This chapter seeks a dialogue between the chansons de geste and the modern translation theories of Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti, to ask questions about the ethics and politics of translation in the medieval and modern periods. Does translation enable an encounter with the ‘foreign’, or does it rather foreclose this possibility by domesticating all that is unfamiliar? Is translation an act of hospitality, a welcoming of the foreign, or is the foreign used as a commodity? Or, to put the question another way: is translation an ethical encounter with alterity, or does it seek to exploit alterity for pragmatic, political ends? I choose to focus on the chanson de geste here as it is arguably the most ‘nationalized’ medieval genre, considered quintessentially ‘French’. Putting the genre into contact with modern translation theory has the potential to free it from this nationalizing straightjacket and to reveal its ability to cross frontiers and to appeal to publics of differing tongues and persuasions. I hope, in the same movement, to integrate this popular and diverse medieval genre into contemporary debates about the practice of translation.

I start, then, from a governing assumption of much chanson de geste criticism: the idea that home of the genre is ‘France’. This categorization draws on the medieval author Jehan Bodel's division of literature into three materes – those of France, Bretagne and Rome – the first being associated with the chanson de geste.