the forefront, claim-
ing, if necessary, the creation of textual adaptations that will facilitate the transfer of
meaning to the target audience. Moreover, dynamic translation claims to recreate the
original reader’s response for the target reader, a dicey proposition at best, as New-
man’s response to its earlier defender, Matthew Arnold, proved.
18
Formal equiva-
lence, its opposite, which Nida did concede was sometimes acceptable for literary
translation, retains the form of its original — its grammatical structure and stylistic
patterns — as well as its figurative language and cultural allusions that threaten to
cloud the message. Nida’s theory has been refined and reworked in the hands of
many theorists over the years to embrace differing views of what constitutes equiva-
lence, although no consensus has ever been reached. Furthermore, most of these
theories are prescriptive in nature.
In the 1980s, however, the biggest challenge to Nida’s target-oriented theory
came from two French theorists, Antoine Berman and Henri Meschonnic, both heav-

Century Translation as an Influence on English Prose (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1940), pp. 79–83, mentions the few conventional theoretical comments found in
prologues but says they mean little.
17
Eugene Nida, Toward a Science of Translating (Leiden: Brill, 1964).
18
Matthew Arnold, ‘On Translating Homer’, in Essays Literary and Critical (London, 1861;
reimp. Dent, 1919), pp. 210–75; and Francis W. Newman, ‘Homeric Translation in Theory and
Practice. A Reply to Matthew Arnold by Francis W. Newman’, in ibid., pp. 276–336.

10 B RENDA M. HOSINGTON
ily influenced by Walter Benjamin.
19
They criticized Nida’s theory as ‘ethnocentric’;
put the source text, not the target text, to the forefront; and made the transmission of
its language and culture the ‘translator’s task’, Benjamin’s Aufgabe. Translation was
now seen as a mode of the continuing life (Fortleben) of a work of art, of a piecing
together of the shards of a broken vase, although the finished product would never
quite be the same as the original. Benjamin’s concept of a work’s and a language’s
afterlife (Überleben) being ensured through translation is further explored by Derrida
in ‘Les tours de Babel’. As for the latter’s concepts of iterabilité, or the possibility of
repetition, of saying the same thing in a variety of new contexts, and différance, the
deferring and differing of referents which shift the focus away from the transference
of meaning, a question that informs most translation theory, their relevance and ap-
plicability to translation are obvious. So too is Foucault’s notion concerning author-
ship, which breaks down the traditional hierarchy of author-translator.
20

Other, more recent, theories take into account ideological factors, seeing transla-
tion as an activity rich in cultural and sociological complexities. Ideologies of poli-
tics, gender, patronage, and even the marketplace — of particular pertinence to men
such as Caxton and de Worde — dictate the texts to be translated and the ways in
which to translate them. These factors all must be taken into account when evalu-
ating translations. Moreover, especially in the case of literary translation, translators
should be seen as rewriters, repairing that broken vase, but doing so under the influ-
ence of various ideologies and often with different goals and in new contexts. As the
Belgian theorist, André Lefevere, says, ‘they manipulate the originals they work
with to some extent, usually to make them fit in with the dominant, or one of the
dominant, ideological and poetological currents of their time’.
21
It is by bearing in
mind these more recent ways of explaining the translating process, while neverthe-
less not applying the same evaluating criteria that we apply to modern translation,
that we should approach medieval and early-modern translation. Above all, we
should try to understand why and how translators introduced textual changes and
what effect these wrought on the work. Only in this way can we move on from the
simple judgements of ‘faithful/unfaithful’ and ‘elegant/clumsy’. It is against this

19
Antoine Berman, ‘La traduction et la lettre — ou l’auberge du lointain’, in Les Tours de
Babel. Essais sur la traduction (Mauvezin: Trans-Europe Express, 1985), pp. 5–91; Henri
Meschonnic, ‘Propositions pour une poétique de la traduction’, in Pour la poétique II (Paris:
Gallimard, 1973), pp. 305–66; Walter Benjamin, ‘The Translator’s Task’, TTR,
10 (1997),
151–65.
20
See in particular Derrida’s ‘Les Tours de Babel’ and L’Oreille de l’autre. Oto-
biographies, transferts, traductions, textes et débats avec Jacques Derridaed, ed. by Claude
Lévesque and Christie V. McDonald (Montreal: vlb éditeur, 1982); and Michel Foucault’s
essay ‘What is an author?’, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, trans. by Donald F.
Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
21
André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame
(Routledge: London and New York, 1992), p. 8.

Henry Watson 11
backdrop of a more comprehensive understanding of the translating process that I
shall now consider Watson’s romances and satires. Obviously space will not allow a
detailed examination of the five texts. Rather, I shall focus on a few salient points of
his translating techniques.
In 1992, Carol Meale, in an essay entitled ‘Caxton, de Worde, and the Publication
of Romance’, stated that ‘the history of the English romance in the years following
the death of Caxton is still largely unwritten’. She also challenged claims that Cax-
ton’s transplantation of Burgundian romance into England was only experimental
and proved to be short-lived because his successor, de Worde, preferred older native
romances extant in manuscript and of limited, popular appeal. In fact, eighty-eight of
these older English romances were extant in de Worde’s time, whereas only twenty-
one made their way into print, and de Worde published only seven of these.
22
Four-
teen romances were published under his own imprint. Six were new French ones,
which he had translated by Watson, Copland, and Berners. Lastly, he re-iussed four
of Caxton’s Burgundian romances. In short, de Worde was, quite simply, the most
important publisher of romance in the years between 1500, when he moved to
Westminster, and 1535, the year of his death. He also increased the readership of
romance by issuing what Bennett rather disparagingly calls ‘little quarto volumes’
for ‘enthusiastic readers . . . concerned only with having them at hand for a spare
hour’ or, as he says earlier, for schoolboys who had mastered the alphabet’.
23
They
were ‘cheap’ in comparison with Caxton’s books, but many had woodcuts, decora-
tive borders, and initials in special type in imitation of their continental originals.
Such is indeed the case for the romances that Watson translated.
Unlike the much earlier Middle English translations of French verse romance, of-
ten made a century or two after the appearance of their originals, Watson’s prose
romances were published a relatively short time after their French sources. This was
to his advantage, for the greater the time lapse between source and target texts, the
more difficult the translator’s task. For example, the fourteenth- and fifteenth-
century translators of twelfth-century romances often curtailed or omitted whole
battle scenes with detailed descriptions of armour and fighting techniques, extended
dialogues, and long love complaints because they were no longer really understood
by their English audience, far more socially mixed than their French predecessors,
who had been familiar with the finer points of chivalry and fin’amor. Watson did not
need to make such radical reductions because his French prose redactors had already
done it for him. For their audiences, too, many of the social and literary conventions
of earlier centuries had lost their familiarity. Watson makes changes, certainly, both
in omitting passages and adding the occasional sentence, but these are fewer and less
significant than in most of the Middle English translated romances.

22
Carol M. Meale, ‘Caxton, de Worde, and the Publication of Romance in Late Medieval
England’, The Library, 6th series, vol. 14.4 (1992), 283–98.
23
Bennett, pp. 149 and 26.

12 B RENDA M. HOSINGTON
Before proceeding to a detailed discussion of a few passages of Watson’s ro-
mances, I shall discuss the question of the unsigned one, King Ponthus, and the ways
in which it relates to the other two signed romances, Valentine and Orson and
Olyuer of Castylle. The French source text, Le roman de Ponthus et Sidoine, is a
reworking of the King Horn story, composed just before 1445 in honour of Ponthus
de la Tour Landry, a relative of the more famous Geoffrey. Four French incunabular
editions appeared before de Worde’s 1511 English quarto, itself preceded by a fif-
teenth-century Middle English translation, King Ponthus and the faire Sidone. The
editor of this Middle English text, F. J. Mather, Jr., believes the anonymous transla-
tor of the quarto volume — he does not name Watson — copied out the Middle Eng-
lish translation but with a French printed edition at his side, which he confidently
asserts de Worde ‘must have possessed’. He rests his case on four short passages that
do, indeed, look as if they owe their existence to the Middle English version.
24
How-
ever, four short passages do not a strong case make. Moreover, Mather consulted
only one French edition, printed by Ortuin in around 1500 and now in the Bodleian’s
Douce collection with de Worde’s English quarto.
25
In-depth consultation of all the
remaining early editions is necessary before reaching a conclusion as to the translat-
ing methods used.
Of equal interest is the question of the authorship of the translation. Mather sim-
ply calls the translator ‘some hack of de Worde’s’. After taking into consideration
internal evidence and some other factors, I suggest that it is in fact Henry Watson.
The reasons are fivefold. Firstly, the fact that the extant text bears no signature is
insignificant because its first two pages are missing. They might well have contained
a signed translator’s prologue. Secondly, certain characteristics of Watson’s translat-
ing practices are found throughout the work. For example, he often makes mistakes
in figures, dropping zeros or confusing twenties and thirties. Printing errors can of
course creep into a text, and small Roman numerals can be easily confused. How-
ever, there are several such mistranslations in Valentine and Orson, Olyuer of
Castylle, and Ponthus. Also significant is Watson’s frequent mistranslation of se-
nestre [left], a word that causes him problems in all three romances: in Valentine it is
‘below’, in Olyuer it is ‘right’, and in Ponthus, ‘best’. More frequent, and with more
serious consequences, is his mistranslation of the subjunctive followed by a negative
particle, resulting in a contresens, the gravest possible error in the transfer of mean-
ing. In Valentine, for example, the wicked archbishop approaches Bellisant, who
says to Blandimain: ‘iay trop grant paour qu’il ne me veulle faire villenie’ [I am very
much afraid that he wants to harm me] (bi
v
). This is translated as ‘I am to sore aferd

24
F. J. Mather, Jr., ‘King Ponthus and the Fair Sidone’, PMLA, XII (1897), xxxiii–xli.
25
Cy commence une excellente histoire la quelle fait moult a noter du tresuaillant roy
ponthus filz du roy de galice et de la belle sidoyne fille du roy de bretaigne (Lyon: Ortuin, ca
1500) (Douce 177); and The noble hystory of kynge Ponthus of Galyce & of lytell Brytayne
(London: de Worde, 1511) (Douce 214) (STC 20108). All quotations are from these editions,
and page references are given in parentheses in the text.

Henry Watson 13
that he do me not some vyllanye’ (28. 14–15) [my italics]. Again, examples of this
error are found in several places in both Olyuer and King Ponthus. A fourth argu-
ment in favour of Watson’s authorship concerns vocabulary. Like many of the trans-
lators of the time, Watson coins words, either creating completely new ones or
adapting French ones to English morphology. Many of these are mistakenly given
much later entry dates by the Oxford English Dictionary. Others he employs are
newly current terms, attributed to Caxton or Skelton, which shows that he was au
courant with the latest developments in English vocabulary. Many of his coinages
appear in all three romances: adnychyl, meaning to decrease or annul; volente, mean-
ing desire or will; mures, meaning mores; and dulceness, meaning sweetness are but
a few. Finally, related to the question of vocabulary is that of the use of doublets, a
medieval and early-modern habit of both unilingual composition and translation,
although some commentators seem to think it only a resource used in the latter.
Doublets reinforce meaning, especially in the case of vernacular or non-prestige lan-
guages, hence their popularity. However, what is surprising in the case of Watson is
that he omits as many French doublets as he creates English ones. This is true of all
his texts, including King Ponthus. So, for all the above reasons, the inclusion of this
romance in this discussion is, I think, justified.
In speaking of fifteenth-century prose translations, Samuel Workman has said that
the majority (twenty-nine out of thirty-eight) were ‘close’ translations, by which he
means that the English sentence structure follows that of the source language with a
minimum of alteration. The translator proceeds grammatically, unit by unit. Literal
translations, in contrast, number only three out of his corpus of thirty-eight, while
independent ones number only two.
26
Workman’s focus, of course, is entirely on
syntax to the exclusion of meaning or style, because he is evaluating the influence of
translation on English prose. Can Watson be said to translate ‘closely’ in this way,
following ‘the usual mechanical procedure, translating phrase by phrase, sometimes
word for word’, as the modern editor of Olyuer of Castille puts it?
27
And can this be
extended to his transfer of meaning and style? The three following passages, which
are typical of Watson’s prose, will provide at least a partial answer.
Valentine and Orson
In the story, Ferragus the giant, brother to Clerimonde, has tricked Valentine and
Orson into coming to his castle, where he immediately imprisons them because Val-
entine has expressed his desire to marry Clerimonde. The young woman blames her-
self in a complaint addressed directly to Valentine:

26
Workman, p. 89.
27
Orgelfinger, p. xix.

14 B RENDA M. HOSINGTON
Et quant la belle Esclarmonde veit son amy Valentin prins et lye elle mena si grant
dueil que trop avoit dur le cueur qui de plourer se tenoit. Helas, dist elle, cheualier
Valentin nostre ioye et nostre soulas est en peu de temps tourne en dueil et en tristesse;
trop auez mon amour chierement achetee quant il fault que pour moy deuez la mort
souffrir. Mieulx amasse que pour vous iamais n’eusse este nee, car en peine et en en
trauail vous m’auez conquestee et en dueil et en tristesse ie vous seray ostee. Trop est
la mort chiere achetee quant il fault pour aymer loyallement que vous endurez mort
sans l’auoir deserui. (hi)
And whan the fayre Clerymonde sawe her louer Valentine taken and bounden, she
made so greate sorowe that hee had a harde harte that wepte not. Alas, said she, knight
Valentyne our Ioye and solace is soone torned into dolour and dystresse; you haue
boughte my loue to deare, whan that for my sake you muste suffre death. I wolde that I
had neuer bene borne for your sake, for in payne and in trauayll you haue conquered
me, and in doole and in sorowe I shall be taken from you. To sore is the loue bought
whan one muste suffre deathe for louynge trewlye wythoute to haue deserued it. (pp.
146–47)
The translator has indeed translated ‘closely’, in Workman’s terms, matching the
grammatical construction of every sentence-member taken from the French with a
native English equivalent. For example, in the first sentence there are a subordinate
temporal clause governed by ‘quant’, [when]; two past participles used to describe
Valentine, ‘prins et lye’ and ‘taken and bounden’; a main clause, ‘elle mena si grant
dueil’, ‘she made so greate sorowe’. However, Watson correctly substitutes English
syntax for French in the remainder of the sentence: ‘trop auoit dur le cueur qui de
plourer se tenoit’, ‘hee had a harde harte that wepte not’. Watson is therefore not
guilty of inappropriate literal translation in Workman’s sense of the term. Con-
cerning semantic content, the French is rendered accurately except for one minor
mistake, the omission of ‘trop’ [too] in line 2. In terms of stylistic matters, the fol-
lowing can be said. Watson has kept the four pairs of words: ‘oiye et [. . .] solas’,
‘dueil et tristesse’, ‘peine et trauail’, and ‘dueil et tristesse’ translated as ‘Ioye and
solace’, ‘dolour and dystresse’, ‘payne and [. . .] trauayll’, and ‘doole and sorowe’.
He has demonstrated a little more lexical variety by translating ‘dueil’ as both ‘do-
lour’ and ‘doole’ without changing the meaning, while achieving a more poetic ef-
fect by the alliterative formula ‘dolour and dystresse’; at the same time, however, he
has eliminated the repetition of ‘dueil et tristesse’, which constitutes a stylistic loss.
In only one place does he translate ‘mechanically’ or ‘literally’, calquing the English
expression on the French; ‘wythoute to haue deserved it’, where an English infinitive
rather than the required participle after ‘without’ mirrors the French infinitive
‘auoir’. Since elsewhere Watson uses a participle in this construction, this is clearly a
slip of the pen occurring under the influence of the French.

Henry Watson 15
Olyuer of Castylle
Oliver arrives at the gates of the King of England’s palace with great panache after
having acquitted himself magnificently in a joust to win the hand of the king’s
daughter, Helen:
Quant Olivier se trouua devant la porte du palays il commenca a ferir son cheval des
esperons lequel faisoyt tant de saulx que sans nombre et ce que son maistre en vouloit
auoir il faisoit saillir feu du pauement et tant que toutes les gens se mirent aux
fenestres pour le regarder [. . .] Ces nouuelles [furent] anuncees aux dames lesquelles
demanderent quel homme ce estoit. Il leur fut dict que c’estoit ung chef d’oeuure et
que oncques rien plus bel n’auoit este veu. (Eivv– Fi)
WHan Olyuer was afore the gate of the palays he began for to smyte his hors with the
sporres, the which made lepes without nombre & dyde all that his mayster wolde haue
hym do. He made fyre to sprynge out of the payment in suche haboundance that euery
body loked out at the wyndowes to beholde hym [. . .] These tydynges were
pronounced to the ladyes, the whiche demaunded what maner of man he was and it
was tolde them that he was a heed of werke & that there was neuer sene a more fayrer
knyght. (G4)
Again, Watson follows the grammatical construction of the French sentences very
closely, although not necessarily ‘mechanically’. In only one place, line five, does he
join two separate French sentences, which he links with a conjunction: and. He also
follows the meaning very closely; there are no mistranslations — that is, until we
arrive almost at the end, where Watson produces the nonsensical ‘heed of werke’ for
‘chef d’oeuvre’. The modern editor of Olyuer of Castylle excuses Watson on the
grounds that ‘chef d’oeuvre’ did not enter the English language until the eighteenth
century.
28
The Oxford English Dictionary’s first attribution is indeed to 1762. How-
ever, both Orgelfinger and the OED are wrong on this count. The term is recorded in
Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. This is neverthe-
less still a century too late for Watson.
King Ponthus
The young King Ponthus of Galicia has gone to the rescue of the king of Brittany
against the invading Saracens. He responds to the challenge of one of them, who has
proclaimed the law of Mohammet superior to that of Christ, and he of course wins:
Le roy et tout le peuple qui virent ce cop eurent moult grant ioie et en mercierent
nostre seigneur. Le paien perdit de son sang tant qu’a peine se pouait soustenir sur son

28
Orgelfinger, p. 232.

16 B RENDA M. HOSINGTON
cheual et Ponthus luy courut sus asprement et tant qu’il reuersa comme celluy qui
auoit perdu son sang et ne se pouoit plus tenir. (biiii)
The kynge & the people whiche sawe that stroke made ryght grete Ioye & thanked
god. The paynym lost the blode & febled fast & so moche that unnethes he myght
holde hym on his hors & Ponthus ranne upon hym sharpely tyll he caste hym downe as
he that hadde loste his blode & myght holde hymselfe no more. (Ciiii)
Once again, we find close grammatical and syntactical translating. The meaning,
however, is somewhat compromised by two mistranslations. In line 1 ‘tout’ [all] is
omitted, which results in a loss of emphasis. In the penultimate line, Watson uses the
preposition ‘tyll’ instead of the stronger ‘et tant qu’il’, meaning ‘and so much so
that’, and the cause and effect found in the French is therefore lost.
Our examination of these three brief passages affords of course only a microcos-
mic view of Watson’s translating practices, but the passages chosen are representa-
tive of most of his work. He is for the most part an accurate translator in terms of
meaning and even style, which is not so common in late-medieval and early-modern
romance translation. Perhaps further light can be shed on his techniques by briefly
discussing three particular points made by the few critics who have commented on
his work: the ‘improvements’ he made to the original, the translation of proverbs,
and the ‘englishing’ of the French text.
Watson’s ‘improvements’ attracted praise from Arthur Dickson, the editor of Val-
entine and Orson.
29
He approved the ‘abbreviations’, that is, the omission of certain
passages and phrases, but called them perhaps insufficient for ‘our taste’. But Wat-
son was not writing for us; he was writing for his early sixteenth-century readers, for
whom prolixity was not necessarily a vice. This is an occasion where textual intent
and audience play a role in shaping a translation. Another ‘improvement’, according
to Dickson, was achieved by Watson’s producing a less harsh text. Indeed, this may be
intentional on Watson’s part since, as Dickson points out, he softens or omits several
speeches and events such as Valentine’s glee at the cruel execution of some sentries,
his harsh words to his father, and Pacolet the enchanter’s belief that no treatment is
too bad for pagans. However, any ‘softening’ is far outweighed by the accurate
transfer of all the nasty comments on pagans and the gory details of the battles
waged against them, and all the exclamations of joy at their demise, a fact which
Dickson does not mention.
30
Nor does he mention another ‘improvement’, namely
Watson’s silent correction of his source text when he finds factual errors. Now,
whether translators should ‘improve’ their texts is a moot point. Umberto Eco said

29
Dickson, Valentine and Orson, Translated from the French, p. xix.
30
Dickson (Valentine and Orson, Translated from the French, p. xx) does mention another
factor that Pompen says in his discussion of The Shyppe of fooles had an influence on
Watson’s translation: the make-up of the pages. However, he rightly dismisses it in the case of
Valentine and Orson because Watson’s omissions and additions are too many to have been
dictated by printing concerns.

Henry Watson 17
once that he thought his English translator, William Weaver, had so improved The
Name of the Rose that he preferred to read the translation rather than his own original.
This might have been a generous but perhaps hyperbolic gesture towards Weaver,
but it suggests that improvement in translation is not only possible but desirable.
A second aspect of interest is the translation of proverbs in the three texts. Here,
Dickson’s comment is negative. He wearily comments that Watson always renders
French proverbs literally.
31
But this is patently untrue. Proverbs are set, codified
statements with fixed meaning and form, culture- and often time-bound. As such,
they present the translator with a choice of ways in which to render them: substitu-
tion of a recognized proverb in the target language, paraphrase, literal translation, or
omission. Those who believe in ‘dynamic equivalence’, where the transfer of the
semantic and pragmatic rather than stylistic and cultural properties of a text is of
prime importance, will opt for substitution or paraphrase. In contrast, those who be-
lieve that the culture of ‘the other’ has a place in the target text will opt for a literal
translation, preserving the referents and the colour of the original proverb, as indeed
Berman has argued in discussing proverbs as ‘cultural cross-roads’ of the greatest
interest to translators.
32
Watson’ s treatment of proverbs in the three romances would
please both groups. Contrary to Dickson’s claim, he uses not only literal translation
but also substitution and paraphrase. For example, in Valentine and Orson, ‘plus
pres ma cotte, plus pres est ma chemise’ (Cviii
v
) is paraphrased as ‘your shyrte is
more nerer your body than your gowne’ (Ni), which transfers the meaning while
changing the referents slightly to match those of the French. Dickson would have
preferred him to substitute the English equivalent: ‘Near is my kirtle, but nearer is
my smock’. In other words, he would have preferred an ethnocentric translation. What
perhaps Dickson does not realize is that the French author is also paraphrasing prov-
erbs, rather than simply quoting them, weaving them into his narrative and often
changing one or two lexical or syntactical items. This can be seen in both the preced-
ing example and in the following one. Watson translates the introductory proverbial
formula literally: ‘car on dit communement que’ as ‘it is a comeyn saying that’. The
French author then paraphrases the proverb ‘A tart est l’uis clos quant li cheval en
est dehors’ [too late for closed doors when the horse is outside] as ‘trop tard est de
fermer l’estable quant le cheval est perdu’, which Watson translates literally as ‘to
late it is for to shyt the stable doore, whan the horse is lost’ (Gi). This is actually
closer to the standard English proverb, used by him in the Shyppe of fools: ‘to shyte
the stable dore whan the horse is stolen’. Not only does Watson deserve more credit
for flexible handling of proverbs than Dickson gives him but also he respects the
paraphrasing habit of his French author, thereby reproducing the colour and tone of
the original.

31
Dickson, Valentine and Orson, Translated from the French, p. 331 n. 79.
32
Berman, pp. 35–37.

18 B RENDA M. HOSINGTON
A final aspect of Watson’s romance translations concerns the technique of ‘english-
ing’ or ‘anglicizing’ the text. This is the ultimate stage in ethnocentric translating.
Again, it elicits contrary responses. Douglas Bush, for example, in discussing The
Shyppe of fooles, praises Watson’s effort to anglicize the work because it makes
Brant’s genius universal.
33
Englishing, or domesticating a text for an English audi-
ence, takes different forms, and Watson tries them all in his romances. The most
obvious method is to substitute or add English proper names to the source text. In
Oluyer of Castille he is specific about the name of the town that Arthur enters —
‘Brystowe’ [Bristol] (N2
v
) — whereas the French is not (Iiii). The King of England
reads of Olyuer’s conquest of the Irish, not at ‘l’eglise Nostre Dame’ (Hi) but at ‘the
cathedrall chyrche of [St] Poules’ (I7). Elsewhere he adds to his author’s worthies,
the dukes of Bourbon and count of Flanders (Ei), eight English aristocrats: the dukes
of Gloucester, Lancaster, Bedford, Norfolk, and Somerset, and the earls of North-
umberland, Leicester, and Salisbury (Fi–Fi
v
). Anglicizing can also be achieved by
substituting phrases such as ‘this realm of England’ (Evi) for ‘ce pays’ [this coun-
try], or mistranslating ‘estranger’ for ‘English’ rather than ‘foreigner’, which Watson
does throughout the romances. He also consistently anglicizes measurements and
coins, regularly making ‘lieus’ into ‘miles’, for example, and ‘escus’ into ‘nobles’.
Finally, étoffements, or explanatory enrichments of the texts, are a way of anglicizing
the text, of making it accessible to the target audience, and again Watson uses this
method throughout King Ponthus, Valentine and Orson, and Olyuer of Castylle.
So far we have discussed only Watson’s romances, but now we shall see how he
fares when he turns his hand to satire. The two satirical texts that he translated, The
Shyppe of fooles and The gospelles of dystaues, are themselves very different in na-
ture. Brant’s Das Narrenschiff is a learned but bitter and moralizing social satire,
heavily didactic although not without humour. The Evangiles des quenoilles is pro-
foundly comic in tone, a four-stranded parody of religion, scholasticism, didacticism,
and literary convention, underpinned by anti-feminist satire.
The Shyppe of fooles is the one text of Watson’s that has received detailed treat-
ment — but what treatment! Pompen’s 1925 hatchet job, for such it is, is a book-
length comparison of Barclay’s and Watson’s translations and their sources. At the
end of the book, Pompen concludes: ‘Of Drouyn and Watson it is better to say noth-
ing. Watson is the more helpless of the two. He knows a little French, but that is all.
He gets paid for his work, but he does not take the least interest in it. He will trans-
late anything that he is set to do, whether nonsense or not’.
34
Harsh words indeed,
but a fitting conclusion to the almost wholly negative comments made throughout
the book. They are certainly not justified in terms of Watson’s romances, which

33
Douglas Bush, ‘Introduction’ in Elizabeth Nugent, ed., The Thought and Culture of the
English Renaissance: Tudor Prose, 1481–1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1956), p. 42.
34
Pompen, p. 310.

Henry Watson 19
Pompen had not read, but it remains to be seen whether they are in terms of the
Shyppe. Pompen, it must be remembered, was writing long before translation studies
was a discipline, and his way of discussing translation, as well as the subjective na-
ture of his critical discourse, belong to another era.
In The Shyppe of fooles, Watson turns his hand for probably the first, and last,
time to translating poetry, for each chapter is introduced by a seven-line stanza.
Verse translation presents more pitfalls than any other. Rhyme and meter are hard
taskmasters, as Alexander Pope once said. The first example of Watson’s verse
translation introduces Chapter One, on useless books and those who collect them:
Le premier fol de la nef suis The fyrste foole of the shyppe I am certayne
Les voiles regis de ma main That with my handes dresse the sayles all
A liures auoir me desduis For to haue bookes I do all my besy payne
Lesquelz ie ne voy soir ne matin Whiche I loue not to rede in specyall
De ceulx que i’ay leu fay desdain For them to se also in generall
On ne les entent somme toute Wherfore it is a prouerbe all aboute
Tel cuide bien scauoir qui doubte. Suche thynketh to knowe that standeth in doubte.
(iv) (Aiv)
Watson has kept the overall meaning of the verse intact — the bibliomaniac loves
collecting books but not reading them, for he cannot understand them — but there
are many inaccuracies of varying importance. In line one: Watson adds ‘certayne’,
clearly to fill out the line; this does not affect the meaning. The same is true of ‘all’
in line two. The translation of ‘me desduis’ [I delight in], by ‘I do all my besy payne’
lessens some of the jollity of Brant’s portrait of the bibliomaniac while ‘I love not to
rede in specyall’ weakens the impact of ‘ie ne voy soir ne matin’ [I see neither night
nor day]. The following line contains a more serious mistranslation: ‘for them to se
also in generall’ in no way renders the point the fool is making, ‘De ceulx que i’ay
leu fay desdain’: he disdains those he has read. It also loses the contrast made be-
tween the delight the fool feels in simply possessing books and his acute dislike of
their content. Watson drops the last but one line in which the fool confesses he does
not understand the books, thus heightening the comic tone of the preceding line. In-
stead, he uses the line for a proverbial formula to introduce the proverb of the final
line, which he translates literally, keeping the binary form and conciseness of the
original. Finally, he has preserved the a b a b b c c rhyme scheme of the original.
This might now be compared with a passage taken from the chapter that this verse
introduces:
Le premier suys en la nauire vagant auec les aultres folz. Ie tourne et vire les cordez de
la nef nauigant en la mer bien avant. Ie me fonde mal en sens et en raison. Ie suis bien
fol de me fier en grant multitude de liures. Je desire tousiours et appete liures
nouueaux ausquelz ne puis comprendre substaunce, ne rien entendre. Mais bien les
contregarde honnestement de pouldre et d’ordure, ie nettoye souuent mes pulpitres. (v)

20 B RENDA M. HOSINGTON
I am the fyrste in the shyppe vagaunte [sailing]with the other fooles. I tourne and hyse
the cordes of the shyppe saylynge ferre within the see. I am founded full euyll in wytte
and in reason. I am a grete foole for to affye me [trust] in a grete multytude of bokes. I
desyre alway and appetyteth newe inuencyons compyled mystycally and newe bookes
in the whiche I can not comprehende the substaunce, nor understande no thynge. But I
doo my besy cure [take good care] for to kepe them honestly from poudre & dust. I
make my lectrons [lecterns] and my deskes clene ryght often. (Aii)
The level of semantic accuracy is fairly high except for the following: the verb
‘hyse’ [hoist] does not really translate ‘virer’ and is used of sails, not cords; ‘full’ is
added as an intensive; ‘new invencyons compyled mystically’, is added in the fourth
line, for what reason it is difficult to ascertain, unless it refers to the astrological ‘in-
ventions’ or magical machinations satirized later in the work. ‘Pulpitres’ is rendered
by a near doublet, ‘lectrons and deskes’, and the book-collector’s cleaning is made a
little more manic by the addition of the intensive ‘ryght’. The only serious mistrans-
lation occurs with the rendering of ‘ordure’ as ‘dust’; the French is far stronger,
meaning ‘filth’, and suggests a greater degree of negligence. This somewhat reduces
the effect of the satire, although on the whole it and the humour of the original are
preserved. Overall, accuracy is greater in the prose passage than in the verse, as one
might expect.
Two other aspects of Watson’s Shyppe of fooles deserve our attention: changes
that are attributable to ideological reasons and changes that he made in the many
anti-feminist passages. In the case of the former, Watson goes beyond simply eng-
lishing the text in ways that we have already discussed. He also makes alterations
that will appeal to his English audience’s patriotism and promote England and the
English monarchy. These occur principally in the very long Chapter 95 entitled ‘Of
the holy faythe catholyke of oure moder holy chirche. And the enclynacyon of the
holy empyre Romayne’. This is an impassioned plea to the Church to unite under the
Holy Roman Emperor in the fight against the Turks. In 1495, one year after the Nar-
renschiff was published, Brant appealed to the emperor for a crusade. In 1499 Pope
Alexander
VI did actually call for one. Drouyn’s second edition, which Watson uses,
came out that very year, and in it appears an interesting addition to Rivière’s verse
rendering which he was translating. He inserts a passage praising the kings of
France, Charles
VIII and Louis XII, for criticizing the king of England (Henry VII) in
not coming to the aid of the emperor in quelling ‘ces chiens, les Turcs’ (lxiii–lxv).
Watson makes six important changes to gear the text to his English audience and
arouse their patriotism (Aaiii–Bbv). He substitutes England for France three times:
‘ryght puyssaunt kynge of Englonde’; ‘Knyghtes of this redouted realme of En-
glonde, whiche is the floure of crystendome’; and ‘whan all Englonde is in tran-
quylyte’. He adds England to Drouyn’s appeal for European countries to go against
the Turks and throws in a few compliments for good measure: ‘O excellente En-
glonde imperyall, so endued with fortytude’. However, he reduced Drouyn’s ‘O
France trespuissante et redoubtee entre les crestiens’ to ‘O noble Fraunce’. In a more
audacious addition he reminds his audience of England’s victory against the French

Henry Watson 21
by replacing Drouyn’s reference to Charles VIII with one to Henry V: ‘Consyder how
God dyde helpe kynge Henry the Fyfte agaynste the crysten men, the whiche by rea-
son sholde helpe you soner agaynst the infydeles’. He makes Drouyn’s specific criti-
cism of the English and Scottish kings’ refusal to respond to the appeal for a crusade
against the Turks very general: ‘you other kynges’. Finally, Drouyn’s appeal to the
envious to stop preventing ‘nostre bon roys de France’ from waging holy war is re-
placed by a similar plea to encourage ‘our good kynge of Englonde’.
Unusually,
Pompen does not criticize Watson for the changes, saying that for once he produces
‘something better than a mere string of detached words and expressions’.
35
But this
is damning with faint praise, one might say. As in the romances, and like Rivière and
Drouyn in their French translations, by the way, Watson is re-orienting his text to-
wards his target audience. This is indeed ‘ethnocentric translation’ in the narrow
sense of the term, that is, appealing to the audience’s nationalistic sentiments. But it
is more. In the case of this chapter in the Shyppe of fooles, we must remember that
Watson’s translation was printed, as we said earlier, on the instructions of Margaret
Beaufort, who had just appointed de Worde as her printer. Watson’s substitution of
the valiant English monarchy for the French was certainly no accident. Secondly, it
was written under the impulse of religious ideology. The threat to Christianity by the
Turks was very real, and England perceived it as much as any other country. De
Worde himself, in the year before he printed the Shyppe of fooles, actually contrib-
uted to financing a crusade. Nor is it insignificant that Watson, in Olyuer of Castille,
twice translates ‘sarrasins’ and ‘mescrents’ as ‘Turks’ when speaking of the invading
Moslems from Spain, although of course the word Turk was sometimes used for
Saracens in Middle English. Watson was certainly trying to demonstrate that English
Christians were as determined and able, if not more so, to defend the Church by van-
quishing the heathen as the subjects of any other European country.
Another aspect of the Shyppe of fooles that can be related to ideological concerns
is its anti-feminism. It is unnecessary to rehearse the traditions and conventions that
inspired Brant’s misogynist chapters on women and marriage. They all appear in
fifty-six of his hundred and twelve chapters and play a major role in thirteen. Most
of these chapters and comments are translated closely in both semantic and stylistic
terms. Brant is often ribald in his comments on women of easy virtue, a section of
society more than well represented in the Shyppe of fooles. Watson does not flinch
from translating the ribaldry as he found it in Drouyn. For example, in the chapter
‘Des conditions courroux et grandes mauvaisties des femmes’ (pp. xli
v
–xlii
v
), mis-
translated by Watson’s much milder ‘Of condycyons, murmurynges & grete unhap-
pynes of wyues’ (Ovi–Pii
v
), the story of Calpernia is used to explain why women
should not be allowed to speak in court: while pleading, she ‘monstra son cul au
juge’, is correctly translated as ‘she shewed her ars to the Juge’. Elsewhere, Watson
translates, again accurately, ‘paillardes’ by ‘harlots’ and ‘veilles maquerelles’ by

35
Pompen, p. 152.

22 B RENDA M. HOSINGTON
‘olde bawdes’. A chapter on the foolishness of young men marrying old women for
their money warns against ‘ces vieilles ridees qui ont des escutz ung plein sac’ (p.
xxxiiii), Watson’s ‘these olde wyddred wymen,which hathe sackes full of nobles’
(M). (Note the substitution of the English coin for the French.) Drouyn’s harsh tone
in these anti-feminine passages is nevertheless softened on more than one occasion.
For example, imperatives used to create a very aggressive tone in the chapter advis-
ing men of the folly of trying to keep watch over their women (xxiiii–xxiii
v
and Hi
v
–
Hv
v
) become conditional clauses: ‘ferme la porte’ [close the door] is ‘yf thou dyde
locke her in thy house’; ‘ne la laisse point aller’ [do not let her go at all] is ‘yf that
thou kept her from’; and ‘ayes bon chien qui la nuyt veil’ [have a good dog to guard
her at night] becomes ‘[yf] that thou had neuer so good a dogge’.
Nonetheless, Watson sometimes curiously makes some changes that increase the
anti-feminism. ‘Fuire la compagnie des hommes vicieux’ becomes ‘flee the company
of vicious men and women’ [my italics], while a long phrase praising good women is
severely curtailed. Since these changes are not made consistently, it is difficult to
ascertain whether they are attributable to any personal ideological cause. The real
test on this account, however, comes in our final text, The Gospelles of distaues.
The brilliantly parodic title in both French and English juxtaposes ‘evangiles’,
‘gospels’, the holiest texts in the Christian canon, written and commented on only by
men, and the polysemous ‘quenouilles’, ‘distaves’. The distaff of course symbolizes
both genders. Phrases such as ‘tomber en quenouille’, ‘to be ruled by women’, and
‘the distaff side’, the ‘female line of a family’, represent women whereas the object
itself represents the penis. In the Gospelles of distaues, sexual innuendo and allusion
are never absent for long.
The clerk’s prologue and epilogue, mock defences of the illiterate women whose
words he is supposedly transcribing, demonstrate some toning down of the parody
and irony in the translation. The French clerk reproaches men for ‘ignoring’ female
nobleness, the English for ‘destroying’ it (aii), the word he uses being one of his
favourite coinages, adnychyll. He often speaks of the women’s ‘auguremens’, their
‘magic’, thus introducing the theme of witchcraft that runs through the work,
whereas his English counterpart consistently speaks of ‘arguments’, also said to be
typical of women’s discourse but which are less negative than witchcraft. The
French clerk concludes that the women’s discussions were void of any ‘fruit ou sub-
staunce de verite’, whereas the English is more cautious: they gave ‘no appearance
of any truth’. His disparaging comment on the ‘fragilite de celles’, the feminine plu-
ral pronoun replacing the women, who get together to talk in this way, is made more
moderate in English by the use of a gender-neutral pronoun, them (Ev
v
).
Watson nevertheless translates closely the narrative links between the six eve-
nings, which afford the clerk ample opportunity to make disparaging comments.
There is one major change, however. In both texts, the clerk refuses the women’s
offer on the last evening of a nubile young woman as recompense for recording the
gospels because he is too old. The French then offers an exemplum, but one which
parodies scholastic convention by being vulgar: when a horse goes to drink without

Henry Watson 23
its bridle or a man says his evening office without his rod, his time is past (116). The
English could not be more different: ‘I abode nothynge but the messanger of god for
to call me unto the Joye eternall, unto the whiche he brynge you and me. Amen’
(Ev). This echoes the ending of many Middle English romances but is worlds away
from the spirit of the French original’s closing statement.
Parody and satire are also conveyed through the ‘glosses’ that the women make
on their ‘gospels’. These of course subvert the normal function of a gloss by being
often off-topic, always mocking, and for the most part erotic. Thus while parodying
scholastic practices, they also contribute to the depiction of the women as silly and
sexual. This is seen in the following example. Dame Abonde du Four presents her
gospel and Beatrix Flabaude glosses it.

Pour le premier chappitre de mon euangile je vous asseure que pour pisser entre deux
maisons ou contre le soleil, on en gaigne le mal des yeulx qu’on appelle le leuriol.
Glose. Aucuns l’appellent la rougerole, dist Beatrix Flabaude, mais je croy mieulx que
cest maladie vienge de trop boire a la fontaine d’amours. (95)
For the fyrste chapytre of my gospell I assure you that he that pysseth bytwene two
houses or agaynst the sonne, knowe that he shall haue sore eyen. Glose. Sayth
Beautrise Bousette, I thynke better that that syknes cometh of to moche drynkynge at
the fountayne of loue. (Cii
v
)
Throughout the work, the clerk satirizes women by mocking their medical knowl-
edge, based on folklore explanations, diagnoses, and remedies. In the French, Sebille
des Mares shows that she knows about opthamological conditions in referring to
‘l’euriol’, ‘styes’, but this is undermined by her ridiculous explanation of its cause.
Beatrix Bousette corrects her by rejoining: ‘aucuns l’appellent la rougeole’, ‘some
call it measles’. But she then goes on to assert that the disease is actually a venereal
one. The exchange parodies the scholastic gloss, where diverse opinions are pre-
sented to explain a theological point and appeal is made to ‘authorities’ to bolster
one’s argument. In the English we have only the vague ‘some call it’. Watson weak-
ens the parody of the women by omitting the correct name of the eye condition,
making it simply ‘sore eyen’, and the parody of scholastics by omitting the phrase
about measles, which reduces the number of explanations. The sexual allusion, how-
ever, is kept.
A second example offers a different strategy for satirizing the spinners. Sebile des
Mares offers an old wive’s tale:
Quant un enfant est ne, avant qu’il soit baptisie, gardez vous de le metre premierement
ne porter sur vostre bras senestre, car pour vray qu’il en seroit gauchier toute sa vie.
Glose. Martine Tost Preste dist a propos que, se vous faittes tourner a vostre mari son
visage vers orient tandis qu’il est embesoingnie ou fait d’amours, s’il fait generation,
ce sera un filz. (103)

24 B RENDA M. HOSINGTON
Whan a chylde is borne before that he be baptysed beware that ye bere hym not upon
your lefte arme, for than shall he be lefte handed all hys lyfe. Glose. Martyne Soone
Redy sayth to this purpose that yf ye make your husbande torne his face towarde the
oryent whyles that he dothe the dede of loue and yf there be ony generacyon it is a
sone. (Cv)
Two superstitions, the malediction of being left-handed and the circumstances gov-
erning the sex of a child, are being mocked, the first in the chapter, the second in the
gloss, which again is sexual. This time Watson translates carefully. He omits only
one word, ‘embesoingnie’, which means ‘to be busy’ or ‘to be in pressing need of’,
obviously used here with a sexual connotation for comic effect. In this example,
unlike the first, few of the parodic and comic elements are lost.
The portraits of the women also provide a vehicle for parody and anti-feminist
satire because they subvert the conventions of the courtly lady portrait found in ro-
mance. They are for the most part translated quite carefully, but Watson does add
details that make the women even more unattractive. In what is perhaps another ex-
ample of his problems with figures, one sixty-year-old is said to be seventy-seven.
Another has eyes that are ‘enfonces’ [sunke]; this is made worse by Watson’s ‘eye
lides reversed and reed, always watryng’. All the portraits end on a sexual note. Only
one is not rendered by Watson. Mme Abonde du Four was previously ‘une mar-
chande de luxure a detail’ but now ‘tinst bouticle en gros’, in other words, she has
given up the retail trade of prostitution for the wholesale one of brothel-keeping.
Watson gets the first point — she sells ‘lecherye all by tayle’ — and probably even
intended the pun on ‘tayle’. However, he misses the second point, which he trans-
lates as ‘she helde a fayre shoppe’.
The comic and parodic effect of giving people significant names, part of a long
narrative tradition, is used to full effect in the Evangiles des quenouilles. No fewer
than seventy out of the seventy-seven names have connotations of sexuality or
magic, both areas of female expertise according to medieval men. Watson’s handling
of these names is interesting. Of the forty-four sexually oriented names, he translates
twenty-two exactly and adapts six others. Some were regionalisms which he could
not have known; others are too culture-bound, like the district of Glay in Paris
known for its brothels which gives its name to Yseline Du Glay. Many, however,
contain the same connotation in English: Martine Toste Preste and Jeanne Toste
Vestue become Martine Sone Ready and Joan Sone Clothed. In the case of Martine,
who is in our second example, the name reinforces the sexuality of her remark. An-
other woman, Pylate, is married to a man called ‘Long nez’, the word nez being a
pun on the word for nose and the slang expression for a penis; although Watson
could have used the same pun in English, nose denoting the same two anatomical
parts, he called her Pylate frelysshe, employing an adjective used for a woman of
easy virtue. In other words, he kept a sexual connotation but one which was less vul-
gar. Bawdiness is kept, in contrast, in the name of Beatrix Flabaude, who features in
the first example quoted on page 23. A ‘flabaude’ is a ‘purse’ or, in slang, the ‘scro-

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elenyészett, feje újra kábulni kezdett, szeme újra a parázstüzű
betűket keresé…
– Éjfél már rég elmúlt, igya ki borát és menjen haza, mondá
mogorván az álmos pinczér, s menten oltani kezdé a lámpákat. Barkó
úr bámúltan nézett szét, azután föltápászkodott székéről, kifizette
érintetlenűl hagyott borát, s kitántorgott az ajtón. Kalapját is benn
feledte, a mogorva pinczér úgy dobta ki utána az útczára.
De a kalap ott maradt, a hová esett. Barkó úrnak eszébe sem
jutott, hogy fölvegye. Az idő egészen megváltozott, nehéz ólmos eső
esett, metsző hideg szél sikoltott végig az útczákon. Barkó úr égető
homlokára üdítően hatott a hideg szél és eső, odatámaszkodott az
átelleni ház falához, s igyekezett rendbehozni gondolatait. Hogy
miért jött a kocsmába, már elfeledte; hogy haza kellene mennie,
nem jutott eszébe. Állásával akart tisztába jönni, mint a lázas beteg,
mindig ugyanazon egy szó vagy gondolat körűl forogva.
Gondolkozott, sokáig és mélyen, de gondolatainak nem volt
határozott alakjok; csak valami homályos sejtelem sugta folytonosan
fülébe, hogy ő az emberek legutolsója, a kit megvetni joga van
mindenkinek. A hideg eső keményen csapkodta arczát, a szél
összezilálta nedves ősz haját; Barkó úr nem érezte ezt, vagy inkább
olyan formát érzett, mintha arczúl vernék, haját tépnék haragos
polgártársai. Hát hiszen ezt is megtehetik… Valaki megragadja
karját, valami hang sírva könyörög, hívja haza… mintha leánya arcza
volna, mintha az ő hangját hallaná… Lába megmozdúl, megy
valamerre, de nem tudja, hová. Elég ha az tudja, a ki vezeti…
Beszélni is kezd, ő jól tudja mit; de a mellette haladó alak, úgy
látszik, nem érti, mert sírva kérleli, biztatja, hogy csak siessenek,
mindjárt otthon lesznek a jó meleg szobában… Barkó úr nem erről
beszélt; boszankodik, mért nem felelnek neki kérdéseire? Nem akar
tovább menni, míg nem tudja ki vezeti, hova viszi – hátha
vesztőhelyre viszi…? Haragosan megáll… s egy pillanat múlva aléltan
összerogy épen lakása előtt.
Leánya, ki hosszas kimaradása fölötti aggodalmában utána ment
s a kocsma elől haza vezette, nagy nehezen a szobáig vonszolta

most az alélt öreg embert s levetkőztetve ágyba fekteté. Barkó úr
keble nehéz hörgő lélekzettel emelkedett, homlokára hideg verejték
ült, s midőn leánya sírva megfogta kezét, érzé, hogy az izzóan meleg
és száraz. Ajkai kicserepesedtek s félig nyitva álltak, közben-közben
szakadozott s érthetetlen kiáltásoknak engedve útat. Annyit tisztán
látott a leány, hogy atyja a nagy hűlés következtében erős lázt
kapott és félrebeszél. Gyorsan vette nagykendőjét, s atyjára zárva a
szoba ajtaját, felfutott a ház első emeletére, hol tudtára orvos lakott.
Már reggel volt és az orvos úr legédesebb álmában szendergett.
Ajtaja zörgetésére mérgesen kiáltott, hogy mi baj?
– Beteg van a házban, kiáltott Juliska dideregve, a kulcslyukon
keresztűl.
– Kicsoda? kiáltott vissza az orvos úr.
– Barkó Kelemen végrehajtó, mondá Juliska.
– Várjon! kiáltott az orvos úr boszankodva. Van ideje, a
végrehajtók nem pusztúlnak el olyan könnyen.
És ezzel másik oldalára fordult s boldog lelkiismerettel tovább
aludta az igazak álmát. Juliska lefutott a lépcsőn, hogy más orvost
keressen, de előbb meg akarta atyját nézni egy pillanatra. Benyitott
a szobaajtón. Barkó úr már fönn volt és öltözni kezdett.
A leány sikoltva rohant apjára, s kérte, erőltette, feküdjék ismét
ágyába. Barkó úr hallani sem akart róla. Félig öntudatosan, félig
lázban, reszkető kézzel kereste elő ruhadarabjait, s leányával
folytonosan viaskodva, nagy nehezen felöltözött.
– Hány óra? kérdezé.
– Hét lesz, mondá Juliska, kezét tördelve.
– Ideje a hivatalba menni, mondá Barkó úr reszkető ajakkal.
Első a hivatalos kötelesség.

Leánya ismét kérte, maradjon itthon, hiszen nagy beteg, alig tud
lábán állni. Barkó úr szigorúan megfeddé leányát s megtiltá, hogy
elállja útját. Vette kalapját s eltávozott.
– Itt maradj a szobában, mondá leányának. Ne félj, nincs semmi
bajom; nézd, mily egyenesen járok. Első a hivatalos kötelesség.
A láz némi erőt adott tagjainak egy időre. Minden nagyobb
veszedelem nélkűl elért a hivatalig, átvette az inspector úr írnokától
napi munkáját s még mindig megállt lábán. Igaz, hogy egy kissé
ingadozott s arcza feltünőleg sápadt volt, mire az inspector úr írnoka
nem is mulasztá el megjegyezni, hogy úgy látszik az éjjel megint
korhelykedett valahol; s megvígasztalá, hogy csak viselje így magát,
majd elcsapják nemsokára.
Barkó úr talán nem is hallotta a díszes ifjú úr megjegyzését; hóna
alá csapta iratait, s kitámolygott a szobából, halkan mormogva:
– Első a hivatalos kötelesség.
Az éjjeli rossz idő még folyvást tartott. Eső esett, szél sivított.
Barkó úr fázni kezdett, pedig feje és arcza lánggal égett és teste
erősen izzadott. De nem törődve semmivel, megindult hivatalos
körútjára s az első útczában ájultan összerogyott.
Midőn magához tért, már késő este volt. A napot szakadatlan
lázálomban tölté el lakásán, hova szánakozó emberek vitték az
útczáról. A szoba sötét volt, a kis faggyúgyertya csak az ágy tájékát
világítá meg. Barkó úr körűlhordá nehéz tekintetét a szobában.
Leánya az ágy fejénél ült, lábánál két alak állt, egy harmadik a szoba
szögletében ült.
– Nagyon szomjas vagyok, mondá Barkó úr gyenge hangon.
Leánya szájához tartá a vizes poharat, a beteg hosszan ivott s
tisztább öntudattal ismét körűlnézett a szobában.
– Kik vannak itt? kérdé leányától.

– Hörcsök úr és Károly, felelt Juliska. A megnevezett két egyén
kilépett az árnyékból, Barkó úr feléjök nyujtá reszkető kezét.
– Köszönöm, hogy meglátogattak, mondá halkan. Hát még ki van
itt?
– Én vagyok, mondá a világgyűlölő idősb Barkó úr, szintén
előkerűlve szegletéből. A mint a világosságba lépett, Barkó úr reá
tekintett s komor arczán a szánalom némi kifejezését vélte
észrevenni.
– Úgy látszik, meg fogok halni, mondá gyenge mosolylyal s
reszkető kezét síró leánya fejére tevé. Apám uram, ha meghalok, ne
feledkezzék meg Juliskámról.
Az öreg úr semmit sem szólt, csak némán megfogta a beteg
kezét. Barkó úr köszönő pillantást vetett rá. Azután Hörcsök úr felé
fordult.
– Hörcsök úr, mondá mindinkább elmaradozó lélekzettel, ha
meghalok…
– Nem, ne szóljon így Barkó úr, mondá Hörcsök úr nagyon
megindulva. Ki nem mondhatom, mennyire sajnálom, a mi tegnap
történt. Bocsásson meg, lássa, most magam kérem meg Juliskát
fiam számára.
– Így, jól van, mondá Barkó úr boldog mosolylyal. Jer
gyermekem, hadd áldjalak meg.
Juliska kitörő zokogással veté magát apja párnájára, Barkó úr
keblére vonta fejét s nehezülő szemével még egyszer utoljára
igyekezett vonásait kivenni. Ajka még mozgott, de szavát nem
lehetett hallani; a leány látta, hogy még valamit akar mondani,
ajkához hajlott, s Barkó úr elhaló hangon, mely a pelyhet alig ingatta
volna meg, sugá fülébe:
– Rangomhoz méltóan temessetek el…

A zúgó szél megrázta az ablakot, a faggyúgyertya lángja riadtan
lobogott, a leány fájdalmas sikoltással esett térdre az ágy mellett. Az
ágyon hátrahanyatlott fővel, nyitott merev szemmel feküdt a szegény
öreg végrehajtó.
Nem, már nem végrehajtó többé… Az állomás megürűlt…

A FÉLELMES SZOMSZÉD.
Csombók úr ellen igen nagy méltatlanságot követett el az iroda-
igazgató, midőn régi hű bajtársát és husz év óta elválhatatlan szoba-
társát, Darnai urat más hivatalos helyiségbe tette át. Ha már
egyáltalában is nehéz elválni a megszokott foglalkozástól és
környezettől, mennyivel nehezebben eshetett Csombók úrnak elválni
régi kollegájától, kit nemcsak a megszokás, hanem hajlamaik és
eszmekörük egyformasága is nélkülözhetetlenné tett számára. Husz
év óta ültek egymással szemben egy füstös, szűk hivatalos szoba két
vénhedett asztalánál, és végezték egyenlő nyugalommal, egyenlő
gépiességgel az írnoki hivatás ezerágú műveleteit. Kevés szavú volt
mindakettő; nem pazarolták a drága időt haszontalan
szószátyárkodással; megkívánták egymásnak a jó reggelt, jó
étvágyat és jó éjszakát; kevesebb munka idején nehány rövid
megjegyzést váltottak az időjárásról, vásárkor a kereskedelem és
ipar forgalmáról; egyszerre jöttek, egyszerre mentek, minden ajtónál
makacs udvariassággal viaskodtak a másik előre bocsátása felett;
Jakab napján Csombók úr meghívta ebédre Darnai urat, Mihály
napján Darnai úr meghívta ebédre Csombók urat; tökéletesen
összeillettek, s a mennyiben husz éves városi írnok kebelében
közönséges emberi érzelem számára hely lehet, meleg barátsággal
viseltettek egymás iránt.
És az iroda-igazgató, lábbal tiporva a husz éves elévülés
jogczímét, egyszerre minden alapos indokolás nélkül áthelyezte
Darnai urat a kiadóosztályba, s Csombók úr egyedül maradt a maga
szobájában, szemközt az elárvult vén asztallal, honnan nem
viszhangzott többé saját tollperczegésére a jól ismert szuszogás és
vakarás.
Egyedül maradt, de nem sokáig. Már-már kezdett hozzá szokni az
irodai magány-rendszerhez, és csak néha-néha zavarták buzgó

munkáját a szomszéd asztalon felhangzó kísértetes tollperczegések:
midőn egy ködös borongós őszi reggelen belépve az irodába és a
fogasra akasztva párolgó felső kabátját, nagy meglepetéssel vette
észre, hogy a szomszéd asztal többé nem árva. Csombók úr udvarias
és leereszkedő ember létére nyájasan és biztató hangon üdvözölte
az új szobatársat, nem akarva mindjárt az első napon felsőségét
éreztetni az újonczczal. Emlékezett, mennyire rosszúl esett neki húsz
év előtt, midőn mint kezdő írnokot vénebb tisztviselőtársai csaknem
elnyomták felsőbbségük és hideg lenézésük súlyával. Meg akarta
kímélni a bátortalan kezdőt e kínos érzéstől, és nyájas
leereszkedéssel jó reggelt kívánt neki.
Megdöbbenve tapasztalá azonban, hogy leereszkedése nem talál
megfelelő hálás elragadtatásra. Az új írnok fejét sem bólintotta meg
a nyájas üdvözlésre, hanem mozdulatlan előbbi helyzetében maradt,
könyökét az asztalra támasztva, ujjaival haját borzolva és halkan
valami gyászindulót fütyörészve.
– Jó reggelt kívántam, mondá Csombók úr hangosabban és
fagyos méltósággal.
– Servus, mondá az új írnok.
Csombók úr megkövült tekintettel nézett körűl a szobában, azt
vélve, hogy talán háta mögött a hivatalszolga vagy a pereczes
gyerek is belépett. Senki sem jött be, a hetyke üdvözlés egyedűl neki
szólhatott. Lelke még küzdött e rémes meggyőződés ellen, de
érzékeinek épségét nem vonhatta kétségbe. Ott ült az idegen alak
Darnai asztala mellett, haját borzolta és fütyörészett; a szörnyű szó
még egyre rezgett a levegőben, visszaverődött a nedves falakról s
beüvöltött a rozzant ablak hasadékán. Csombók úr egy szót sem
szólt többé, leült asztalához, elővette tollát, papirosát és munkájához
kezdett. De a toll nem fogott, hol valami hajszál akadt bele, hol
keresztbe ugrott a hegye; a papiron görcsök, göröngyök támadtak, a
tinta elcseppent, és Csombók úr húsz év óta először volt kénytelen
az írnoki műveletek egyik legkezdetlegesebb ágát a vakarást
alkalmazni. Íróasztala megelevenedett, a tintatartó beszédes ajkat

nyert, a toll perczegése emberi hangokat adott; még a szoba
szegletének őslakója, az irodai egér is előjött sötét rejtekéből, és a
megelevenűlt bútorok kísértetes chorusába vegyülve, érthető
hangon czinczogá Csombók úr fülébe: Servus, servus!
Csombók úr fájdalmas sóhajtással eltaszítá maga elől a papirost.
Érzé, hogy képtelenné vált a munkára, nem akart küzdeni a
lehetetlenség ellen. Ő is az asztalra támasztá könyökét, tenyerébe
hajtá fejét, és félszemmel vizsgálat alá vette ellenségét. Mert hogy
az első pillanattól fogva ellenségek lettek, arról Csombók úr
fájdalmas kényszerüséggel győződött meg. Az ellenség ott ült még
mindig asztalánál, előbbi helyzetén csak annyit változtatva, hogy
most mindkét kezével borzolta haját. Vézna, halvány, hegyes orrú,
savó szemű, bozontos hajú fiatal ember volt, a megátalkodott
gonoszság és a hideg kegyetlenség valódi typusa, mint Csombók úr
az első pillanatra észrevevé. Kifejezésében volt valami démoni,
mozdulataiban valami fenyegető, és a mint vékony ajkait halk
fütyölésre dudorítá, olyan igazi banditának látszott, hogy Csombók úr
ösztönszerüleg megragadta a papirosnyíró ollót s védelmi állapotba
helyezte magát minden lehető orvtámadás ellen.
Az új írnok végre megelégedett fürtjeinek borzolásával,
megváltoztatta baljóslatú helyzetét s szemközt fordult Csombók úr
asztalának. Csombók úr hirtelen lekapta róla félszemét, asztala fölé
hajolt s mohó buzgósággal írni kezdett, nem véve észre siettében,
hogy tollát elfeledte a tintába mártani. Nemsokára viszhangot hallott
a szomszéd asztal felől, tollperczegés hangzott fel, de nem az írnoki
rendes, szabályos, higgadt, kimért, illedelmes tollperczegés, mely
dallamos zeneként hat a szakértő fülekre, s gömbölyű, egyforma,
szabályos betűk bűvös képét varázsolja a lélek elé; hanem rendetlen,
szökdelő, majd lázasan rohanó, majd baljóslatúan szünetelő
tollperczegés, mintha meghalt írnokok lelkei járnának kísértetes
tánczot a göröngyös papiron. Csombók úr lassan, óvatosan fölemelte
fejét, s félszemmel ismét az ellenséges tábor felé pillantott. A vézna
fiatal ember minden írnoki törvény és hagyomány megvetésével,
egész testével nekifeküdt az íróasztalnak, és fejét féloldalt, csaknem

egészen a papirosra hajtva, lázasan, rángatózó vonásokkal írt
valamit, közben-közben haját borzolva, szünetelve, és halk elfojtott
hangon oly ördögi gonoszsággal kaczagva, hogy Csombók úr
közelebb vonta magához a papirosnyíró ollót.
A vézna fiatal ember azonban, a megátalkodott gonoszok
vakságával, nem vette észre, hogy minden mozdulatát őrködő szem
kíséri a szomszéd íróasztal felől. Tovább írt, azon megfoghatatlan
módon, mely határozottan ellenkezik mind a fogalmazás, mind a
másolás örök törvényeivel. Csombók úr el nem képzelhette, a
hivatalos irományok melyik fajával foglalkozik kísértetes szomszédja?
Végig futott gondolatával a beadványok, fölterjesztések, jelentések,
határozatok, kimutatások, idézvények, végzések, lajstromozások,
jegyzőkönyvek egész sorozatán, és mikor már az egyik vagy másik
mellett elegendő jelet vélt észrevenni, egy hirtelen zökkentés ismét
összezavarta minden számítását és csúffá tette kombináczióit! Az
őrjöngő tollperczegés egészen megbűvölte, szemét le nem tudta
venni a vézna fiatal ember alakjáról, s arczából csaknem kikelve,
meredt tekintettel, elmaradó lélekzettel tapadt a rejtelmes
irományokra.
– Borzasztó állapot, gondolá magában Csombók úr; rettentő
szomszédságba jutottam. Ez bizonyosan valami kétségbeesett
gonosztevő; arczából, viseletéből látom, hogy képes a legszörnyűbb
merényletre. Ellensége minden tekintélynek, forradalmár, sőt talán
az Internationale tagja. Nem maradok vele egy szobában. Ki tudja,
mit ír most is? Talán lázító plakátokat vagy valami új ördögi
gonosztett tervezetét. Még ma beszélek az iroda-igazgatóval és
megkérem, hogy vagy engem helyezzen át más szobába, vagy ezt a
szörnyeteget távolítsa el.
A vézna fiatal ember e pillanatban ellökte maga elől a beírt
papirlapot, s miután a kielégített gonoszság hideg kéjelgésével
hosszasan megszemlélte, hirtelen, mintegy benső gonosz sugallattól
űzetve, földhöz vágta tollát és fölemelte fejét.

Ugyanazon pillanatban mesés gyorsasággal eltünt Csombók úr
feje a másik íróasztal felől s a nevezett élemedett tisztviselő ismét
írni kezdett nagy buzgósággal, és ismét nem vette észre, hogy tollát
nem mártotta a tintába. De azért csak írt tovább, oly hévvel és
mohósággal, mely az iroda-igazgatót bizonyára Csombók úr
fizetésének javítására bírta volna, ha lelkes szorgalmát észre veszi.
Így azonban nem volt más tanúja ez önfeláldozó szorgalomnak, mint
a vézna fiatal ember, ki egy pár pillanat óta mereven és
mozdulatlanúl szomszédjára szegzé tekintetét. Csombók úr nem
látta, de érezte, hogy a baljóslatú savó színü szemek a túlsó asztal
felől szakadatlanúl reá lövelik fenyegető villámaikat és feszűlt
figyelemmel kísérik minden mozdulatát. Fejét nem merte fölemelni,
csak írt tovább, s félszemmel a papirosvágó olló felé pillantott, és a
mennyire lehetett, összehúzta magát, de akármit tett, a savó színü
szemek merev tekintetét folytonosan érezte, ideges rángás vett erőt
egész testén és már közel volt hozzá, hogy megigézett madárként,
mely önkényt rohan a csörgő kígyó torkába, – fölkeljen és kitárja
mellét a vézna fiatal ember gyilkos tőrének.
Senki sem tudná megmondani, meddig írt volna még Csombók úr
láthatatlan betűket a savó színü szemek delejező hatása alatt, ha a
vézna fiatal ember viseletében egyszerre változás nem áll be, oly
változás azonban, melyhez képest előbbi viselete kardinális erénynek
volt nevezhető.
– Uram, szólalt meg a vézna fiatal ember, vékony hangon, de
fenyegető hanglejtéssel. Uram, gyilkolt-e már ön valaha?
– Micsoda! kiáltott Csombók úr rémülten és felugrott székéről.
– Azt kérdeztem, gyilkolt-e már? ismétlé a vézna fiatal ember
hideg kegyetlenséggel.
– Én? Mit? nyögé Csombók úr, és oly mozdulattal nyult a
papirosnyíró olló felé, mintha csakugyan el akarná követni ez
égbekiáltó bűnt a vézna fiatal emberen.

– Embert, mondá a vézna fiatal ember. Akárhogy, az mindegy.
Tőrrel, méreggel, pisztolylyal vagy ökleinek egy lázas szorításával.
Ontott-e vért, gyönyörködött-e az áldozat hörgésében? Szóval,
gyilkolt-e már? ismétlé a vézna fiatal ember, oly higgadt tetszelgéssel
sorolva elő e vérengző műveleteket, mintha csirke-ölésről beszélne.
– Nem, nem gyilkoltam, mondá Csombók úr, haragtól és
félelemtől reszketve.
– Kár, mondá a vézna fiatal ember, hegyes orrát vakarva és savó
színü szemével oly pillantást vetve Csombók úrra, mely világosan
mutatta, hogy csalódott várakozásában.
Csombók úr kimondhatatlan borzadálylyal és undorral tekintett a
vézna fiatal emberre, de hirtelen lekapta róla tekintetét és újra
asztala mellé ült, azon erős elhatározással, hogy az első gyanús
mozdulatra segítségért kiált, és a hivatalos órák eltelte után tüstént
jelentést tesz az iroda-igazgatónál.
– Uram, szólalt meg újra a vézna fiatal ember vékony hangja,
miután egy ideig hallgatva galvanizálta savó színü szemével a
verejtékező tisztviselőt. Uram – hogy is hívják önt…?
Csombók úrnak azt sugta egy pillanatra a hivatali felsőség és
megsértett büszkeség érzete, hogy felelet nélkül hagyja ez illetlen
kérdést; de egy pillantás a vézna fiatal ember vésztjósló arczára,
elfojtá keblében az önérzetes felbuzdulást, és fojtott haraggal s nem
minden titkos rettegés nélkül megvallá, hogy Csombók Jakabnak
hívják.
A vézna fiatal ember komoran csóválta fejét, s Csombók úr
ijedten vevé észre, hogy neve nem nyerte meg a félelmes szomszéd
tetszését.
– Rossz név, mondá a vézna fiatal ember. Hogy lehet valaki
Csombók, s hozzá még Jakab? Használhatatlan név.
– Én becsülettel használtam ötven év óta, mondá Csombók úr
titkos boszúsággal. A vézna fiatal ember nem reflektált az emberi

hiúság ez önkénytelen kitörésére, hanem ismét Csombók úrra
szegezve csörgőkígyó-szerű tekintetét, tovább folytatá a vallatást.
– Csombók Jakab uram – ha már ez a neve – tehát Csombók
Jakab uram, volt-e már ön szerelmes?
– Tizennyolcz éves házas vagyok, felelt Csombók úr, meglepetve
a rémes kezdetű párbeszédnek e lyrai fordulata által.
– Úgy? mondá a vézna fiatal ember, sötéten és vontatva. És
érezte már a féltékenység gyötrelmeit?
– Csombók Jakabné született Hankó Juliánna soha sem adott
okot és alkalmat ez érzésre, sem most, sem leánykorában, felelt
Csombók úr fölmelegedve.
– Nem-e? Azt hiszi? Hahaha! Kaczagott démoni gúnynyal a vézna
fiatal ember.
Csombók úr elképedve ugrott fel asztala mellől e lovagiatlan
kaczagás hallatára. Férji önérzetének és násza szentségének e
vakmerő lábbal tiprása csordultig tölté a mértéket. Reszketett a
haragtól és felindulástól, keze ismét a papirosvágó olló felé nyult,
ajkán borzasztó kihívás lebegett, midőn a vézna fiatal ember lassan,
nyugodtan fölemelkedett székéről s néhány lépést tett Csombók úr
felé, kit az ellenség támadó mozdulata egyszerre ismét figyelmessé
tett veszélyes helyzetére. Elfojtotta tehát lázongó indulatát,
összeszorította ajkait, s azon mértékben, a mint a vézna fiatal ember
feléje közeledett, hátrált Csombók úr a maga széke felé, míg végre
csüggedten reá ereszkedett s titkos remegéssel tekintett a vézna
fiatal emberre, ki közvetlenűl előtte állt összefont karokkal és
vésztjósló tekintettel.
– Az én nevem Zalabéri Zoltán, – mondá a vézna fiatal ember.
– Örvendek, hebegett Csombók úr kénytelen udvariassággal.
Szeretett volna már menekülni a szobából, de a vézna fiatal ember
fenyegető alakja elállta útját. Szent isten, gondolá magában
Csombók úr, mi lesz belőlem? Ez az ember vagy őrült vagy valami

kétségbeesett gonosztevő. Mindkét esetben el vagyok veszve. –
Csombók úr istennek ajánlotta lelkét, még egy búcsugondolatot
szentelt a tiszta hírében megsértett Csombók Juliannának, s
elhatározván, hogy lehető szelid és alázatos viselettel igyekszik
megengesztelni veszedelmes szomszédját, a kétségbeesés tompa
érzéketlenségével várta a bekövetkezendő eseményeket.
– Tehát nem érezte a féltékenység gyötrelmeit? mondá a vézna
fiatal ember maró gúnynyal. Szegény ember, hahaha! Soha sem
lihegett száraz ajka nehány enyhítő vércsepp után, soha sem vágyott
körmeit szívébe vágni, a hűtelennek, soha sem fordította
halántékának a pisztoly tátongó üregét, soha sem marczangolta
véresre önnön kebelét? Feleljen!
– Nem volt szerencsém, mondá Csombók úr alázatos
udvariassággal.
– Kár! mondá a vézna fiatal ember, s egy pillanatig komoran
elmerengett, mialatt Csombók úr nesztelenűl, de siker nélkül a
papirosnyíró olló közelébe iparkodott jutni.
– Elmondok egy történetet, mondá a vézna fiatal ember, ismét
Csombók úrra szegezve átható élű szemét, s oly közel lépve hozzá,
hogy a boldogtalan tisztviselő és családapa kénytelen volt lemondani
a menekülés legkisebb reményéről is. Elbeszélek egy történetet, jól
figyeljen rá, véleményt kell róla mondania.
– Saját történetét akarja elmondani. Szent isten, micsoda szörnyű
bűnlajstromot fogok hallani, gondolá magában a verejtékező
Csombók úr, a borzadály és kíváncsiság vegyes érzésével.
– Volt egyszer egy ifjú ember – kezdé komoran elbeszélését a
vézna fiatal ember – hogy hol? nem tartozik a dologra. Szegény volt
és lángszellemű, megvetette a közönséges munkát és éhezett,
szívében vad lánggal égett a szerelmi vágy és nem volt lény, a ki
megértse. Az ifju – nevezzük Zenőnek – tehát Zenő végre arra
szánta magát, hogy éjjelenkint a temetőbe járjon, s midőn a bagoly

huhogása az éjfélt hirdeti a kísérteteknek, felássa az új sírokat s a
halottak gyűrűit és ruháit leszedje…
– Nagy ég! nyögött rémülten Csombók úr.
– Tetszik önnek? kérdé a vézna fiatal ember kegyetlen örömmel.
– Borzong a hátam, rebegett Csombók úr.
– Annál jobb, mondá a vézna fiatal ember oly sötét
megelégedéssel, hogy Csombók úr haja szálai az ég felé meredtek.
– Zivataros éjszaka volt – folytatá a vézna fiatal ember kísértetes
elbeszélését, – harsogott az ég dörgő haragja, czikáztak a sustorgó
villámok, huhogott a bagoly, suhogtak a temető szellemlakói, midőn
Zenő a sírkertbe lépett ásójával. Nem messze a kalváriától állt egy
frissen hantolt sírdomb, tegnap temettek bele egy büszke, ragyogó
fiatal leányt. Zenő felásta a sírt, kiemelte és kinyitotta a koporsót,
felhajtotta a szűzi fátyolt, mely a halál arájának merev arczát fedé,
és őrjöngő sikoltással reá borult… Ő volt…
– Kicsoda? kérdé Csombók úr, elfeledve a pillanat izgalmában
rémes helyzetét.
– Ő – szívének imádottja, a büszke úrhölgy, az elérhetetlen
csillag. Itt feküdt, hidegen, megtörve, elhamvadva. Zenő ráborult és
izzó csókokkal borította fagyos ajkait. Az eső zuhogott, hideg szél
süvöltött a sírdombok közt, a koporsó tele lett esővízzel, s a forró
csókok és a hideg esővíz vegyes hatása alatt egyszerre
megborzongott a holt leány teste.
– Uram ne hagyj el! mondá Csombók úr.
– Igen, megborzongott, mondá a vézna fiatal ember, vad
megelégedéssel pillantva izgatott hallgatójára – és Zenő rémülettel s
őrjöngő örömmel felsikoltott. A leány élt, neki köszönte életét, övé
lett, a sírtól váltotta vissza, senkinek sem tartozott vele. Karjaiba
ragadta az éledő leányt, s miután lábával visszarugta a sírba az üres

koporsót s hamarjába behantolta, drága zsákmányával elrohant a
temetőből. – Hogy tetszik?
Csombók úr kimondhatatlan irtózattal tekintett a vézna fiatal
emberre, de félelmes helyzetében nem mervén nyiltan kifejezni
érzelmeit, csupán tompa nyögéssel felelt.
– Meg van rendülve, örülök rajta, mondá a vézna fiatal ember
hideg kegyetlenséggel. Hallja tovább. – Zenő haza vitte rablott
kincsét, és miután folytatólagos csókjaival és több kancsó hideg
vízzel tökéletesen életre hozta, lábai elé borult s felajánlotta neki
életét. A leány – nevezzük Csillának – tehát Csilla kezét nyujtá és
mosolygott. Oh! így mosolyog az ördög, ha angyalmezt ölt magára.
Látott ön már ördögöt mosolyogni?
– Nem volt szerencsém, mondá Csombók úr borzongva.
– Zenő látott, mondá a vézna fiatal ember sötéten. És az ördög
mosolya megejté szívét. Imádta Csillát, egész nap lába előtt feküdt,
zsámolya volt és szőnyege. Csilla nem emlékezett vissza elmult
életére, a sír álma sötéten állt multja és jelene közt. Szerette Zenőt,
legalább tette magát, hogy szereti és az együgyü ifju hitt a leány
szerelmében. Hahaha! Nevessen hát ön is! Itt nevetni kell.
Csombók úr kénytelen volt kínos erölködéssel kaczagni, mialatt
fogai összeverődtek a borzalomtól.
– Egy éjjel – folytatá a vézna fiatal ember ismét elkomorodva, –
midőn Zenő visszatért a temetőből, nehány gyűrűvel és két selyem
szemfedővel – mert régi keresetét ezután is folytatta – Csilla
meglátta az egyik gyűrűt, felsikoltott és elájult. Zenő a végzetes
gyürűre pillantott és megfagyott a vére. A gyűrű kövére Csilla
arczképe volt festve, oly élethíven, hogy azonnal rá lehetett ismerni.
Mit jelenthet ez? Zenő szívében felébredt a féltékenység szörnye.
Leöntötte az ájult hölgyet egy korsó hideg vízzel, megragadta kezét
és fogcsikorgatva kérdezé sikoltásának és ájulásának okát. Tudja, mi
volt az?

– Nem, mondá Csombók úr, lihegve az izgatottságtól.
– Nem is gyanítja? kérdé a vézna fiatal ember szigorúan.
– Nem, felelt Csombók úr remegve.
– Annál jobb, annál meglepőbb, mondá a vézna fiatal ember.
Tudja meg tehát, hogy a gyűrű megrázó hatása egy pillanat alatt
visszahozta Csilla emlékébe a multat. Visszaemlékezett mindenre, mi
halála előtt történt vele. Halálnak nevezem a költői kifejezés
kedveért, ámbár csak úgynevezett tetszhalál volt. Ezt a gyűrűt Csilla
adta hajdani vőlegényének, most visszaemlékezett rá, megvallotta és
azt is kimondta, hogy még mindig szereti. Zenőről többé tudni sem
akart. Büszkén kiegyenesedett előtte, s tudni kívánta, honnan
szerezte ezt a gyűrűt? Ujra felébredt főúri gőgjében még azon sértő
gyanúnak is kifejezést adott, hogy talán lopta. Zenő kínos
gyötrelemmel hallgatott, majd őrülten felkaczagott. A féltékenység
rémei mardosták szívét. A hálátlan nő, kit ő váltott vissza a haláltól,
mindent elfeledett s kapva kalapját, nagy kendőjét, határozottan
kijelenté, hogy azonnal visszatér fényes úri palotájába, hajdani
jegyese karjai közé. Zenő elállta útját, esengett, fenyegetőzött,
őrjöngött, mind hiában. «Visszatérek jegyesemhez, visszamegyek
kedvesemhez!» sikoltott görcsösen a hálátlan Csilla. Zenő végre
megunta a dolgot. «Vissza akarsz térni jegyesedhez?» mondá ördögi
kaczajjal. «Jól van, visszaviszlek!» És megragadta Csillát és… tudja,
mit tett vele?
– Meg tetszett ölni, hebegett Csombók úr fulladozva.
– Én? kérdé a vézna fiatal ember, végig tekintve remegő
hallgatóján. Úgy? Tehát engem tart Zenőnek? Eltalálta! Hahaha!
És a vézna fiatal ember sátáni megelégedéssel kaczagott. Azután
folytatá:
– Nem erről van most szó, hanem kitalálja-e, hol jutott Zenő a
gyűrűhöz s hová vitte Csillát?
– A halott vőlegény ujjáról tetszett lehúzni, találgatá Csombók úr.

– Eltalálta, mondá a vézna fiatal ember. Uram, ön mégsem oly
ostoba, mint gondoltam volna.
– Térjünk át most a harmadik képre, folytatá a vézna fiatal
ember, mielőtt Csombók úr megköszönhette volna a fönnebbi kétes
értékű bókot. Ismét temető, zivatar, mennydörgés, villám. Tátongó
sír, nyitott koporsóval. A sír szélén Zenő és Csilla. Hosszas viharos
párbeszéd. Zenő részéről szerelem, féltékenység, gyűlölet. Csilla
részéről hálátlanság, hidegség, megvetés. «Tehát régi kedvesedhez
akarsz visszatérni?» sikolt Zenő őrjöngve. «Igen!» felelt Csilla
megátalkodottan. «Légy hát övé örökre – a sírban!» ordít Zenő. Egy
tőrszúrás, egy sikoltás, egy zuhanás. A sír újra be van temetve, de
egy helyett két halottat takar.
– Szörnyűség! sóhajtott Csombók úr a verejtéket törölve
homlokáról.
– Várjon, még nincs vége, mondá a vézna fiatal ember, kegyetlen
kéjjel élvezve elbeszélése hatását. Zenő ott áll a sír szélén. Lelkében
megölt szerelmének emlékével s a gyilkosság mardosó öntudatával.
Mit tegyen most? Élete megsemmisűlt, számára nincs már semmi e
világon. Megölje magát? Hogyan? Tőrrel, pisztolylyal, méreggel?
Vagy eltemesse magát elevenen a sírba a másik két halott mellé?
Vagy tegyen eleget a törvény szentségének, s jelentse föl magát a
biróságnál? Mit gondol?
– Nem tudom, mire tetszett magát határozni, mondá Csombók úr
halálos aggodalmak közt és nagy alázattal.
– Azt hiszem, legeredetibb, de legnehezebben kivihető lesz az
elevenen való eltemetés, mondá a vézna fiatal ember oly higgadtan,
mintha csak arról volna szó, hol töltse el a mai délutánt? Mit tenne
ön hasonló helyzetben?
– Nem gondolkoztam még ilyesmiről, mondá Csombók úr.
– Tehát gondolkozzék most és tudassa velem véleményét, mondá
a vézna fiatal ember, és visszatérve íróasztalához, leült és ismét írni

kezdett, oly pokoli nyugalommal, hogy Csombók urat véglegesen
kivette sodrából.
Csombók úr egy ideig kábultan űlt székén. A szörnyű
bűnvallomás egészen lesujtotta, alig tudott gondolkozni. Mit tegyen
szemben e borzasztó gonosztevővel, e halottrablóval, e gyilkossal?
Jelentse föl a törvényszéknek s tegye ki őt a nyilvános kivégeztetés
gyalázatának? Oly ifjú s már is ily gonosztevő! De talán megjavulhat.
Hallgassa hát el bűnét, legyen bűntársává s tegye ki magát annak,
hogy fölfedeztetés esetében vele együtt bűnhödjék? Csombók úr
lázas lelke már a börtön és vérpad rémes képeit látta maga előtt, s
egész teste megborzadt… De ha nem fedezik föl? Ha együtt
maradnak tovább is? Ha kénytelen lesz minden nap érintkezni e
kétségbeesett gonosztevővel, kiről tudja, hogy a legvégsőre is
képes? Mily iszonyú veszélynek lesz kitéve minden nap? Nem, én
családapa vagyok, kötelességeim vannak, nem dobhatom koczkára
életemet, gondolá magában Csombók úr; kileste a pillanatot, midőn
a vézna fiatal ember nem tekintett rá, fölemelkedett székéről,
óvatosan az ajtóhoz lopózott s villámgyorsasággal kirohant.
Futott egyenesen az iroda-igazgatóhoz. Érezte, hogy szörnyű
titkát nem tarthatja magában, mert szétfeszítené agyát. Főnökével
kell tudatnia, s ha a felelősség terhét reá hárította, nyugodtabban
nézhet a jövő eshetőségek elé.
Az iroda-igazgató bámulva hallgatta végig a lihegő Csombók úr
szaggatott elbeszélését.
– Halottrablás, gyilkosság! Kiről beszél ön? kérdé gyanús
tekintetet vetve izgatott alárendeltjére.
– Az új írnokról, Zalabéri Zoltánról, mondá Csombók úr félelmes
suttogással.
– Unokaöcsémről! kiáltott az iroda-igazgató úr. A legszelídebb,
legjámborabb fiú! Megőrült-e ön, vagy neki ment el az esze?
Menjünk, azonnal kérdőre vonom őt magát.

Az irodába siettek. A vézna fiatal ember asztalánál ült s oly
nyugodtan írt, mintha a legmagasztosabb erények dicsfénye övezné
fejét. Meglátva belépő nagybátyját, fölállt székéről s egyetértő
pillantást váltott az óvatosan hátul maradó Csombók úrral.
– Zoltán, mondá az iroda-igazgató szigorúan, mit beszéltél az
előbb Csombók úrnak?
– Legujabb drámám meséjét mondtam el neki s véleményét
kértem a befejezésre nézve, felelt a vézna fiatal ember s egy csomag
összevissza firkált kézíratra mutatott, mely költői rendetlenségben
hevert az íróasztalon.
– Máskor foglalkozzál okosabb dolgokkal, mondá az iroda-
igazgató haragosan. Nem azért neveztelek ki írnokká, hogy drámákat
firkálj. Az úrnak pedig – folytatá Csombók úrhoz fordulva – lehetett
volna annyi belátása, hogy ne vegyen komolyan minden éretlen
fecsegést.
Csombók úr kimondhatatlan megvetéssel nézett végig a vézna,
fiatal emberen s még aznap folyamodott, hogy más szobába
helyezzék át. Örökös ellensége maradt a vézna fiatal embernek,
kiben – mint többször mondá keserű gúnynyal Darnai barátjának –
tigrist sejtett és hitvány macskát talált.

A 233-DIK SZÁM.
A régi ház fala, melyhez komoly nyugalommal támaszkodni
szokott, úgy magába fogadta alakját, mint a szerető szív jó barátja
vonásait. Ha távol is járt, a barnás foltok, a ledörzsölt mész, a
plasztikai körvonalok folytonosan róla beszéltek, és erős vállait,
széles hátát, ábrándosan hátratámasztott fejét nem engedték
kiveszni a vén ház emlékezetéből. Itt állt, ide dőlt hosszú évek során
keresztűl változatlan tartással, mozdulatlan nyugalommal, és az a
foltszerű hátkép sokkal erősebben bizonyította jogát ez ingatlanhoz,
mint akármilyen telekkönyvi kivonat. Nem is jutott senkinek eszébe,
hogy birtokpert indítson ellene; kollegái, kik a szomszéd útczák
szögletein, vagy a kapubálvány alatt, vagy a boltok lépcsőin tartották
hivatalos óráikat, teljes tisztelettel viseltettek a tulajdonjog szentsége
iránt; és ámbár maguk közt sokszor tréfáltak, sőt gúnyolódtak a 233-
ik szám önérzetes büszkesége, kimért udvariassága fölött; de azért
nem volt az a hordár, lett légyen akár hetyke újoncz, akár a
szakmában megőszűlt tekintély, kinek háta valaha a 233-ik szám
freskójával mert volna érintkezni.
Mint valamennyi ház falát e szeszélyes ég alatt, ezt is
megpörkölte a napsugár, megkopogtatta a jégeső, körűlsivította a
szélvész; de napsugár, jégeső, szélvész egyaránt változatlan
helyzetében találta a 233-ik számot, s szinte régi ismerős gyanánt
üdvözölte. A 233-ik szám épen úgy nem törődött ez ismeretséggel,
mint azokéval, kiket dolguk naponkint az utczán vezetett végig, s
kiknek szeme öntudatlanúl úgy hozzá szokott a vén ház falát
támogató komoly alakhoz, hogy ha egyszer-másszor hívatalos
minőségében távol volt, mikor az utczán áthaladtak, egész nap
valami megfoghatatlan hiányt éreztek, melynek nem tudták
magyarázatát adni.

A 233-ik szám nem kapkod a közönség kegye után, nem tolja föl
szolgálatát, nem fürkész szemével föl s alá az utczán, nem emeli
meg távolról vörös sipkáját, ha valaki megáll s vizsgálódva néz körűl.
Ez apró fogásokat élelmesebb kollégáira hagyja; ő elfogadja a
megbízásokat, melyek hozzá jönnek, elvégzi lelkiismeretes
komolysággal, a tiszteletdíj fölött soha sem veszekszik, a borravalót
meg épen el sem fogadja. Meglehet ugyan, hogy arra született, de
nem arra nevelték, és a nevelés teszi igazán az embert. Vidám
tanulócsoportok haladnak előtte az útczán; a kisebbek szíjra fűzött
könyveiket hetykén himbálják a légben, a nagyobbak zsebeikbe rejtik
a könyvet, s azzal a boldog önáltatással néznek végig a a 233-ik
számon, hogy ez nem tartja őket diákoknak. De a 233-ik számot
nem lehet oly könnyen elámítani; ő is járt iskolába, ő is himbálta
szíjra fűzött könyveit az útczán, és soha sem dugta szégyenkezve
zsebébe, pedig már derekasan kihajtott a szakála, mikor még mindig
könyvvel járt az útczán. Meglehet, hogy most sem az elhaladó
alakokat látja, hanem egy másikat, egyetlen egyet, egy szürke ruhás
kis fiút, nagy csomó könyvvel hóna alatt, aggodalmas kifejezéssel
arczán, a mint menetközben is a leczkét mormolják csendesen
mozgó ajkai, és minden tizedik lépés után megáll, hogy egy
kétségbeesett pillantást vessen könyvébe. Nehéz dolog a görög
nyelv rejtelmeibe hatolni, és a mathematika igen fáradságos
tudomány. Az a jó öreg asszony odahaza oly büszke örömmel
hallgatta, midőn tudós fia erős hangon kiabálta magába a vonakodó
tudományokat, és oly boldog megnyugvással ment rendes
munkájához, a mosó-teknő mellé, mikor fia izzadt homlokát törölve
kijelenté, hogy tudja már a leczkét. Tudta is, föl is mondta
dicsőséggel, és mikor az esztendő végén nyilvánosan fölolvasták az
érdemsorozatot, az ünneplő-ruhás öreg mosónő ott a fényes úri
vendégek mögött, kötényével törölte könyes szemeit s nem merte a
körűlállóknak elárulni, hogy az a jeles ifju, kinek most adják át
jutalmúl az aranyos kötésű könyvet, az ő fia.
– Vigye ezt a csomagot a nyúl-útczába, a 16-dik szám alá, Vörös
úrnak. Ott fogják kifizetni.

A fiatal ember kezébe adja a csomagot s visszamegy a házba,
honnan jött. A 233-ik szám szó nélkűl megindul a nyúl-útcza felé,
hóna alá szorítva a rábízott holmit. Vajjon mi lehet benne? Fogásáról
úgy érzik, mintha ruha volna, szép barna kabát, a milyent ő is viselt
valaha. Meg is becsülte, négy esztendeig viselte; sokba kerűlt, az
öreg mosónő kezét sokszor fölette a lúg, szemét sokszor megríkatta
a forró gőz, míg árát összedolgozta. De megillette derék fiát; jogot
tanult, tudósok közt forgolódott, urakkal érintkezett; nem járhatott
abban a szürke zubbonyban, melyet boldogult apja viselt, a ki csak
ácslegény volt, és ott a másvilágon bizonyosan nagyon boldog annak
láttára, mily jeles tudós urat nevel fiából a szegény özvegy. Meg is
lesz érte jutalma. Fia maholnap elvégez minden létező iskolát,
megtanul minden tanulható tudományt, diplomát kap, hívatalba jut,
nagy úrrá lesz, és szegény öreg anyját magához veszi; mert jó és
hálás fiú, s uraságában sem fogja szégyelni a szegény mosónőt.
Akkor aztán elfelejtik a nélkülözések hosszú éveit, kényelmes szép
szobában fognak lakni, tisztelettel lesz irántuk minden ember s
megbecsüli őket; fiának kalapot emelnek az útczán s dícsérve
emlegetik nevét, hírét és anyjának nagy lesz az öröme, nagy lesz a
büszkesége.
– Ez már mégis szemtelenség! – kiált mérgesen Vörös úr, mikor a
233-ik szám kezébe nyomja a csomagot, s felbontva, egy
összerongyolt, bepiszkolt kabátot talál benne.
Vörös úrnak vörös arczán rémes lobot vet a harag lángja ez
elnyomorított kabát láttára, de mindez még csak szelid mécspislogás
ahhoz képest, mikor elolvassa unokaöcscse levelét, melyet e
könnyelmű fiatal ember gombostűvel a volt-kabát gallérjára tűzött
volt.
– Semmirekellő léhűtő! – mondá Vörös úr szenvedélyes haraggal;
– nem elég, hogy kölcsön kéri ünneplő kabátomat egy napra, s hat
hónap múlva ily állapotban küldi vissza, hanem még pénzt is mer
kérni apró adósságai fedezésére.
É

És Vörös úr annyira megfeledkezett haragjában a családi titkok
sérthetetlenségéről, hogy fönhangon még egyszer végig olvasá
unokaöcscse levelét, melyben valóban szóról-szóra előfordult az apró
adósságok fedezésének kérdése.
– Hát maga mit vár? – mordult az ajtóban álló 233-ik számra.
– Fáradságom díját, – mondá komolyan a 233-ik szám.
– Micsoda! Még ezt is én fizessem! – kiáltott a szenvedélyes
Vörös úr kimondhatatlan elkeseredéssel. – Nem elég a kár, meg rá is
fizessek? Semmit sem adok. Menjen, keresse föl azt a derék ifjú urat
s vegye meg rajta fáradsága díját; és ha nem fizet, csukassa be.
Érti?
A 233-dik szám szó nélkűl megfordúl, és e kétes értékű
utalványnyal lehalad a lépcsőn. Megszokta már, nem először esik
meg rajta, hogy csalódott reményekkel megy le a lépcsőn, melyen
biztató bizalommal haladt fölfelé. Nagyobb uraknál, mint a haragos
Vörös úr, ki utoljára sem volt egyéb, mint egy közönséges városi
írnok. Híres ügyvédek, elnökök, polgármesterek, főispánok,
tanácsosok, miniszterek ajtaján fordúlt ki félénk alázattal és
csalódott reménynyel, a nélkűl, hogy csak egy vonása is mutatta
volna a lelkében háborgó keserűséget. Hosszú ideig nem állt élete
egyébből, mint folyamodványok készítéséből, tisztelgő
látogatásokból, bizonyítványai mellékléséből s más efféle
műveletekből, melyek biztos symptomái az eredménytelen
hívatalkeresésnek. Folyamodott, pályázott, látogatott mindenfelé, de
vagy a tudománya nem felelt meg az élet valódi követeléseinek,
vagy a modora nem volt elég hajlékony és kellemes, vagy az
ábrázata nem volt szemre való: elég az hozzá, hogy lassan-lassan
félelmesen ismert alak lett a hívatalosztó körök előszobáiban, a kiket
az inas urak minden különös utasítás nélkűl azzal az üdvözlettel
szoktak fogadni, hogy: nincsenek itthon. Most sem jön ő Vörös úr
szobájából, a mint lehajtott fővel, szomorú tekintettel lehalad a
lépcsőn s kilép az útczára; azt a régi szomorúan nevetséges alakot
látja, sötétkék ujjasa, piros sapkája helyett elvásott fekete kabátban,

szőrehagyott kürtő-kalapban, a mint megint, talán századszor fordúl
ki egy előkelő egyéniség ajtaján üres biztatással, szívében
keserűséggel, szemében elfojtott könyekkel, gyomrában rikoltó
ürességgel, és megy haza, megírni az öreg mosónőnek, hogy ügyei
nagyon jól állanak, nemsokára szép hívatala lesz. És az öreg mosónő
a házbeli úrfi által ezer meg ezer áldást írat vissza fiának, és
ismerőseinek boldogan dicsekszik a jeles tudós ifju nagy jövőjével. S
az évek elmúlnak, az éhség megaszalja az arczot, a töprengés dérrel
hinti meg a főt, az akarat ellankad az eredménytelen küzdésben, a
mindennapi szükség oda hajtja, a hol pártfogás nélkűl is lehet egy
kis kenyeret keresni; hosszú fárasztó látogatások után végre
megpihen és oda támaszkodik a régi ház falához.
Szemére húzza piros sipkáját és szomorú tekintettel bámul az
átelleni ház egyik ablakára. Az ablak függönye le van eresztve,
semmit sem lehet látni, de azért le nem veszi róla szemét. Egyebütt
úgy sincs néznivalója, a közönség kegyét nem keresi, kollégáival
szóba állni pedig nem engedi önérzete. Ha a sors mostohasága ez
állomásra kényszerítette, azért soha sem felejti el, mivel tartozik
nevelésének. Nem nézi ugyan le társait, hanem szóba sem áll velök
a hívatalos érintkezéseken kívül. Csak egyiköket, a 154-ik számot
méltatja némi bizalomra, a ki írástudó ember s üres óráiban újságot
olvas a boltajtók lépcsőjén. Ezt is csak annyiban tiszteli meg
bizalmával, hogy minden este, a hívatalos foglalatosság végével,
lakására megy, ott leveti kék ujjasát, piros sipkáját s a régi időkből
ismert fekete kabáttal és meztelen kürtőkalappal cseréli ki. E polgári
öltözetben megy haza, de hogy hol lakik, azt sem megbízói, sem
kollégái nem tudják, még a 154-ik szám sem. Nem is szükséges
senkinek tudnia; kora reggel ott van megint a 154-ik szám lakásán,
felölti hívatalos egyenruháját, s a rendes időben pontosan oda
támaszkodik a régi ház falához.
Szemét még mindig az átellenes ház ablakára függeszti, de a
függöny nem akar megmozdulni. Vagy talán lát is valamit a fehér
függönyön, a mi az avatatlan szemlélők elől sűrű felhőbe rejtezik.
Talán a mult idők ködképei jelennek meg ott s a régi emlékeket

idézik vissza lelkébe. Talán magát látja, fáradtan, elcsigázva,
nyomorultan, tehetetlenűl, s szemben egy másik alakot, egy
összetöpörödött öreg asszonyt, a mint kimondhatatlan büszkeségtől
csillogó szemét rajta legelteti és áldva simogatja fejét. A kép olyan
élénk, hogy még a szavakat is hallja, tisztán érthetőleg hallja.
– Tudtam én, hogy nem hagy el az isten, és akkor segít meg,
mikor legnagyobb szükségünk lesz rá, – mondja az öreg asszony. –
Látod, édes fiam, már nem dolgozhatom, gyengék a lábaim, a
szemem sem állja már ki a meleg gőzt. Mi lenne most belőlem, ha az
isten meg nem segített volna téged?
– Igen, megsegített az isten, – felel a fáradt alak, s igyekszik
elégedettnek, büszkének látszani.
– No, az isten segítsége mellett a magad érdemének is
köszönhetünk valamit, – mondja az öreg asszony, kimondhatatlan
anyai büszkeséggel szemlélve egy pár tintafoltot, mely valami levél
írása után fia ujjain maradt. – Olyan tudományra, mint a tied, el nem
maradhatott a jó hívatal.
– Nem is maradt el, – viszhangozza a fáradt alak, és valóban
egészen boldognak látszik.
– Hát aztán micsoda hívatalod is van, hogy nevezik azt
tudományos nyelven? – kérdi az öreg asszony lelkesülten.
– Miniszteri fogalmazó, – felel a fáradt alak merészen és minden
habozás nélkűl.
– Milyen szépen hangzik, – mondja az öreg asszony, mennyei
kéjjel ismételve e magas rangfokozat tudományos nevét. Hála
istennek, nem veszett kárba sok esztendei fáradságom, nagy ember
lett belőled. De hát milyen czímed van? Ha úgy valaki levelet küldene
neked, hogy írná kívülről a nevedet? – teszi hozzá titkos remény és
aggódás közt ingadozva.
– Tekintetes Zsombék Mihály miniszteri fogalmazó úrnak, – felel a
fáradt alak biztató mosolylyal.

– Tekintetes úr! – mondja az öreg asszony; reszketve örömében,
és ajkai ismételve halkan mormolják ez előkelő megszólítást. –
Szegény apád, ha élne, milyen büszke lenne rád. Áldjon meg az
isten, édes fiam, hogy ilyen boldogsággal jutalmaztad meg szegény
anyádat. Most már megmondhatom, hogy mennyit fájt eddig a
szívem miattad. Mikor láttam, hogy annyi fáradság után, annyi
tudománynyal nem tudsz boldogulni. Megrepedt volna a szívem, ha
a sok rossz ember tönkre tette volna előmeneteledet, nem
magamért, édes fiam, hanem miattad. De most már nincs okom
búsulni; a világ látom, megbecsüli érdemedet; szép hívatalod van,
úgy-e fiam?
– Nagyon szép, – felel a fáradt alak, s megcsókolja anyja kezét, a
kit könyekre indít e nagy megtiszteltetés.
– Milyen jó fiú vagy te, – mondja az öreg asszony zokogva;
mennyire megbecsülöd szegény anyádat fényes rangodban is. És az
a rosszlelkű, irigy Csordásné – tudod, a kövér mosónő
szomszédunkban – mégis azzal keserített, hogy nagyúrrá lettél,
szégyelni fogod anyádat és köszönjem meg, ha majd egy pár forint
alamizsnát fogsz nekem küldeni. De én tudtam, hogy csak a
rosszaság beszél belőle, úgy-e fiam?
– Fölmegyünk Pestre, anyám, nálam fogsz lakni, nyugalomban
töltheted öreg napjaidat, – felel a fáradt alak biztató mosolylyal.
– Igen, de nem leszek-e terhedre? Fizetésed is olyan nagy, a
milyen fényes a rangod? kérdi az öreg asszony aggódva.
– Olyan fizetésem van, hogy úri módon elélhetünk belőle
mindketten s még félre is tehetünk, – felel a fáradt alak vidáman.
*
– Hej! hordár! jőjjön föl! – kiált egy visító hang a szomszéd ház
harmadik emeleti ablakából.
A 233-ik szám kábultan föltekint, s a harmadik emeleti ablakban
egy hegyes orrú, hegyes állú, középkorú hölgyet vesz észre, míg egy

vékony, csontos kar merész hajlongásokat tesz a levegőben s
kifejező mozdulatokkal kiséri a sivító hangot.
– Hordár! jőjjön fel! Nem hallja?
A 233-ik szám körűlnéz az utczán; kollégái mind távol vannak, a
visító fölhívás csak neki szólhat. Felsiet a harmadik emeletre és
sipkáját a folyosó párkányán hagyva, belép a szobába.
– Itt van valahára? – kérdi epésen a középkorú vézna hölgy. – No
jó, vigyázzon arra, a mit mondok. Azort megnyírattam és most félek,
hogy ebben a csúf esőben megfázik. Jól vigyázzon hát, nehogy
megbetegedjék, mert magával fizettetem ki az orvost. Adja ide
czéduláját. 233-ik szám? Furcsa, már miért nem 333? No de
mindegy, hanem azt mondom, Azort jól betakarja ebbe a meleg nagy
kendőbe és nehogy meg találja szorítani, mert akkor vonít…
Csókollak, édes Karolinám; holnap délután látogass meg, mert én
nem merek ilyen időben Azorral kijönni, arra meg nincs pénzem,
hogy hordárt fogadjak mellé dajkának… No, hordár, megtalálta már
Azort? Ott lesz az ágy alatt. Hívja ki, de szépen; nehogy a füléhez
nyuljon, mert harap.
A 233-ik szám négykézlábra ereszkedik s igyekszik kicsalni az ágy
alól az oda menekűlt kis fenevadat. Sok biztatás és czukorral való
csábítás után végre kisompolyog rejtekhelyéből, épen úgy
szégyenkezve meztelensége miatt, mint hajdan Ádám a
paradicsomban. A sivító hangú, középkorú vézna hölgy meleg nagy
kendőbe takarja a természetes mezétől megfosztott Azort, s a 233-ik
szám karjaiba fekteti, lelkére kötve, hogy gyöngéden tartsa és
nehogy megszorítsa, mert akkor valamennyi útczán végig fog
vonítni. Azután összecsókolózik egy másik középkorú vézna
hölgygyel, ki az asztalon a kiürűlt kávés findzsákat rendezgeti, s
végre útjára indul, minden hatodik lépés után visszafordulva s
megintve a nyomában haladó 233-ik számot, hogy Azort meg ne
találja szorítani.

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The Medieval Translator Traduire Au Moyen Age Jacqueline Jenkins Olivier Bertrand

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