Page 22 - DENG502_PROSE

Prose

Notes I must set a reason for a word and tell what it meaneth. But for all such changing, the meaning
shall stand and not be changed.” To this program Trevisa faithfully adhered. His translation is
usually close, though not literal, and his additions are few and unimportant. Occasional errors
occur, due to misunderstanding of the original Latin. The most notable characteristic of Trevisa’s
English as compared with the compact and well-constructed Latin of the original, is its looseness
of form and its verbosity. A single English word is seldom allowed to count as the equivalent of
a Latin word. The simple Latin phrase of Higden, in signum quod minoris virtutis est quaerere quam
quaesita tueri, became in Trevisa, “ in tokeynge pat pis is lasse maistrie to wynne and to conquere
pan it is to kepe and to save pat pat is conquered and i-wonne.” The more earnest and the more
careful he is, the more cumhersome Trevisa becomes. An unfamiliar allusion always calls for
elaboration, as in the following sentence of Higden : Cujus negotii, velut Daedalini labyrinthi,
inextricabilem attendens intricationem, rogata sum veritus attemptare. This is rendered by Trevisa as
follows : “poo toke I hede pat pis matir, as laborintus, Dedalus hous, hap many halkes and hurnes,
wonderful weies, wyndynges and wrynkelynges, pat wil noust be unwarled, me schamed and
dradde to fynde so grete and so gostliche a bone to graunte.” Awkward as this translation of
Trevisa’s is, however, it is better than that of the later fifteenth-century translator of the Polychronicon,
who speaks in his Latin English of “ the intricacion inextricable of this labor” and of “the obnubilous
and clowdy processe of this matter.” Trevisa, with all his faults, retains his feeling for native and
familiar English. It had not yet occurred to him that English words could be made out of Latin by
the simple process of bodily transference. His struggle was to render his original into intelligible
English, not to write a high style or to create a new literary vocabulary. His attitude towards
English is not that of the Renascence but of the Medieval mind. He uses the language naturally,
crudely, laboriously, with no higher quality than occasionally the unconscious and naive charm of
a simple-minded man writing as he speaks.
The latter fourteenth century was not, however, without more ambitious writers who attempted to
develop a higher literary type of prose than the simple medieval narrative of Maundevile and
Trevisa. These experimenters, like the earliest Greek prose stylists, endeavored to raise prose to
the literary level by giving it some of the characteristics of verse. Or perhaps it would be truer to
say that a kind of prose was derived by abstracting some of the most marked features of verse,
leaving something which stood half-way between colloquial discourse and regular verse. An
in-structive example of this type of English prose is a didactic treatise written about 1357 on the
basis of a Latin original by John Thoresby, archbishop of York. The name of the translator, or
paraphraser, was John de Taystek (Tavistock ?), a monk of St. Mary’s Abbey at York, a name
which seems to have been corrupted in later transcripts of the text to Gaytrigge, Gaytrik, Gaytringe,
and other forms. The treatise was intended to be preached, as a manual of instruction, by parsons
and vicars to their parishioners. It has been printed in three versions, one from the official records
preserved at York, another from the manuscript of a Wiclifite version of Taystek’s translation, and
one from a later copy of it. The work treats of the ten commandments, the seven sacraments, the
seven deadly sins, the seven virtues, and the seven works of mercy, and similar material, and it
serves, so far as content goes, as a good example of popular discourse in the fourteenth century.
The most notable stylistic feature of the treatise is its semi-metrical character. The metrical
characteristics easily become obscured, however, and in the Wiclifite version many passages pass
over into unqualified prose. In the version known as Dan Jon Gaytrigge’s Sermon, the editors have
felt so little the metrical elements in the text that they have simply printed it as prose. There can
be no doubt, however, that Taystek in his paraphrase of Thoresby’s original intended to produce
a style which would be a safe compromise between plain prose and out-and-out verse. The metrical
feature which survives most distinctly is the feeling for the cadence of the four-stress long line of
alliterative verse. Occasional lines occur which are quite regular in scansion, both with respect to
rhythm and alliteration. In general, however, alliteration is not well maintained, and apparently
what Taystek endeavored to do was to discard alliteration and retain the general rhythmical

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