Erec & Enide (Translated by Burton Raffel) (Chretien de Troyes) - Softcover

Chrétien De Tro, Chrétien De Tro; Raffel, Burton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300067712 ISBN 13: 9780300067712

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Erec and Enide, the first of five surviving Arthurian romantic poems by twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes, narrates a vivid chapter from the legend of King Arthur. Chrétien's romances became the source for Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England and on the Continent. Yet his swift-moving style is difficult to capture in translation, and today's English-speaking audiences remain largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet has translated Eric and Enide in an original three-stress metric verse form that fully captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Burton Raffel's rendition preserves the subtlety and charm of a poem that is in turn serious, dramatic, bawdy, merry, and satiric. Erec and Enide tells the story of Erec, a knight at King Arthur's court, whose retirement to domestic bliss with his beautiful new wife Enide takes him away from his chivalric duties. To regain his knightly honor, Erec sets out with Enide on a series of amazing adventures. Eric dispatches thieves and giants with prodigious strength and valor but treats his wife rather harshly for doubting his abilities. When Enide is kidnapped by a robber baron, Erec revives from near-death to perform a courageous rescue, and at length the two are reconciled.

About this title

Review

"Her work constitutes the finest poetic translations now available of Chretien's romances."--"Arthuriana"

From the Back Cover

"Ms. Gilbert's couplets read beautifully, encompassing Chretien's range of tone--from wit to elevation of sentiment--very sensitively."--Charles Muscatine, author of "Chaucer and the French Tradition

"A wonderfully accurate and witty translation of Chretien's "Erec and Enide which brilliantly renders the rhymed octosyllabics of the original text in compelling, colloquial English. . . . A treat not just for students and scholars of Old French literature but, more important, for what we now call general readers--that is, all those who relish a rollicking, well-told tale."--Sandra M. Gilbert, editor of "The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women

"Older translations, generally in stupefying Maloryan prose, convey little of the sense of the poetry so obvious in the original, and admirably reproduced in this translation."--Robert Harrison, translator of "Gallic Salt: Eighteen Fabliaux

"One of the best English verse renderings of any poem by Chretien."--William J. Kibler, author of "An Introduction to Old French

"A union of scholarship and consummate art that affected me like the great stories I read in my formative years; a permanent vicarious experience."--Ruth Stone, poet, author of "Second-Hand Coat

"This will be a standard English translation of "Erec and Enide and a definitive one."--Roger J. Steiner, editor of "The New College French and English Dictionary

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300067712
• ISBN 13: 9780300067712
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 242