Translating Nature in French Verse Bestiaries

Abstract French verse bestiaries participate in translatio as an interlinguistic mode of textual transmission that disseminated the Greek Physiologus; they also use multiple, intersecting forms of translation to uncover the spiritual truths that the world was thought to contain. By engaging with the untranslatability of bestiary creatures, French bestiaries derived from the B-Isidore branch of the Latin Physiologus activate the ontological potential of translation as well as its epistemological capacities. Translation in these works is a way of understanding the world and of reflecting on (human) being itself. This use of translation is compared with Derrida’s concept of the ‘animot’, which uses linguistic translation to think beyond the supposed human–animal divide. Bestiaries expose the historical limitations of Derrida’s concepts of language and of the human–animal binary he deconstructs, while nonetheless sharing Derrida’s interest in translation as a process that reveals what animal and human natures have the potential to become.