🧵: Let me show you Jacqueline de Weever's pioneering 1994 study on how modern translators of medieval texts often reinforce ideas that Blackness cannot be beautiful, & how they claim, in their translations, that blackness is a "stain".
#MedievalTwitter
De Weever analyzes translations of a major passage in the Old French romance 'Aucassin et Nicolette', when beautiful Nicolette discovers she's Arab and "anoints" her face black/noire.
Modern translators refuse to translate "noire" as "black" when applied to a beautiful woman.
De Weever notes that "noire" appears 2 times before it is applied to Nicolette. It is used to emphasize how white Nicolette is (so white daises appear "noire" by comparison) or to describe the blackness of a wild man. Translators translates these instances properly as "black".
Nicolette discovers she's the daughter of the Emir of Cartage, disguises herself as "noire" with herbs.
De Weever points out that every modern translator suddenly does not want to translate "noire" as "black" when applied to beautiful Nicolette.
De Weever brilliantly notes that, just as damningly, the translators render "oinst" [anoints] as "stain" or "smear," when the word actually is a religious word, a holy word, "a word of enhancement, not defacement."
But, to these translators, blackness can only be a stain.
Most gallingly, when the *exact same word* is used later for Nicolette removing her "noire" disguise, translators render the word as "anoints".
For these modern scholars, whiteness is an anointment, blackness a stain.
As De Weever notes, the assumption is that Nicolette's assumed blackness isn't "really" her and that she "recovers" her whiteness later.
Yet, De Weever argues we can read the moment differently. Nicolette is already in disguise as a male bard. She need not make herself "noire"
Nicolette only uses herbs to make herself black, De Weever points out, after she discovers she's the daughter of the Emir. De Weever argues that it's "a way of claiming her cultural inheritance for a brief period", something modern white translators cannot imagine.
De Weever notes that the medieval French poet's choice of this device--and choice to emphasize that Nicolette is "really" white--is one kind of problem.
The modern translators who refuse to render the actual situation in the medieval poem is another kind of problem.
De Weever smartly argues that the translators are imposing their own 20th-century values on the text with their side-stepping of Nicolette anointing herself with blackness.
De Weever also smartly notes that translations like "dark", "swarthy", and "brown" aren't alternate possibilities here.
They are words used to avoid saying "black," the literal translation of "noire."
We have a medieval French romance in which the heroine discovers she is the daughter of an Emir and then, for little practical purpose, anoints herself with blackness for a while.
Modern translators cannot handle that phrase.
What makes De Weever's article so striking is that it, like so much of her work, is about how modern scholars have imposed their own racial ideologies and assumptions on medieval texts..
Yet reviewers consistently claimed DE WEEVER imposed her ideology.
De Weever is a pioneering Black scholar of race and the Middle Ages who is not discussed often enough.
I've done a few other threads on her, which are linked here:
But you should read her book!
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