The Translation as Original: Probing the Making and the Agency of Medieval Documents (Ninth-Thirteenth Century)

Abstract: The concept of an original as a source is fundamental for translators and students of diplomatics. However, recent trends in the field of translation studies have recognized multidirectional and multimedial operations in translational processes that require a reassessment of the notion of a primary point within these processes. This essay probes the relation between original and translation, with a focus on sealed charters and diplomas issued as originals in northern Europe between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries. Yet, as will be argued, these documents were less primary than mediatic, sensory, textual, and artifactual links in a chain of specific events, such as transactions and settlement of disputes. The task of charters was to translate living actions and their actors into a legally credible record. Assuring the effect of equivalence with the "original" event was paramount and addressed by imbuing the media of writing, skin and wax, with haptic traces of the participation of authors and witnesses in documentary production. The document, by embodying the event of its production and bringing to existence the disappeared event that had required its creation, formed a pause that gathered and stabilized these multiple interactions as an enduring artifact. Charters were not "primary" in this process, but medieval and modern scholars have construed them as originals, as having an irreducible ontological plenitude that might be copied but could not be translated.