Salvo García, Irene <br/><br/>
“Que l’en seult balaine clamer.” Linguistic commentary and translation in the Middle Ages (ca thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, Spain and France) 

 -  2019.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> ‪The first translations of Ovid’s ‪ ‪Metamorphoses‪‪ in Castilian and in French date from the end of the thirteenth century. These versions, the product of a common exegetic tradition of French origin, are part of a much wider historiographical and Christian body of works: the ‪ ‪General estoria‪‪ (1270-1284) of King Alfonso X, the modern edition of which has more than 6,000 pages, and the ‪ ‪Ovide moralisé‪‪ (‪ ‪ca‪‪ 1320), which contains 72,000 verses. Despite having extensive interpretative glosses at their disposal, both translations are remarkably literal, which allows us to compare the original text to the vernacular version quite precisely. Thus, we observe that the translators were also aware of the short Latin gloss, which is of a linguistic character and is a fundamental part of Latin commentaries on Ovid. In this article, we focus on the translation of the lexicon of plants, flowers, and animals, which are mentioned frequently in Ovid’s ‪ ‪Metamorphoses‪‪, and we study the extent to which the vernacular solutions can be explained by or linked to the previous commentaries. The examples highlight the difficulties the translators had to contend with, which included not only having to understand Latin precisely, but also finding Romance language equivalents to capture the original Latin term. The comparison between both translations contributes to the literary and linguistic histories of Old French and Castilian between the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century.‪