THERE'S A COMMON EXPRESSION in literary studies that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Indeed, translating poetry is one of the most difficult things a writer can do. Can you capture the nuances of a text's language—including wordplay, irony, humor, or cultural references—for a new audience? How can a translator respect a poem's artistic form and its original social context while also creating a work that is meaningful to a new audience?

One persistent idea underlying the academic field of Western translation studies is the so-called “invisibility” of the translator. When translators do their job properly, so the thinking goes, the audience isn't even aware that a translator exists—it's only when a text exhibits an awkward or stilted “translationese” or introduces confusing or unfamiliar words that an audience knows something has gone awry. Philosopher and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah argues for the value of “thick translation” and making acts of translation recognizable to the audience through annotations, glosses, and commentary; since translations can never enact word for word correspondences, a thick translation “seeks with its annotations and its accompanying glosses to locate the text in a rich cultural and linguistic context.” Translator, author, and cultural theorist Tejaswini Niranjana has argued that “translators can intervene to inscribe heterogeneity, to warn against myths of purity” and to offer “a more densely textured understanding of who ‘we’ are.” Poets of color often find themselves writing against Eurocentric traditions that assume the white (male) subject as the “default” (or universal “we”), and when poets of color translate or adapt European texts, they confront the choice of whether to make their racial positionings and sociopolitical stances explicit—or to conform to dutiful white norms of self-effacement. The “double bind” that translators and poets of color face is not only the obligation to convey the “rich cultural and linguistic context” of a work to a new audience, but also the question of when, or how, to make their (our) racial identities “visible,” or recognizable, to a reading audience.

This chapter considers how poets of color adapt (or adopt) themes and structures of Old English and Middle English literature to address the illusory dimensions of translation and race, when the labor—and racial identity—of a poetic translator flickers in and out of view (to use an optical metaphor).

THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES how the genre of the ethnic minority Bildungsroman, or story of intellectual growth, was crafted in the nineteenth-century United States in conjunction with traditions of travel narrative and contemporaneous forms of medievalism (especially historical romance). If the phrase “medieval romance” usually conjures visions of chivalric knights in armor and fair damsels in distress, what space could people of color create for themselves within such expectations? This book's explorations of medievalism by people of color starts by tracing how medieval romance and conversion narratives offered a vital scaffolding for accounts of intellectual development. African American abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass (ca. 1818–1895), Chinese American journalist and public speaker Wong Chin Foo (1847–1898), and Arab American author Ameen Rihani (1876–1940) repurposed the masculine Bildungsroman to reject medievalizing white fantasies of the past and to critique gendered Western imperial ideologies of progress and expansion. In their writings, they challenged stereotypes portraying Africans as “savage” and Asians as stagnant “Orientals.” Conversations among African American and Asian American thinkers generated nuanced forms of racial belonging in lieu of white Eurocentric models.

As discussed in the introduction to this book, my analysis of early ethnic minority writing explores what José Esteban Muñoz calls strategies of disidentification. The authors discussed in this chapter who find themselves positioned in the “minority” (in respect to white Christian masculinity) devise varied methods for disidentifying with European medieval pasts, and they seek to transform gendered notions of racial belonging through references to a Western Middle Ages that is not typically coded as properly “belonging” to them. Such gendered and politicized acts of disidentifying with the European medieval past—or openly refusing to engage with such a past—shape these authors’ arguments for new forms of cultural and national belonging.

Frederick Douglass: Disenchanting Medieval Pasts

In the final chapter of The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself (1845), internationally renowned African American orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass (ca. 1818–1895), originally named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, has achieved freedom and chooses a new surname (retaining his first name “Frederick,” which he has held from birth). His white benefactor Nathan Johnson, who has just been reading Sir Walter Scott's historical romance The Lady of the Lake, suggests “Douglass” (derived from a character in Scott's narrative), a name which Frederick adopts.

BOTH THE REEVE's Tale and the Host's comments following the Tale of Melibee end with a discussion of a staff— for the Reeve's Tale, it is the weapon Symkyn's wife uses in the final bit of textualized violence, fully repaying the Reeve's enemy for his fabliau. For the Host, it is the “the grete clobbed staves” his wife brings to him to beat the knaves. As the Tales are recopied and then, finally, printed, solidifying the reputation of Chaucer as the first “fyndere” of English verse, these narrative punishments, for me, echo across the fifteenth century in the exemplum “Tale of John of Canace,” included in Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment and printed by William Caxton. What is first a mace and then a club in Caxton's version highlights similar energies of punishment and prosthesis. But the common exemplum and its revisions also introduce that Hoccleve is erased for Caxton, even as he functions as a prologue for print, indeed “Hoccleve is at once everywhere in Caxton … yet nowhere to be found in portfolio.” In fleshing out this absence and erasure, I touch first on Caxton's printing of the Book of Curtesye with its small description of Hoccleve's Regiment. Arguing that the Regiment serves as supplement to the conception of old age and print in Caxton's paratextual materials, I then turn to a discussion of “John of Canace,” uncovering the inscription and staff in an otherwise empty chest. This link between Hoccleve and Caxton helps to reframe some of the exclamations of age-related impairments in Caxton's paratextual material, which I trace in a number of different texts and translations, beginning with Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye and ending with Polychronicon's textual substitution for embodied old age.

It would be difficult to find a better model for embodied old age and its similarities to writing than Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes— the end of the prologue to Regiment makes this model valuable, even as the end of the advisory text and the inclusion of “John of Canace” suggests the model might have been used by Caxton. When Thomas Hoccleve writes of his return home, near the end of the prologue, he describes a literal journey that is also meant to serve as a figurative homecoming, a move toward patronage from the prince.

“BUT I HOPE, that after to haue ben in youre graces handes: there shall be nothinge in it worthy of reprehension and that in the meane whyle no other (but your highnes onely) shal rede it.” Elizabeth wrote these words as part of her dedication to Katherine Parr in her New Year's gift of 1545 accompanying her translation of Marguerite de Navarre's Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse. However, three years later, in 1548, John Bale corrected her translation, added Scriptural citations, and printed the book as A Godly Medytacyon of the christen sowle. He also added his own dedication to Elizabeth. Elizabeth's translation went on to be published four more times by the end of the sixteenth century.

Like the lacuna in a close examination of all of Elizabeth's dedications to her family members, it also seems as though the five sixteenth-century printed editions have not gotten nearly enough attention. The scholarly consensus of Bale's edition is that Bale printed Elizabeth's translation in 1548, safely after Henry VIII was dead, to mobilize Elizabeth's name and translation to promote Protestantism within England. John N. King notes that “despite the pre-Reformist origins of the text, Bale uses it as a vehicle for exaggerated praise of Elizabeth's Protestant zeal.” Aysha Pollnitz and Jaime Goodrich agree that Bale published Elizabeth's translation as part of his effort to advance the English Reformation. Patrick Collinson suggests that Bale turned Elizabeth's translation into “a godly Protestant manifesto” and “in effect hi-jacked Elizabeth's juvenile exercise for the Protestant cause.”

Some scholars go so far as to suggest that Bale's afterword, in which he lists previous women who served as queens regent or regnant, is a subtle promotion of Katherine Parr to the regency of Edward VI. Both Anne Lake Prescott and Patrick Collinson suggest that Bale lists so many women who had served as regents it is hard to imagine he was not supporting Katherine Parr to be one for Edward. Yet, few scholars grapple with the importance of Bale's publication beyond these ideas, and what gets even less treatment is the later editions of Elizabeth's translations.

AT THE END of the Knight's Tale, the narrator of the Tales reports the unanimity of the pilgrims:

The terms of this unanimity are given in status and age: the gentlefolk, in particular, find the value of the story the Knight has told, as well as both young and old. But oldness really is paramount here: from the beginning of his tale, the Knight has been conscious of the past, aware of the value of what is old, even as his tale seems to focus on the traditional concerns of the young: love, battle. Indeed, even as the Knight tells a tale, much of the tale's power is found in its age, a fact apparent from the tale's first line: “Whilom, as olde stories tellen us” (1.859). And much of what the tale tells us as readers in the twentyfirst century about old age can be seen in the workings of Saturn toward the end of the tale, in the depiction of the old god, whose discussions of disease, age, and infirmity are central to his power, even if the human figures of the tale fail to see this. Even though these strategies are frequently deployed— the temporal framing of the tale, the inclusion of Saturn as a mover of divine disorder or an older order— I see in the Knight's frequent citations of oldness from the beginning more than a commonplace. While many messages about oldness and old age exist in the Tales and late medieval England— old age and its effects might be negative, old stories are important, and age can be a source of debility and impairment as well as authority and veneration— this framing has consequences for how these lines at the end of the tale can be understood, which I use a map for Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England.

IN THE FINAL chapter of Writing Old Age, I examine how these prosthetic ideas of old age reflect in the centuries following the rule of Richard II and the authorial activities of Caxton, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and the Parlement-poet. It is clear that the age-related anxieties associated with Richard's rule extend into early modern depictions of his tumultuous reign, including the chronicles of Holinshed and Shakespeare's Richard II. The age-related anxieties of Richard II's reign echo, but in reverse, with an aging queen reminding us that the intersections among politics, age, and ability remain potent concerns. Following the Earl of Essex's staging of Richard II in the early seventeenth century, Elizabeth remarked to William Lambarde that, “I am Richard II, knowe ye not,” a comment which makes this link undeniable. Indeed, as Christopher Martin has argued, “Elizabeth's experience of age informed her expression, public and private, verbal and visual.” And Elizabeth was not the only figure negotiating anxious age in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries— as the link between Elizabeth and Richard II implies, Shakespeare's plays offer numerous portrayals of old age.

But what about the prosthetic function of these poetic depictions of age-related impairments, which seem tied to the valuation of old age in the late fourteenth century? The continuing importance of viewing old age both as site of impairment and prosthetic addition comes into focus in Shakespeare's Pericles, one of his later, co-authored plays and one which depicts medieval material in a style that calls attention to its medieval qualities. Reworking the narrative of Apollonius of Tyre, Pericles tells the story of a prince, named Pericles, who escapes certain death in Antioch when he discerns, in a riddle, that a princess he wishes to marry is in an incestuous relationship with her father. Fleeing for his life, he finds himself in Tarsus, where he marries another princess whom he subsequently loses to death, and who is later revived. Separated from his daughter, he manages to find her in a brothel, from which he rescues her and almost marries her, before he realizes she is his daughter. Pericles, wife, and daughter are reunited at the end.

FELICITY HEAL, AMONG others, has shown the power and importance of New Year's gifts at the Tudor court. New Year's was not only an appropriate time to give gifts, but also to receive them, as there was an established protocol of gift-giving that required the receiver of the gift to acknowledge and give something in return. Additionally, gifts were used “to enhance bonds between individuals and families,” which I suggest Elizabeth attempted with the content of her manuscript dedications. This chapter examines the New Year's gift exchange among Henry VIII and his children to show how Mary and Elizabeth gave and received gifts differently, according to their status and abilities.

While books were not the most frequently given gift, they were a typical gift that was given to every Tudor monarch at each New Year. As such, I suggest that Elizabeth's gifts of manuscript translations were strategically planned to be New Year's gifts to her father, stepmother, and brother because this would have ensured that her gifts were at least looked at in the event that she did not present them at court in person and were attempts to strengthen the connection between Elizabeth and her family members.

Sources for New Year's Gifts

For the years in which Elizabeth gave her dedicated manuscripts, it is difficult to determine if she gave them in person, what she received in return, and what her siblings gave to gauge the significance of Elizabeth's gifts because extant New Year's gift rolls only exist for 1528, 1532, 1534, and 1539. Surviving state papers also offer few clues as to any expenses that Henry or Katherine may have incurred giving gifts to their children or giving rewards for the rest of the New Year's gifts that they would have received. However, New Year's gift rolls do not even tell the whole story of the New Year's gift exchange. According to Felicity Heal, beginning in the 1530s, gift-giving became more challenging with the upswing of Anne Boleyn and downfall of Catherine of Aragon. In 1532, Eustace Chapuys reported that the king would not accept Catherine of Aragon's gift of a gold cup, and then refused to send a gift to Catherine, her ladies, or Princess Mary.

THIS CHAPTER COMBINES medieval literary analysis and ecocriticism to consider the poetic corpus (hundreds of lyrics) that Chinese detainees carved into the wooden walls of detention barracks of the Angel Island Immigration Station, a site in San Francisco Bay currently registered by the United States as a National Historic Landmark due to its cultural significance. Located in waters a boat ride away from the city of San Francisco, CA, this so-called “Ellis Island of the West” was where many newcomers from Asia were processed as they sought entry into the US and it also operated as an immigration detention center from 1910–1940. The majority of the detainees were Chinese with some staying as long as months or years before being deported or “landed” (granted entry into the US). Thick with literary allusions and references to imprisonment and injustice in Chinese myths and literary classics, the mostly anonymous and untitled poems that the detainees composed while on Angel Island adapted medieval lyric forms (conventionalized in the Tang Dynasty) for a new geopolitical environment.

Crafting new poetic terms not used in medieval lyrics themselves, the detainee-poets repeatedly invoked the modern “wooden house” (木屋) or “wooden building” (木樓) as a prison and an uncanny home. The barracks of Angel Island, situated within a garden landscape inaccessible to the detainees themselves, were a site of frustration, humiliation, longing, and anger. In this chapter, I explore how detainees drew upon a rich tradition of medieval Chinese lyrics to testify to their own lived experiences of incarceration, and I conclude by reflecting on the importance of this “wooden building” as a site of cultural memory and activism today.

Previous chapters in this book have examined how elite Chinese Americans (or Chinese immigrants seeking US citizenship) used medieval imagery or genres to address urgent issues of racism, discrimination, and cultural belonging. During the earlier part of the twentieth century, Chinese immigrants who were scholars or merchants were not subjected to restrictions as harsh as those for incoming laborers, and my discussion of Angel Island poetry focuses on experiences of incarcerated migrants who were often less privileged and hailed from humble village origins.

This chapter has three main strands. First, I provide historical context and socio-political background for the composition of Angel Island poetry itself.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER'S THE CANTERBURY TALES begins with “sondry folk, by aventure yfalle” [various people fallen together by chance] gathering in Southwark across the river from the City of London. A mixed assemblage of people of different genders, ages, professions, and regional backgrounds, they form a temporary and at times fragile community (a “felaweshipe” or “compaignye”) traveling to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury, and along the route they tell stories on topics as varied as romantic love, violence, class conflict, religious devotion and conversion, geopolitics, philosophical matters, and sex. This chapter considers how modern-day poets of color use Chaucerian materials not only for the purposes of humor and light-hearted social satire (as they might be expected to do). They also—on a much more serious note—subvert longstanding Eurocentric cultural and linguistic norms, and they intertwine themes of race and migration to give testimony to long histories of violence and ongoing systems of oppression around the globe.

In modern-day Chaucerian adaptations by people of color, mobility—in both its physical and sociopolitical dimensions—drives the storytelling enterprise. In Chaucerian adaptations that transport the Canterbury pilgrimage into the present day while also relocating the pilgrimage to disparate locations worldwide, the storytelling narrators are always in motion, and it is impossible to disassociate the fictive speakers from their surrounding sociopolitical environments. Writing from a Caribbean perspective, Barbara Lalla observes that “Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales assembles and confronts identities continuously on the move, displaced from their ‘proper’ categories, travelling light in the characteristically en route condition of the pilgrim,” and “[p]ostcolonial writing in the Caribbean and elsewhere” is similarly “peopled by travellers. Travel facilitates shifting positions from which to view what is given out as reality … Implicated in travel is the denial of fixity.” Contemporary adaptations of Chaucer often use pilgrimage and its mixed storytelling potentials to explore present-day interplays of local and global phenomena and the “denial of fixity” that pervades transit, dislocation, and uprootedness, as well as ever-shifting ideas of home and (un)belonging. Although some modern Chaucerian poets focus on one city or neighborhood—or even a particular street—some explore a dispersal of voices and bodies across global trajectories.