The Time of Translation in Wauchier de Denain’s Histoire des moines d’Égypte

What is it about?

This article explores the temporality of translation in Wauchier de Denain’s Histoire des moines d’Egypte: an early thirteenth-century French rendering of Rufinus of Aquileia’s fourth-century Latin Historia monachorum in Aegypto. Examining relationships not only between source and copy but also between the different narrative perspectives present in the text, I explore how the only complete manuscript of the work presents these perspectives in complex ways through prose and verse, French and Latin, text and image. It is argued that the Histoire encourages reflection on how translation cultivates temporal as well as linguistic and cultural heterogeneity, an issue that has been given scant attention in translation studies.

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