In a recent interview with Benzir Harald Dmello, a Ph.D. student in the Department of English, Prof. Rector explained that,
The anthology was designed for teaching, with the intention of providing as broad a range of Arthurian texts from the Middle Ages as possible. There are three texts. One of them is the story of Tristan and Iseult by an obscure twelfth-century author named Béroul.
The second is Brut by an author named Wace. It is a French translation of History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth which is the origin of the King Arthur legend.
The third translation is much bigger. In fact, it's the biggest individual text in the anthology. It is a translation of a French author named Chrétien de Troyes who wrote five big romances set in the court of King Arthur. The one I translated is called le Chevalier de la charrette or the Knight of the Cart. It is the story of Lancelot and Guinevere which is one of the centrepieces of Arthurian legend. And Chrétien’s is the original version of the story. So that was really amazing to translate.
Interestingly, the story of Lancelot and Guinevere has also been translated by Rector’s University of Ottawa colleague, Prof. David Staines.
He translated all of Chrétien in the 1990s. Mine is a new translation of that text. So, it's a University of Ottawa English department story that the two of us, separated by almost 30 years, translated the same text!
In addition to the Broadview anthology, Professor Rector has also worked on the translation of Huon de Bordeaux for the University of Toronto Press. His experiences as a graduate student at Columbia University and his extensive work in medieval translations have shaped Rector’s creative process.
Keeping in mind the growing distance between medieval and contemporary societies, Rector hopes to maintain the authenticity of the texts while also making them accessible to contemporary readers.
You have to try to strike this balance between being loyal to the text and being loyal to English and the target language. So, you're stuck trying to bridge those two particular loyalties at the same time.
Because these medieval texts are 800 plus years old, there are also a lot of historically and culturally specific things that sometimes require notes. Some of the culturally specific things that aren't handled in notes have to be handled by trying to find the equivalent way of saying things.
And sometimes there is a tendency to try to make texts too familiar or too sensible. There is a temptation to try to iron out the wrinkles. But part of translating medieval texts is that they are foreign. And you shouldn’t try to erase that difference.
Rector believes that Medieval Studies can find important applications in our current reality. Medieval literature, in particular, can help bridge the gap between the old and the new.
In terms of the relevance of medieval translations or medieval texts, these are the origins of literary traditions. If you want to know Shakespeare, you should know what he knew.
Another way to think about it, though, is that these are moments of cultural, historical and political options. Our present doesn't have to be the way that it is because other times and other places have done similar things differently. It is important for us to recognize that there is no necessity to our particular version of culture.
Studying things in the Middle Ages is as important as studying things from other cultures and other parts of the world. It has similar effects of allowing us to see possibility and difference as something that could apply to ourselves, of knowing that we are not trapped by our own culture.
At the heart of Rector’s methodology is his goal of helping readers understand ancient texts while also making the language accessible and easy to learn. He hopes his texts can be used for the simultaneous engagement of both modern and ancient languages.
Translations have an interesting role in the study of medieval literature, because often those languages are inaccessible. I worked really hard, for example, to make sure that my text could be used as an aid to a reading of the original. So, line by line translation, at the level of grammatical order.
I really like what we call a by-facing translation where you have the original language on one side and the English translation on the other. So students can read the English side while referring to the original. And as students become more advanced, they can start to spend more time on the original side of the text. I really wanted my translations to be useful for students who are trying to bridge the gap back to the original language in the original text.