ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the strategies by which a translation might mediate the contradictions and difficulties of Henry's text, by way of examples of the use of French, wordplay and punning, grammatical gender, and the question of authority. The very process of translating Henry's monolingual text into Modern English, then, can uncover aspects of its original polyglot cultural context. The cultural material contexts for the Livre, then, together reflect its dual status as a confidently aristocratic book that nonetheless proclaims spiritual abjection. The various translations simultaneously offer a history of English literary language and the fashions and tensions of modern literary critical response to a poem that belongs to a "half-alien culture" to adopt for the earlier medieval period Stephen Medcalf's characterization of the later Middle Ages. The translation emphasizes a particular devotional and literary milieu for Henry's writing, one that not only exploits language for devotional ends but also prompts awareness of the multilingual context in which that language operates.
