Translating and Rewriting: the Reception of the Old French Floire et Blancheflor in Medieval England

Abstract

The present thesis focuses on the reception of the Old French popular romance Floire and Blancheflor in Medieval England. Its purpose is twofold. First it aims at reconstructing and assessing the translation strategy emerging from the comparison between the source text and its Middle English translation. Second, it considers the English translation within the literary Polysystem of Medieval England and tries to define its impact on later translated and/or original texts belonging to the Middle English literary tradition. A careful study on the rewriting process of the source text has enabled us to identify the major lines of the translation strategy embraced by the Middle English adaptor: some of the changes could be ascribed to the intent of enhancing the coherence of the narration and to clarifying, especially in some passage, the storyline in the chain of actions; other ones might be actually attributed to the translator’s intention to adapt it to a new kind of audience, probably of aristocratic extraction. The adoption of a perspective aiming to consider our romance in relations with other texts within the whole structure of the Middle English literary Polysystem, lead us to assume that Floris contributed to establish a model in stylistic and ideological terms for later translated texts and for a few cases, as probably happened with Chaucer’s Troilus, also for works which do not have an Old French counterpart.