• 1 J.-P. Richard, Microlectures, Paris, Seuil, 1979, p. 11; like my own here, his readings, he says, “ (...)

Le projet de ces lectures (…) me vouait, on le voit bien, aux scrupules d’une minutie, à l’attrait soutenu d’une petitesse, fût-elle labile, fuyante (…). Mais le petit n’est-il pas quelquefois le plus précieux1 ?

• 2 I use the terms “translator”, “adapter”, and prosateur indiscriminately: most theorists of translat (...)
• 3 I use the edition by M. Colombo Timelli, L’Histoire d’Erec en prose: roman du XV^e siècle, Geneva, D (...)

1The incomparably beautiful Enide glimpses, for the first time, the knight who will become her husband. She blushes, with due maidenly modesty: never has she seen so handsome a man, tant bel homme. And in one of the three redactions of the fifteenth-century Burgundian prose Erec, the adapter/translator2 feels the need to underline the moment: his original, he adds, le compte, tells us that Erec’s beauty could be convincingly compared to that of Absolom: “car dist le compte qu’il pouoit estre acomparé a la beaulté d’Absolon”3.

• 4 Biblically, Absolom was, of course, the son of David; 2 Samuel 14:25 describes him as the most beau (...)
• 5 Œuvres complètes, ed. le marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire and G. Raynaud, Paris, Firmin-Didot, 187 (...)
• 6 I refer, of course, to Barthes’s article «L’effet de réel», Communications, 11, 1968, p. 84-89 (rep (...)

2Now, Absolom is, of course, in the Middle Ages, a standard comparator for male beauty4. We have only to look, for instance, at that compendium of medieval commonplace, Eustache Deschamps’s complete works, to see how easily Absolom trips off the poetic tongue: the poet has two of his ventriloquized ladies compare the beauty of their lovers to that of Absolom, and the biblical hero acts as one of the indices of the fragility of human existence (even Absolom’s beauty could not save him from death…)5. But what is particularly interesting in what might seem, at first sight, a detail, a mere commonplace, something like an example of Barthes’s détail non notable6, is the phrase dist le compte – because this is much more significant than simply a standard medieval cliché. The comparison does indeed appear in the compte by Chrétien de Troyes which our prosateur is translating. But it does so, in the original verse version, very much later: when Erec is at the height of his chivalric glory, after his marriage to Enide and when he is requesting permission from Arthur to return to his own kingdom of Carnant:

• 8 In an interesting article, Michel Charles interrogates the notion of what might constitute, in the (...)
• 9 Daniel Arasse, to whose work this paper is indebted, makes the point, in relation to painting, that (...)
• 10 “The Significance of the Insignificant: Reading Reception in the Burgundian Erec and Cligès”, Fifte (...)
• 11 See for instance Raoul de Presles, in 1375: “Si ie ne ensuy en ceste translation les propres mots d (...)
• 12 See his Semiotics of Poetry, London, Methuen, 1978, chapter 1, «L’intertexte inconnu», Littérature, (...)

3And it is this insignificant, non-notable fact, easily overlooked, that, in the context of a study of detail, is interesting8. First, it demonstrates a close and detailed reading of the original, on the part of the adaptor – but much more important, it is evidence of a judicious reading, and more particularly of a process of deliberate, undisguised textual management. The adapter has taken the trouble to promote a standard, cliché’d comparison, and transferred it from authorial comment to, indirectly and by implication, Enide’s gaze9. In this paper, I want to argue as I have done elsewhere, with the translation of Erec, and indeed with that of Cligès to which I shall also refer, as well as to other prosateurs, for the translators’awareness, and deliberate and sophisticated manipulation, of the detail of source texts. I want to suggest, in other words, and rather contrary to assertions I made in a previous article10, that the editorial moves of the prosateurs of the late Middle Ages are self-conscious acts – and that this self-consciousness is to be detected at the level of fine detail, as much as on the larger scale of interpolation or deletion. Prosateurs apologise, anxiously, for the fact that their translations are not word-for-word11, but it is often precisely the relation between translation and original, even at the level of word and detail, that is valuable to our understanding of the poet’s own understanding of a text. Moreover – and the point is an important one – to read comparatively, as between verse text and mise en prose, is often to note oddities, surprises, which could be classed with Michael Riffaterre’s “ungrammaticalities” or “catachrèses”12: that is, unexpectednesses which disconcert the attentive reader who expects a smooth and uninterrupted progress through a work, and which serve as signals that the surface text needs further investigation. To notice these apparently inconspicuous details, then, is to question just what are the pragmatic presuppositions behind them – and this is a fruitful manœuvre that allows us to hypothesise as to the translators’æsthetic or ideological presuppositions and strategies.

• 14 See A. M. Colby, The Portrait in Twelfth-Century French Literature: An Example of the Stylistic Ori (...)
• 15 I am painfully aware that I am simplifying the question of male and female gaze – not least in leav (...)
• 16 No trace of this faint lasciviousness in the prose text which says merely “de son atour elle estoit (...)

5Once detected, in other words and if its significance is to be understood, the presence of a detail demands its repositioning in a larger hermeneutic context: it provokes, indeed requires, a response, and that response is likely to involve an understanding of the text as a whole. The little comparison that I have quoted here does, I believe, precisely that: it refracts the source text in ways which illuminate the translator’s very particular, and very focused, reading. Chrétien’s original, here, consists of a lyrical description of Enide, too long to quote in full and which occupies some twenty lines (CTE, l. 421-441): Enide is a miracle of Nature, the very embodiment of beauty in conformity with the norms of medieval literary portraiture14. The description quite deliberately, and explicitly, solicits a male reader’s gaze15: Enide, we are told, is dressed in rags through which the loveliness of her body can be glimpsed (CTE, l. 402-410)16; she is, says Chrétien unapologetically (CTE, l. 439), “fete por esgarder”. But nothing, at this point in Chrétien’s text, represents the female gaze, Enide’s first glimpse of Erec; we are given no hint as to his appearance; simply, we are told that because Enide does not know him, “vergoigne en ot et si rogi” (CTE, l. 447). Compare this with the fuller context of the Absolom comparison – which, I stress, appears very much later in the text, well beyond the first meeting where Enide’s beauty is the primary focus:

• 17 W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy”, Sewanee Review, 54, 1946, p. 3-18.
• 18 Roland Barthes’s “La mort de l’auteur” was first published in 1968 in the journal Manteia, 5, p. 12 (...)
• 19 For a recent exhaustive study, see S. Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Barthes, Foucault (...)
• 20 Marine Ricord sets out a pertinent question on this topic: see her introduction to Le Parti pris du (...)
• 21 To quote Michel Charles again (see above, p. 244, n. 3): methodologically, I propose to discuss the(...)

7What I have said here reverts, knowingly, to the question of “authorial intentionality” on the translator’s part, and “intentionality”, of course, has been the subject of some critical dispute at least since 1946 when Wimsatt and Beardsley invented the phrase “intentional fallacy”, and stated, with glorious certainty, that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art”17 – and more recently, since Barthes and Foucault proclaimed “the death of the author”18. This is not the place to trace the evolution of the controversy19, but I want to argue that “detail” provides the ideal locus where the attentive reader of a translation or an adaptation is led, inevitably, into postulating the agency of a “personality” – the translator/adapter20. Now, we know nothing of the present translator: at most, we understand him to have an attachment, in some capacity, to the court of Burgundy. As a consequence, we cannot bring to bear any of the external evidence as to his “intention” of the kind which was judged especially misleading by Barthes and his colleagues. On the other hand, the study of “detail” in rewriting offers, valuably, internal, textual, evidence of a translator’s “grammar” of mise en prose, because such a translation can be compared, tacitly, with what might have been: a direct, unmediated, word-for-word translation. The divergence between the potential and the realised allows us, I believe, to speak legitimately of intention, and to attempt to provide heuristic models for the choices that the translator/adapter has made21.

• 22 Again, Charles is useful: a detail, he proposes, “est ce que l’analyste, en fonction d’une stratégi (...)
• 23 See CTE, l. 2409-2429.

8Let me provide another example, from the same text, of “detail”22, this time from the crucial scene where Enide weeps with dismay at criticism of Erec for having abandoned chivalry in favour of uxoriousness. Chrétien precedes this key moment with another long (too long to quote in full here), carefully composed paean of praise23: Enide is more beautiful than any other lady in the world; she is “gentix et enorable, / de saiges diz et acointable, / de bon ere et de boen atret” (CTE, l. 2413-2415). No-one can accuse her of “folie,/ne malvestié, ne vilenie” (CTE, l. 2417-2418); she is admired for her largesce and her savoir; no-one can find ground to condemn her:

• 24 I am led here, in other words, to nuance the article by Martha Wallen in which she argues that the (...)
• 25 Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image: question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art, chapter 1: “L’histo (...)

10What I italicise here are three phrases, again apparently innocuous: chastity, godliness, sinlessness, in the description of a lady of birth and heroine of a romance, might easily pass unnoticed. In context, however, those phrases are representative, I believe, of a consistent and strategic rewriting of the translator’s source text to provide, contrary perhaps to received opinion which has preferred to see the prosateur as heaping blame on Enide, an exculpation or at the very least a careful, and sophisticated, reassignment of blame24. I am suggesting a process of reading, here, which has analogies, perhaps, with the process of “gradual envisioning” which Didi-Huberman describes in the discovery of a painting by Fra Angelico in the Convent of San Marco in Florence: a process in which, progressively, details, signes, emerge from the darkness of the cell and the fadedness of the painting, and which gradually coalesce to make the painting both visible and ultimately lisible25. As with the painting, close attention here to the menu détail of the mise en prose shows us a prosateur having a more nuanced, a more sophisticated translational strategy than is commonly supposed, and which, in particular, allows him a certain critical distance from the source text.

• 26 For dosnoier, see Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française, II, p. 746; for drue, see (...)
• 27 See for instance the theologians quoted by A. Blamires, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, Oxford, C (...)
• 28 See Arasse, Le Détail, p. 357.

12Chrétien’s vocabulary makes Enide, unequivocally, a sexual object – dosnoier, “faire l’amour”; drue, “amante”; acoler, beisier26 – and in a medieval context of sexual ethics where an excess of sexuality, even with a wife, is dangerous and reprehensible27, it seems unarguable that our prosateur is pursuing a carefully defensive strategy designed to stress Enide’s blamelessness: she is so chaste that no-one has been able to detect her in wrongdoing; she is profoundly God-fearing, allowing no stain on her honour; Nature herself has made her free of any taint of sin. Our prosateur, in other words, by altering a few mere words, a detail or two, is transforming what Arasse calls “the economy” of his source28: exonerating Enide, quite deliberately and explicitly, from the blame that might well attach to her in Chrétien’s original, as distracting Erec, by a certain undefined and reprehensible, eroticism, from his duty and calling as knight and king.

• 29 L’Histoire d’Erec, ed. Colombo Timelli, p. 9, note 10.
• 30 Jakemés’s Roman du Châtelain de Coucy et de la Dame de Fayel was edited by Maurice Delbouille, Pari (...)
• 31 Such episodes are surprisingly widespread: see Le Cœur mangé: récits érotiques et courtois des XII^e(...)
• 32 For a full and valuable summary of the development of the legend – the Châtelain was genuinely and (...)
• 33 Although I agree with Helen Solterer, speaking of the verse romance, that to isolate this episode a (...)

13Now, this process of what one might call “heuristic rewriting” is detectable in the other Burgundian prose translation of a Chrétien poem, Cligès – but because it is not impossible that this latter and the Burgundian Erec et Enide are the work of the same prosateur who might therefore, logically, be employing the same translational methodologies29, and in order to show that to concentrate on the transposition of detail is as valid, and as valuable, for the study of mises en prose more generally, I shall turn now to comparisons between another pair of texts: the thirteenth-century Jakemés’s verse Le Roman du Châtelain de Coucy et de la dame de Fayel and its fifteenth-century prose counterpart, Le Livre des amours du Chastellain de Coucy)30. These latter texts are, of course, notorious for their incorporation of a cœur mangé episode31 into a fictionalised version of the life-story of a blameless, and historically attested, hero-trouvère32. Briefly, the poet, Renaud Châtelain de Coucy, falls in hopeless love with the Dame de Fayel, but the latter’s husband, the Seigneur de Fayel, discovers the secret and becomes wildly jealous. After many vicissitudes for the lovers, Renaud takes the Cross and departs on crusade: he is wounded by a poisoned arrow, but before he dies, he asks his companion Gobert to take out his heart and give it to the Dame de Fayel as an earnest of his undying devotion. Unfortunately, the husband waylays Gobert, takes possession of the heart, has it cooked and served to the lady in the course of a feast; the lady dies of grief, the husband is driven into exile. I want to concentrate here specifically on the final, climactic episode of the cœur mangé33.

• 34 In his introduction to his edition of Jakemés’s romance: Paris, Firmin-Didot, 1936, p. xc.
• 35 In his and Petit’s edition of the prose text, p. 25-27; see however Fr. Suard’s later article, “Le (...)
• 36 Compare the verse text: “Ains vous penderai a mes mains: Se ce n’estoit pour el au mains Que pour t (...)

16I distance myself, here, from Maurice Delbouille, who maintains that the prosateur is “scrupuleusement fidèle au texte qu’il translatait” and intervenes only minimally, “se contentant le plus souvent de briser le rythme de l’octosyllabe et d’effacer la rime […]”34 – and indeed from François Suard who sees him as, primarily, an abbreviator35. The first detail on which I focus relates to the portrayal of the husband, gleeful, joieulx, happily showing la milleure chiere que jamais nulz homs peuist faire. Now, nothing in the verse text licenses this instance of rewriting: the prosateur’s little detail, however, is, I believe, a contribution to the construction of a new and individual concept of the husband, where the emphasis is firmly on the murderous “duel” between the male protagonists, and which is actualised, with yet another contrast, in the same chapter. In the verse text, when the husband explains, par mout grant yre (CCDF, l. 8054), what the dish consists of, he does so by referring simply to vengeance: “Et pour un peu moi revengier Vous ai ge fait son coer mengier” (CCDF, l. 8074-8075). The prosateur’s husband, by contrast, is concerned with questions of power and hegemony: he, the husband, has suffered distress and sleepless nights at the hands of his rival; “mais ores maintenant, la mercy Dieu, j’en suys au deseure […]” (Amours, p. 223; my italics). Having been the victim, in other words, the husband now celebrates, explicitly and gleefully, the fact that he is the victor. What this little detail betrays, I believe – and there is again no equivalent in the verse text – is a sense of petulant, competitive rivalry which, it could be argued, is a key to a new reading on the part of the prosateur: a Seigneur de Fayel brooding, interminably, on the slights to which he has been subject: witness, for instance, another little addition of the prosateur’s, at the point where the Seigneur is threatening to hang Gobert, carrying the heart, with his bare hands “ne fust tant seulement que pour courouchier ton seigneur, par lequel j’ay eu tant de desplaisirs” (Amours, p. 215; my italics)36. In each case, we are talking of alterations to the merest detail – but I would contend that this prosateur is far more sophisticated, far more innovative, far more purposive than one might suppose were one simply to work at the level of major change or major rewriting.

• 37 As with the word brouet which he also uses – corresponding to coulis in the verse text; see CCDF, l (...)
• 38 See among others the excellently documented and socially and politically interesting study by F. Fa (...)
• 39 Might it be the case that the prosateur’s heavy insistence, in his prologue, on the nefarious role (...)
• 40 An oversimplification which I myself have perhaps been guilty of propagating: see my “The Significa (...)
• 41 Maria Colombo Timelli undertakes a rather similar interpretative manœuvre in her «Pour une “défense (...)
• 42 Mourey, Philosophies et pratiques du détail, p. 80.

17My last example I take from the same chapter in the prose text: the final sentence of the extract above in which the prosateur translates the laconic description, in the verse text, of the dish the lady eats – savereus – by telling us that the Châtelain’s heart was “dehachié tant menuement et sy bien asavouré de chucre et de sinamonne que jamais la dame, a son samblant ne a son goust, elle n’avoit mengié milleure viande”. Now, it would be easy to dismiss this as simply one of Barthes’s effets de réel: ginger and sugar are, after all, among the most conventional flavourings in the cuisine of the Middle Ages, and our prosateur might be thought, therefore, to be providing some busy local colour37. I want to suggest, however, that behind this little detail lies an interesting predicate which only that detail reveals, and that here as elsewhere, we should assume a conscious strategy, this time relating to plausibility and, perhaps, to a certain horrified fascination with the cannibal which transcends time and place38. What I am referring to, here, is what pragmatics calls “contextual sense”: I suggest that in order to understand what intention to ascribe to this extension of meaning, we need to consider assigning reference to it. In which case, we might, perhaps, pragmatically, wonder if the provision of new detail, here, is not a response to an anticipated query: “Why did the Dame de Fayel not realise that what she was eating was the heart of her lover? Was the texture or the appearance not different? Did it not have a different taste?” What the prosateur is offering are plausible, and disturbing, answers to these disturbing, and reasonable, questions: the heart had been – and the detail, once noticed, is unpleasant – chopped up very small; its flavour had been disguised by the (relatively exotic) sugar and spice. Our prosateur is, perhaps, engaged in the dynamic process of making and negotiating meaning between “speaker” (the text) and “hearer” (the reader). Might his wariness have to do with fending off any implication of cannibalism (given the taste, the Dame could not be expected to understand what she was being tricked into)39? I am, of course, speculating, but as we saw with my first example here, the comparison of Erec to Absolom, we should not assume a priori that the processes of interlingual, or intralingual, translation are internalised40. Our translators make conscious choices as to the balance of information; they assign pragmatic force to their utterances; their translations have illocutionary goals which we are, I believe, entitled at least to explore41. And perhaps our prosateur’s sugar and cinnamon are details which, as Mourey says, “fragilise[nt] la scène, la destabilise[nt]”: which are “énigmatique[s], inquiétant[s]”42.

• 43 Charles, “Le sens du détail”, p. 417-422, emphasises in particular the element of authorial, and re (...)
• 44 Until recently, of course, the standard overall work of reference for the late-medieval and Renaiss (...)
• 45 Translating Baudelaire, Exeter, Exeter University Press, 2000, p. 5.
• 46 I borrow the term revalorisation from N. Schor’s Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, Ne (...)

18Those who have worked on the ideological drive in the translation or mise en prose of medieval texts – and I include myself here – have tended to look for major omissions or additions or rewritings. What I have suggested here, however, is the vital importance of detail as a tool in understanding the meanings of the propositions imagined by our prosateurs. Because the translation of detail often involves relatively minor shifts and transpositions, it is by the same token unobtrusive and can easily be ignored by commentators43. In recent years, after much neglect, the late-medieval mises en prose are receiving appropriate attention44; we are now, I believe, in a position to embark more fully on the process of which Clive Scott, talking of the multiple translations of Baudelaire, says that “understanding a translation in relation to an original is a profoundly more valuable activity than assessing a translation’s proximity to a source text”45. And in such a programme, the revalorisation of “detail” will need to play an important part46…