Collaborative Translation: The Laws of Crusader Outremer Project

by KARL STEEL

Briefly noted - last night, the Medieval Club of New York was fortunate enough to witness, and participate in, a presentation by Fordham University's Laura Morreale and Nicholas Paul, on their translation project of the French Laws of Crusader Outremer. Here's a link to the project. As they observed, the late twelfth to late thirteenth-century Crusader kingdoms produced a vast body of original French writing, mostly charters, unsurprisingly, but also a large quantity of law texts. These laws, as Nicholas Paul noted in particular, were a kind of laboratory for chivalric practice and belief: many are oriented towards ritual, towards proper speech formulas, and so on.

Morreale and Paul are leading an online translation effort using FromThePage, a custom-built tool for creating collaborative digital editions of texts. Paul and Morreale and their shifting group of collaborators meet twice weekly, online, for an hour's work in translating, working from OCR'd versions of 19th-century editions of the laws, themselves checked regularly against manuscripts and modern editions. It's fun! We know, because our presenters pulled up a text, and we, as an audience, along with two experts brought in via Google Chat, put our Old French to work and got down to translating.

Here's a sample of what we worked on:

Frankly, the rubric gave us the most trouble: 'Ici orrés la raison': we settled on 'words' for 'raison,' but not without some [expert!] struggle. The other question: when the king's been 'retenu en prison,' has he been taken prisoner or put in prison? Surely we're talking about captivity in general rather than a particular space? And so on.

The bulk of what we produced - and, again, this is a working translation - is here:

If it happens through some mishap that the king be defeated at battle and that the Turcs take him and hold him as prisoner, and then it happens that the king has such parley with the Turcs that put to ransom at a set price and he asks the queen and his [homes liege|liege men] that they pay the ransom and they cannot because they cannot find anyone to lend them so much, and the king agrees with the Turcs to grant them as hostage for him as many of his liege men and they will consider themselves paid.

For a list of texts, what's been done, and what's left to do, see here.

2 Brief Notices: The Old English Poetry Project + Wael Shawky's Cabaret Crusades

by KARL STEEL

First read Jonathan Hsy below on the George Washington U Digital Humanities Institute's "Disrupting DH" event, paying particular attention to the CALL TO ACTION at the bottom.

Two things for you to do, whether you're not in NYC or you are.

First, the Old English poetry project, made by Bob Hasenfratz and Miller Oberman. I saw Bob present on this last night at the New York Medieval Club, where he described the project and walked us through some various ways of presenting translations of several Old English maxims. How should compounds be presented? How should punctuation be handled? Line breaks?

More importantly, he asked US to comment and to use this website in our teaching. Note the COMMENT function here, for example, which you'll find throughout the site: quibble with translations, make suggestions, build in your own glosses, have your students work out projects, and so on! The field's open. And continue coming back, as Hasenfratz and Oberman aim to translate no less than the entire poetic corpus of Old English. Those of our readers who are heavy into Old English and translation -- David Hadbawnik and Dan Remein for example -- may want to play around with Bob and Miller's manifestos, in particular (not least of all because Dan, along with Lawrence Venuti, was the guiding, and oft-cited, spirit of Bob's presentation).

Second, PS1 just opened its show on Wael Shawky's Cabaret Crusades. First, I recommend reading Matt Gabriele's tweets on the crusades here. It'll just take a couple minutes. For a slightly longer take, Dave Perry in The Guardian. Then get out to Queens, if you can, between now and the end of August, to see Shawky's marionettes and films, which base a retelling of the first and second crusades on Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. Here's Shawky explaining the project (with French subtitles)

 

And here, a few of my photos from yesterday. If you're in NYC, I recommend doing what I'm going to do: grab your artist friends and make a day of watching the films. I suspect this will be my favorite PS1 show since their Schlingensief retrospective (confiteor: I tend to love PS1)