26 pages • 52 minutes read
Marie De FranceLe Lai de Lanval
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Marie de France is part of “Arthuriana”: the collection of Arthurian romances, also referred to as chivalric romances. King Arthur and the magician Merlin were introduced to the literary canon by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his 12th-century book, History of the Kings of Britain. Chivalric romance is also rooted in the songs of the French troubadours. These love songs, in turn, were historically influenced by Sufi poetry (such as Rumi and Hafez). Ancient Latin inspirations for courtly love also include Ovid’s Art of Love.
In medieval France, Arthurian stories were extremely popular. During this era, when Marie de France was writing, Lancelot was introduced by Chretien de Troyes in The Knight of the Cart. Stories about King Arthur’s knights searching for the Holy Grail spawned what modern readers would call “fanfiction”; many Grail stories by anonymous authors were published during the middle ages in France.
Other countries expanded the Arthurian canon. Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto was published in Italy, and Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach was published in Germany. In Spain, Miguel de Cervantes parodied the Arthurian romance genre in Don Quixote. In England, Thomas Malory crafted a Middle English version of Le Morte d’Arthur. During the English Renaissance, Edmund Spenser published his Faerie Queene, featuring Arthur as a prince.
Arthuriana has endured throughout the ages. It saw a resurgence in the English Romantic period during the 19th century with poems like Alfred Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” and Percy Shelley’s “Queen Mab.” In the 1950s, T. H. White wrote The Once and Future King, loosely based on Malory’s text, and it became the inspiration for the Disney film Sword in the Stone. Modern Arthuriana includes young adult books—like Legendborn by Tracy Deonn—as well as many other movies, TV shows, and even consumable products (like King Arthur flour).
Translation Context
There are countless translations of the Le Lai de Lanval, each with different specific priorities and points of view on the poem. Part of this phenomenon is due to the polysemic (having several meanings) nature of the original version, written in Old French. For instance, loan words from Norman are used to describe the garments of the fairy damsel, resulting in some discrepancies between translations. As a result, some translations preserve the literal meaning (dark, silken garments) while others preserve the connotative meaning (opulent purple and scarlet garments).
In addition, metrical differences between English and French present other issues for translation. As a lai, the poem was written in strict eight-syllable lines, with rhyme. However, preserving this structure requires extreme alteration to specific lines. Prose translations rely on a more literal and specific translation of each line, but sacrifice the metrical and rhymed quality in order to maintain the particular idioms and similes of the original.
These issues are surprisingly eternal, as Marie de France was also a translator. Many of her Fables come from Latin prose which she converted into French meter, almost always with rhyme.
