Racism, Slavery, and Literature

Abstract

ally reliable. Purists may lament that the Middle French tense system has not always been directly transposed into English – both Grimbert and Chase frequently set actions in the past which the prosateurs narrate in the present –, but I agree with the translators that this is the right procedure to follow since it results in a far more readable text in the target language (see their comment to this effect in the “Translators’ Notes”, 19). There are a few archaisms which I might have been tempted to update – for example, ‘prithee’ (Chrétien de Troyes in Prose, 33, 37) for “si vous pri[e]” (Colombo Timelli, L’Histoire d’Erec, 125, 143) and ‘forbiddance’ (Chrétien de Troyes in Prose, 55) for “deffence” (Colombo Timelli, L’Histoire d’Erec, 185) –, but there are also many lively renderings here, in particular of the fight scenes, which students of Middle French translation will examine to their profit. The notes which accompany the English texts provide a laconic commentary on the translators’ work and alert readers to a variety of material and textual matters, frequently referring back to Colombo Timelli’s editions. Given that one of the aims of Chrétien de Troyes in Prose must be to make its texts accessible to those whose French is insufficient to allow them to consult the works in these very editions, it is perhaps unfortunate that more information was not provided about these matters here in English. This is particularly true as regards the few notes which point up specific translation difficulties. These are somewhat uneven in their coverage. We are told, for example, that the word Erec uses to refer to Guinevere – “maistresse” – is “a term that suggests that Erec considers Guenevere to have authority, to be an arbiter” (37 n. 9), but the wordplay on the count of Limors’s name is not made explicit, even though he first appears upon Enide’s evocation of Death (cf. 62). The translations in Chrétien de Troyes in Prose may thus best be regarded as texts which have been prepared for readers who are already at least to some degree “in the know”. Indeed, Grimbert’s and Chase’s English versions are keyed into Colombo Timelli’s editions page by page, an aid unlikely to have been designed for the purposes of an audience possessing absolutely no French. For scholars who rate their language competency somewhere nearer to that of the Middle French specialist than to that of the grand débutant, then, Chrétien de Troyes in Prose will constitute a useful research tool.