Julian of Norwich: A female translator of the divine
Agnieszka Gicala
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Title
Julian of Norwich: A female translator of the divine
Abstract
The paper discusses two modern translations by women of a unique religious text which can be construed as a translation itself, as it is an account of mystical visions. The author is Dame Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century English mystic and anchoress, the title is Shewings [showings, or revelations]; the language is Middle English. The uniqueness of Julian’s vision lies in its female character: Christ is perceived as a Mother, and this metaphor is developed by Julian in an elaborate way. The paper adopts an ethnolinguistic perspective; in particular, it applies the concept of linguistic worldview in the analysis of the original text and its translations. The aim is to describe the metaphor of God’s maternity along with Julian’s style as the linguistic expression of the author’s worldview, and to take a parallel view of two translations (by Elisabeth Spearing and Mirabai Starr) into modern English. In other words, the modern translations are viewed as women’s translations of a woman’s translation of God’s message as revealed to Julian. The analyses suggest that the translations differ largely in terms of strategies adopted and the resulting shifts in worldviews conveyed: from faithfulness to the original to a very modern recontextualization.
Keywords
linguistic worldview, translation by women, gender in translation, Julian of Norwich, God as Mother
34(1) - 2022