Bruce O’Brien’s New Book on Medieval Translation

Dr. Bruce O’Brien’s latest book, Reversing Babel: Translation Among the English During an Age of Conquests, c. 800 to c. 1200, has recently been published by the University of Delaware Press.

As noted by its publisher, this study starts with a small puzzle–why did Normans translate English law, the law of the people they had conquered, from Old English into Latin? Solving this puzzle meant asking questions about what medieval writers thought about language and translation, what created the need and desire to translate, and how translators went about the work. These are the questions Reversing Babel attempts to answer by providing evidence that comes from the world in which those who lived in England did their translating–not just Norman translators of law but any translator of any text, regardless of languages or genres. Reversing Babel reaches back from 1066 to the translation work done in an earlier conquest-a handful of important works translated in the ninth century in response to the alleged devastating effect of the viking invasions–and carries on to the wave of Anglo-French translations created in the late twelfth century when England was a part of a large empire, ruled by a king from Anjou who held power not only in western France from Normandy in the north to the Pyrenees in the south, but also in Ireland, Scotland, Wales. In this longer and wider view, the significance of political events on translation is more easily weighed in relationship to other influences. Ideas about language and translation formed the foundation for literary translators, ideas that came principally from biblical translators like Jerome and from classical Latin grammarians. These, along with poetic traditions and habits of translation, were engaged by the contact situations created in England between speakers and readers of different languages by a series of conquests and settlements that mark this as the most politically unstable period in English history. The variety of medieval translation among the English, and among those translators working in the greater empires of Cnut, the Normans, and the Angevins, is remarkable. Reversing Babel does not try to describe all of it; rather, it charts a course through the evidence and tries to answer the fundamental questions medieval historians should ask when their sources are medieval translations.