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The King's English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boethius (review)

Discenza’s book offers us a study of the Old English translation, traditionally attributed to King Alfred, of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae examined through the dual perspective of modern translation theory and, more unusually, the prolific writings of Pierre Bourdieu. On almost every page she shows her debt to the French social anthropologist, either in the form of direct quotation or in the use of Bourdieu’s terminology: cultural and symbolic capital, fields, dispositions, markets, and habitus pepper her prose. A full-length discussion of the Old English Boethius is certainly welcome; whether Discenza’s study is enhanced by its theoretical framework is a question to which I shall return. In the first chapter, ‘Treasures from the Latin Hoard’, Discenza discusses the Boethius translation in terms of adequacy. Alfred, she argues, translates largely according to the idiom of English usage and its norms, not Latin; however, he retains many proper nouns, frequently adding a gloss to introduce his readers to ‘previously closed fields of discourse’ including classical mythology, Roman history, and the natural sciences. There are some odd statements here: Discenza tells us that Alfred avoids loan-words in his translation. Given the same tendency in the Old English language as a whole (one estimate puts the number of loanwords at only 3% of the recorded vocabulary), this is a meaningless observation without some numbers (‘a very small set’ will not do), or comparison with other texts. Here as elsewhere, some division of material into sections might have helped; Discenza’s closing consideration of words to render different types of eternity is different in kind from the more general discussion which precedes it and therefore sits rather uneasily with it. It’s not always clear where the discussion is heading; again, section layout might have helped to orient the reader. The second chapter, ‘A Christian Act of Reading’, examines the Christianization of the source text in order to accommodate the habitus Translation and Literature 15 (2006)