Translatio: 'Difficult Statement' in Medieval Poetic Theory

Abstract

I have chosen to approach the complicated problem of the poetically difficult at a specific but, it seems to me, focal point: the point where the single word and the single concept come together in a union that is at the same time a conflict. Rhetoricians called the trope translatio or metaphora 'difficult' because, as the force of the term suggests, a word is carried outside its normal semantic range into foreign territory. Metaphor is a linguistic mixed marriage – a word from one family gives its own name to an alien conceptual bride, sensing in the very diversity of the partnership the possibility of a vital and vigorous union. If the match comes off well, it re-enacts in minimal form the most widely-celebrated marriage of the Middle Ages – the marriage of eloquent word with perceptive awareness of things: Mercury again meets Philology.