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In her collection of stories known as the Lais, Marie de France represents a number of animals that act in marvelous ways: a deer speaks Guigemar, 11. 106-122), a weasel brings its partner back to life using a magic flower Eliduc, 11. 1045-53), a hawk turns into a man Yonec, 11. 113-19), a man turns into a wolf Bisclavret, 11. 63-66). l These figures come from the oral Breton tales that she claims to translate Prologue, 11. 33^12), and they are associated with the so-called Celtic merveilleux, representations of the marvelous derived from Welsh and Breton literary traditions. Marie translates these animals from Breton into French, and she is highly conscious of her literary project as a project of translation.2 Translation encompasses a range of meanings in Marie's Lais. It includes linguistic translation as well as the translation from oral to written and the translation to a new interpretive context. Translation may also describe the animal-human transformations that Marie recounts in her Lais. An understanding of the movement between animal and human forms as a translation from one form to another can tell us something about the relationship between animality and humanity in Marie's stories.
Medieval translation encompasses a variety of intellectual endeavours. As Rita Copeland has so richly demonstrated, translation is part of the hermeneutic project of interpretation.3 Translation is also described in transferre, the act of "carrying across" from one language to another, and it is used to describe a metaphorical transfer in the medieval term translatio. In its metaphorical uses, translatio names geographical, institutional, cultural and historical processes, as in, for example, translatio imperii, the transfer of power from one group to another, or translatio studii, the transfer of learning or knowledge from one place to another. Because the transfer of culture is implicated in all forms of translation, Zrinka Stahuljak has argued, medieval notions of translation should be contextualized within the many cultures of twelfth-century Europe. Marked by Roman and Germanic conquests, by contact with Muslim culture and Arabic learning, by Hebrew influences and by a Celtic past that survived in oral traditions, twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe was a place of diverse knowledges and languages. Metaphorical uses of translation assume that diversity is translatable and, Stahuljak argues, obscure the relations of...