ABSTRACT

A simple kind of networking is common enough in studies of medieval translation. Small corpora of retranslations or adaptations are arranged according to the probable links connecting each particular version with the others. However, such initial-cause networking can also be properly incremental in places where, as often happens, one or several 'missing links' could explain the phenomena in a more satisfactory way. Straight philological examples are provided by C. W. Marx on transmission from Anglo-Norman to Middle English, and Kalinke on medieval Norse-Icelandic translations in eighteenth-century manuscripts. The problem has a frighteningly quantitative dimension. According to the sociologist Alphonse Boubert, who was there at the time, some 1,748 periodicals were published in Paris in 1889, of which 56 specialized in literature. For the German side, Schlawe lists some 64 'significant' literary periodicals for the period 1885-1910. Stefan George would in turn translate verse by his French translator Albert Saint-Paul, published in the May 1893 issue of the German periodical.