Chretien de Troyes in Prose: The Burgundian Erec and Cliges

Abstract

This translation of the Middle French prosifications of two of Chrétien de Troyes's Old French romances is a credit to both Joan Tasker Grimbert and Carol J. Chase. Their rendering of the Middle French syntax and vocabulary of both texts is fluid, accurate, and believable, while the overall presentation of the volume is clean and unfussy. The Introduction to the translations constitutes both a useful piece of apparatus for understanding the translators’ rationale for certain decisions and a brief, yet insightful, explanation of, and guide to, the texts’ historical and literary context, and the current state of scholarship. Grimbert and Chase lead us through the evolution of Arthurian romance from twelfth-century poetry to fifteenth-century prose and elucidate, with a combination of exactitude and concision, why fifteenth-century prosifications have come to be understood as more than simple translations of the original texts. They argue that this type of prosification actually constitutes transmutation, a process which is often underpinned by what Jane H. M. Taylor refers to as ‘acculturation’, which is a reappropriation of an anthropological term, and by which she means a meticulous recasting of the unfamiliar in familiar terms.