Translanguaging, Word and Image, and the Danse Macabre

Abstract

The late medieval Danse Macabre, a bilingual word-and-image tradition, may be understood through the theoretical lens of translanguaging. This article begins with an analysis of the visual reception of this tradition in a public art installation in Luxembourg City during the coronavirus pandemic, and is followed by the challenges of applying paratranslation to a page of the early printed Danse Macabre (1486). Returning to the earliest translations of the Danse, the article also examines evidence of untranslatability and tensions between three literary languages in the Catalan Dança de la Mort (c. 1490).