INTRODUCTION 25
John Wyclif (1320-84), a master at Balliol College in Oxford, was the first
to transfer the gospels into the modern vernacular. With impoverished
preachers, who were called the Lollards, he took the gospels in English to the
people. In 1401 Archbishop Arundel denounced Wyclif as heretical, fuming,
"The pearl of the Gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine."
Arundel further wrote in his report to papal claimant John XXIII in 1421,
"This pestilent and wretched John Wyclif, of cursed memory, that son of the
old serpent... endeavoured by every means to attack the faith and sacred doc-
trine of Holy Church, devising—to fill up the measure of his malice—the ex-
pedient of a new translation into the mother tongue."^2 The scholar's death
saved him. Some associates were burned alive for their unauthorized vernac-
ular renderings. Wyclif lay safely in the earth until 1424, when his bones were
dug up, burned, and thrown into the River Swift.
Etienne Dolet (1509-46) translated the Bible into French, but it was for
translating Plato in such a way as to subvert the notion of immortality that he
was tried for heresy and taken to the stake. However, in his Maniere de bien
traduire d'une langue en aultre (1540), he did leave us five important rules of
translating, of which the final one applies to all good writing: "The translator
must achieve harmonious cadences, he must compose in a sweet and even
style so as to ravish the reader's ear and intellect."^3
William Tyndale dared to translate the New Testament into English. It is
fair to say that he established the English language for the Bible: the King
James Version of the New Testament is in large part Tyndale's phraseology.
Tyndale's prose is clear, modern, minimally Latinized, and with unmatched
narrative powers. Everything is fresh, including the use of very common
words, unelevated for religious respectability.
For "his cunning counterfeit," which Bishop Wolsey called "persiferous
and most pernicious poison," he was arrested. It is good to remember that the
word once had so much power to disturb. Sir Thomas More ranted allitera-
tively against this "devilish drunken soul," who challenged the hierarchy with
his English phrases, which the lowest figure of society would receive without
mediation of Latin or clergy. In what amounted to a poem of rage, More pro-
nounced that "this drowsy drudge hath drunken so deep in the devil's dregs
that if he wake and repent himself the sooner he may hap to fall into draff that
- Quoted in Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation, p. 201.
- Quoted in Steiner, After Babel, p. 263.