After seeing this post (by daphne) about vulvic imagery in medieval Christian texts, I decided (due to a combination of puzzle-solving curiosity and ADHD) to try to translate the text. I’ll let you fill in the very apropos linguist joke on your own 🤭
Anyway, I won’t bury the lead, so here are my translations. Scroll down for more detail on the process!
Transcription:
Nous monstre tres dous dier me tresguint largesce
Quant vousistes pour nous souffrir tant de destresce
Literal translation (attempt!):
(It [this image]/God) shows us (this) very soft/sweet door, (which) signals generosity to me
When you (God) wanted us to suffer so much distress
Freeish translation:
To present us such a pleasant portal is, to me, a grand gesture of generosity
When you’ve willed us so much woe
———
Ok so here’s what I did. I speak French decently, and at first glance it looked like Old/Middle French.
After eyeballing it a little, I needed to look up medieval script to see if I was reading the letters properly. As I was doing this I was cross-checking words in O/M French to see if things were lining up. For the most part it went well but I ran into a couple of real head-scratchers. First, dier. I thought this was probably related to French dire (to say/tell) but I wasn’t getting any hits. So then I thought, since I’d confirmed we’re in OF, could this be from eastern France / modern-day Belgium/Luxembourg/The Netherlands and be a dialect (like Walloon or Luxembourgish) that included some Germanic words? That led me to the Luxembourgish dier, meaning door, which made sense given the imagery. Then I ran into tresguint, which was extremely mysterious. It took me quite a while digging, and what I landed on is that it’s a combo of tres (very) and guint, a conjugation of the OF verb guignier (cognate with English wink), meaning to signal. So, that’s my best effort based on semi-educated guesses and instinct. If you’re still here, you get my final version of translation, the freest one. I guess it’s a poem.
✨
A glance, a wink, a glimmer
a place of warmth, a glow
beyond the gloom
✨
