This article examines the role played by untranslatability in late medieval religious macaronic lyrics (ca.1350 to ca.1500). Asking what, and how, the Latin elements in these lyrics communicate, it first argues that the untranslated presence of liturgical quotations is no less important than their literal sense. Examining the relationship between codeswitches and verse form, it demonstrates that such quotations are formally differentiated in a way that not only seems to acknowledge their innate virtus (or spiritual efficacy), but reemphasizes it for doctrinal ends; even when they are comprehensively glossed, they are presented as untranslatable. This effect is particularly pronounced in carols and other lyrics that explicitly identify their liturgical phrases as quotations, framing them so as to encourage readers to voice them, and thus join in an eternal Christian community. Yet while such techniques imply that untranslatability is a rhetorical effect as much as a reality, the final section of the article examines a partial exception to this rule: lyrics whose Latin elements seem not to be part of a considered formal strategy, but rather the incidental result of their authors’ bilinguality. Examining lyric responses to the liturgical sequence Laetabundus, it suggests that, even as the Latin elements in these lyrics are made to serve instructive ends, they also reveal how bilingual poets may – like their readers – encounter Scriptural or liturgical Latin as irreducible, and thus untranslatable. It proposes that to look at macaronic lyrics through the lens of untranslatability not only enables us to discern how their Latin elements communicate to their readers, but also brings into focus their authors’ cognitive processes: the business of making in the material medium that is language, as well as the verbal artefact that is made.
