Guillaume de Machaut: The Tale of the Alerion ed. by Minette Gaudet and Constance B. Hieatt

Abstract

could pay and support humanists. Carlson acknowledges that conservatism in “a literary economy still centred on personal patronage and professional contacts” (13), but in order to make his literary/bibliographical focus truly imposing and classic he could or should have attacked and elucidated the problems inherent in that fatal stance. In many ways the seeds of human­ ism’s irrelevance in the seventeenth century’s various wars of truth are sown early, as humanists jostle for publication, patronage, and position, at some­ times great cost to their souls. Still, Carlson’s is a very fine and detailed study, building suggestively on the work of analysts of text and patronage such as D.F. McKenzie, Robert K. Root, and Richard F. Green. It fleshes in engagingly the lives and tactics of several humanists both small and large, bodying forth the forms of things unknown, and giving to what has conventionally been an airy nothing (the actual, professional lives lived by humanists) a local habitation and a name. p e t e r a u k s i / University of Western Ontario Minette Gaudet and Constance B. Hieatt, ed. and trans., Guillaume de Machaut: The Tale of the Alerion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). viii, 192. $60.00 cloth. This translation will be welcomed by two rather different audiences: grad­ uate students, mainly in Middle English, who have no French or time, and older students, like myself, whose Old French has to be renewed through lack of practice and who, therefore, welcome the aid of a good crib. The editors/translators discuss in detail the problems of translation and their solutions. Very sensibly, since their audience is unlikely to be those fluent in Old French, they have opted for a mixture of word-for-word and sense-bysense translation, with some small transpositions of text to clarify meaning — the solution used by very many medieval translators. The verse form they have adopted reads well, and reproduces Machaut’s elegant, and occasionally rather stilted rhetorical structures quite well, while avoiding the restrictions of rhymed couplets. This translation is both closer to the original and more agreeable to read than the prose and verse translations in the Wimsatt and Kibler parallel text editions and translations of Machaut’s Jugement du Roy de Behaigne and Remede de Fortune. Apart from the work of Constance Hieatt herself, the possible relationship of the Tale of the Alerion to some of Chaucer’s work has been overlooked, but this translation should not only confirm these relationships for those Chaucer critics who have little French, but also expand our awareness of the ubiquity of courtly love language and the flexibility of vision allegories available to Chaucer. Though the 493 editors identify the Parlement of Foules and “The Squire’s Tale” as the works influenced by this Machaut poem, there are very many places where the narrator-lover’s situation and language closely parallel those of the man in black in the Book of the Duchess. Those correspondences can, of course, be derived from the Roman de la Rose and/or the Remede de Fortune, as Wimsatt suggests, but it is worth noting Machaut’s frequent use of similar material, the ultimate derivation from the Roman, and Chaucer’s frequent use of both. Another connection, of course, is the heavy use of Boethian material in Alerion. A table of such possible correspondences, such as Wim­ satt provides both in his book, Chaucer and the French Love Poets, and his edition and translation of Machaut, would have been a welcome addition to the Introduction to this translation. Reviewers, and even more so anonymous assessors, have a tendency to construct the “ideal” book they would have written (if they cared to make the immense effort). I have not been able to resist this tradition. This book suffers a bit from split vision of its probable audience. The translation will, as I have remarked, serve two types of reader very well. The Introduction, on the other hand, will serve the graduate student less well. After a brief identification and contextualization of Machaut and this poem, the bulk of the Introduction is devoted to the question of Machaut’s sources and use of...