Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes Read Free Book Online Page A

today. To eliminate them entirely, however, would be to create a false modernity, so we have in some instances preferred to respect the works’ ‘otherness’ and retain archaic words for which there exist no precise modern equivalent. These terms are explained in the Glossary of Medieval Terms that immediately follows the Appendix.
    As Cervantes once lamented, reading a translation is like viewing a tapestry from the back. Through the knots and loose ends you can make out the central design and colour, but it is impossible to recreate the original in all its subtlety, detail and energy. We have attempted to provide a straightforward English prose rendition of Chrétien’s romances, but one which retains some of the richness and flow of the original. We have sought to remain as faithful as possible to Chrétien’s text, while keeping in mind the habits and needs of the contemporary reader. The elliptical nature of Old French syntax, as well as its tendency to separate relative clauses from their antecedents and to use a postpositioned subject, frequently necessitated substantial syntactical modifications. Like other writers of his day, Chrétien made little effort to avoid ambiguity in his use of personal pronouns, so we have frequently clarified ambiguous referents by the use of proper names. Nor have we attempted to reproduce the tenses of the original exactly, for Old French allowed apparently indiscriminate switching between past and present for narrative, a technique which only appears inattentive in modern English.
    Divisions into paragraphs according to modern usage have been providedby the translators. Medieval manuscripts divided the poems into lengthy sections, often of many hundreds of lines each, by the use of decorative initials, but these were the work of the scribes rather than the poet and vary in frequency and placement from manuscript to manuscript. The line numbers provided in the running heads correspond to those in the editions used to make the translations.
    Until 1987 the only available English translation of Chrétien’s major romances (except
The Story of the Grail
) was that by W. W. Comfort, published in the Everyman’s Library series in 1914 and reprinted well into the 1980s. Although accurate in the main, its Victorian style had become antiquated and accessible only with difficulty. In the past two decades a number of translations have appeared in a variety of formats and series. Rhyming translations of all five romances have been produced by Ruth Harwood Cline (Georgia UP, 1975–2000), and a poetic rendering in three-stress, unrhymed verse by Burton Raffel is now complete (Yale UP, 1987–99). Prose translations of Chrétien’s Arthurian romances have appeared by D. D. R. Owen (Dent, 1987) and David Staines (Indiana UP, 1993). In French, new translations were produced to accompany the editions of Chrétien’s poems in the Pléiade edition, edited by Daniel Poirion (Paris, 1994), as well as in the ‘Lettres gothiques’ series, edited by Michel Zink, which, in addition to appearing individually, have been published collectively in the Pochothèque by Livre de Poche (Paris, 1994). Earlier French translations that appeared in Champion’s ‘Traductions des Classiques français du moyen âge’ series remain useful.
    Our special thanks go in the first instance to Gary Kuris of Garland Publications, who always dreamed of reading these translations together in a single volume and who oversaw the negotiations that made this possible. Special encouragement was also given by Glyn S. Burgess of the University of Liverpool, whose timely intervention is most appreciated. We would also like to thank James Wilhelm, who first welcomed Chrétien into the GLML, Paul Keegan, who brought him to Penguin, and the many other colleagues, reviewers, and readers whose insightful comments and criticisms have guided us along the way. Research