“The Body of Translation: the Roman de la Rose and the Formalization of the Embodied Experience of the Linguistic Act in the Italian and English Literary Traditions”

This essay discusses the translational dissemination of the semantic field associated with the conventions of courtly love by comparing two translations of the French medieval poem Le Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, those attributed to Dante and Chaucer. The semantic fields marked by these transitions, which had a crucial role in building the respective national cultures of the two poets, in the course of the English literary tradition contributed to formalizing the performative nature of the linguistic act of translation, as represented by the works of Shakespeare.