Miss Butler, who has also translated the
Roland
, offers here good running versions of thirteen Old French
lais
,
fabliaux
and
contes dévots
. Under the first heading are included the
Lai du Cor, the Melion and the Lai de l'Oiselet
, which is generally classed as a
fabliau
; also, from Marie de France,
Chaitivel, Eliduc
and Les Dous Amanz. The
chosen are all from the Montaiglon-Raynaud collection: The Divided Blanket, Of the Churl who won Paradise, and The Gray Palfrey. Schultz-Gora's Chevalier au Barisel adds its length to the "contes dévots et didactiques," and as shorter samples are given (from
Méon and Barbazan et Méon
), The
Angel and the Hermit
, the
Order of Chivalry
The Jousting of Our Lady
(Du Chevalier Qui Ooit la Messe.
..).
The range of these is partly limited by the fact that a certain type of the fabliau is untranslatable; yet perhaps more brevity and variety could have been attained; and the choice, say, of
Chievrefoil
instead of the rather limp
Chaitivel
would have been advantageous. Marie has been abundantly dealt with by translators. Besides Miss Rickert's "Seven Lays" (mentioned by Miss Butler), we have Arthur O'Shaughnessy's versions and a less-known rendering of three others in the third volume of "Arthurian Romances," published by Nutt. Bisclavret is given there, and that fact, together with her own inclusion of the nearly allied Melion, probably prevented Miss Butler from translating the more famous were-wolf story. She is aware that five of her collections have been translated before; to which may be added the version (inferior to Miss Butler's) of
furnished in the peculiar missal-form of the New Mediaeval Library."
In the actual wording, Miss Butler seems to have aimed at the standard set by Andrew Lang in his classic rendering of
Aucassin et Nicolete
— to give rather the atmosphere of an Old English counterpart, the flavor of Sir Thomas Malory. In the main, naturally barring the joyous naïveté that Lang found ready to hand, she has succeeded in this endeavor, imparting a consistency and a flow of style which are quite admirable. For accuracy in adapting either of the old idioms, Miss Butler's translation, while not impeccable, is superior to most such efforts. She shows more than a Wardour Street dexterity in fitting her Old English cloak to the occasional angularity of her models. Two of her favorite methods are, first, a certain fusion of construction, resulting in three nouns—"care and heed and study"; and, second, a fusion of sentence-structure, either by wholesale inversion or, less frequently and less justifiably, by suppressing a period.
There is a generous use of the old terms: vair and viol, paynimry, churl, "for that, etc.; and what is more difficult, the translator gives the constant illusion of age in the very reticulation of the sentence, in such things as the appropriate rendering of syntactical doublets, antitheses and proverbs. The pronoun confusion of the Old French was very great. Miss Butler has been put to it skillfully to indicate and differentiate the speaker. Occasionally there is a lapse into a maze of "he" and "his" where the parties of each part are entangled with thorough legality.
But in order fully to appreciate Miss Butler's tact and, in due proportion, fidelity, it is necessary to make a word-for-word comparison between her text and the original. It may be added that I have found this the best way to take pleasure in her text. In submitting it to this process, while reading four of her selections, I have found three or four errors, with perhaps twice that number of scarcely preferable renderings. This does not seem excessive for a volume of easy and excellent swing, whose primary aim is not literalness. It should find its function in arousing the interest of beginners.
–Modern Language Notes, Vol. 26