'Oem walschedi?' Touching on tongues, teeth and skin in Van den vos Reynaerde

Simpson, J.R. (2011) 'Oem walschedi?' Touching on tongues, teeth and skin in Van den vos Reynaerde. Queeste, 18(1), pp. 32-57.

Abstract

This article explores how the Middle Dutch beast epic, Van den Vos Reynaerde, uses images of animal cruelty and devouring as a commentary on the process of translation. Central here is the idea of the ‘blindness’ of the process of intercultural adaptation in a reception context in which it seems likely audiences were sufficiently familiar with the original French stories to spot departures from these sources in the form of lies and economies with the truth put into the mouths of Willem’s characters. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Claude Lévi-Strauss, among others, the study shows how Willem’s work of adaptation appears as a sensuously tactile, indeed explicitly and indeed sadistically eroticised, process that not only problematises and interrogates relations between subject and object, active and passive, predator and prey, but also manifests in the text’s intercultural mapping of relations between local and literary geographies.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Simpson, Dr James
• Authors: Simpson, J.R.
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PD Germanic languages
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages and Cultures > French
• Journal Name: Queeste
• ISSN: 0929-8592