By: Lucy Mackintosh
A “fixer” is identified as “performing a range of duties in addition to interpretation and/or translation, acting as local informants, guides, negotiators and more” (Stahuljak, 147). They are essentially the person who is testing out whether a piece of writing works in terms of theme, being realistic, and asking questions of the morality of the work. Our concepts of translation do not allow for us to have an idea of who the translator is, but thanks to the fixer, we almost get an autobiography of who a person is through their translational choices, mechanisms, and linguistic styles (148-149). The fixer guides works through political or social ideologies of the time, and as we see it today, acting as the first account of historical events.
Fixers are not the same thing as a translator, mainly because they have a certain ethic, or “fidelity,” that they need to uphold in their translations and transcriptions. They are historians and sociologists and journalists. Fixers are vital to what we know about history through literature; medieval literature can tell us the attitudes of religion, families, morality, and politics, among other things, in the time that the literature was written, and thanks to the mediators like fixers, we can know what life was like back in the Middle Ages and we can see a lot of commonalities to our lives today.
They are also the reason that texts like Beowulf are able to survive historically for as long as they do. Beowulf consists of a cast of characters from throughout northern Europe and shows examples of nationalism and semi-realistic historical events; references to certain parts of the Bible, names of locations, and relationships between families in this text are all ways in which the time period that it was written is able to be pointed out assumed to be between the 8th and 10th centuries (Norton Anth., 38). Beowulf was the remaining work in a library fire, and it is our only link to Saxon literature from the time, and so the smallest details from it can tell us a significant amount about how people may have written then, who it was for, what they believed in, etc.
Further Reading
More reading on the history of British literature here
Works Cited
Greenblatt, Stephen, editor. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 10th ed., Vol. A, W.W. Norton, 2018.
“The Linguistics and Literary Contexts of Beowulf.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Middle Ages: Topic 4: Overview, https://wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/middleages/topic_4/welcome.htm.
Stahuljak, Zrinka. “Medieval Fixers: Politics of Interpreting in Western Historiography.” Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory, edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills, Boydell and Brewer, 2012, pp. 147–163. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt1x73qw.13.
Note: all info on “Fixers” comes from Stahuljak, even if not cited in text.