16   EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION

of the Latin translator: "I have translated with great travail into open understanding of Latin out of the language of Araby . . . sometimes expounding letter by letter, and sometimes understanding of understanding, for other manner of speaking is with Arabs and other with Latin." 1 Lydgate makes a similar statement:

I wyl translate hyt sothly as I kan, After the lettre, in ordre effectuelly. Thogh I not folwe the wordes by & by,

I schal not faille teuching the substance.2

Osbern Bokenam declares that he has translated

Not wurde for wurde — for that ne may be In no translation, aftyr Jeromys decree —But fro sentence to sentence?

There is little attempt at the further analysis which would give this principle fresh significance. The translator makes scarcely any effort to define the extent to which he may diverge from the words of his original or to explain why such divergence is necessary. John de Trevisa, who translated so extensively in the later fourteenth century, does give some account of his methods, elementary, it is true, but honest and individual. His preface to his English prose version of Higden's Polychronicon explains: "In some place I shall set word for word, and active for active, and passive for passive, a-row right as it standeth, without changing of the order of words. But in some place I must change the order of words, and set active for passive and again-ward. And in some place I must set peZon for a word and tell what it meaneth. But for all such changing the meaning shall

1 Three Prose Versions of Secrete Secretorum, E. E. T. S., Epistle

Dedicatory to second.

2 The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, E. E. T. S.,

3 Osbern Bokenam's Legenden, St. Agnes, 11. 680-2.

THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD 17 stand and not be changed." 1 An explanation like this, however, is unusual.

Possibly the fact that the translation was in prose affected Trevisa's theorizing. A prose rendering could follow its original so closely that it was possible to describe the comparatively few changes consequent on English usage. In verse, on the other hand, the changes involved were so great as to discourage definition. There are, however, a few comments on the methods to be employed in poetical renderings. According to the Proem to the Boethius, Alfred, in the Anglo-Saxon period, first translated the book "from Latin into English prose," and then "wrought it up once more into verse, as it is now done." 2 At the very beginning of the history of Middle English literature Orm attacked the problem of the verse translation very directly. He writes of his Ormulurn:

Icc hafe sett her o thins boc

Amang Godspelles wordess,

All thurrh me sellfenn, manig word

The rime swa to fillenn.3

Such additions, he says, are necessary if the readers are to understand the text and if the metrical form is to be kept. Forr whase mot to laewedd folic

Larspell off Goddspell tellenn,

He mot wel ekenn manig word

Amang Godspelless Wordess.

& icc ne mihhte nohht min ferrs

Ayy withth Godspelless wordess

Wel fillenn all, & all forrthi

Shollde icc wel offte nede

Amang Godspelless wordess don

Min word, min ferrs to fillenn.4

1 Epistle of Sir John Trevisa, in Pollard, Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse, p. 208.

2 In Sedgefield, King Alfred's Version of Boethius.

Ed. White, 1852, 11. 41-4.

4 Ll. 55-64.