Introduction

Summary

In an ideal world, this would be a complete translation, line by line, of the extraordinary prehistory of Arthurian Britain that is Perceforest. But, as anyone who has encountered the original knows, there is a problem: it is immensely long. Each one of Perceforest’s six parts is the length of a substantial novel – the shortest is as long as Moby Dick. Realistically, a complete translation is not a publishable proposition, or at least not a purchasable one.

One solution might have been to give a series of lengthy ‘key’ extracts, fully translated, linked by brief synopses; but that would in no way have conveyed the pacing, the subtle development of themes and ideas or the complex interconnection of episodes in a work so intricately and deliberately conceived that no strand is much less important than any other. Instead, this is an attempt to provide a shortened but complete telling of Perceforest such as a medieval scribe might have produced if commissioned to supply a version of the whole romance at less voluminous length. So, although it doesn’t translate every line, this is a complete and detailed redaction of Perceforest, recounting every incident and translating verbatim all key passages and phrases. No event or character is omitted.

Few readers, in any case, would deny that, for all its richness and vitality, Perceforest does sometimes lend itself to abridgement – it would be surprising if a work as long as this did not – and it has not been hard to compress some passages. Journeys, for example – the simple getting of characters from a to b – are often detailed at a length which modern readers would find unnecessary; and the anonymous author has a habit, very odd to the modern mind, of having one character tell another, often in considerable and near-identical detail (and sometimes even in song, in elegant but lengthy ‘lays’), a story that the reader has already heard. Greetings, laments, challenges and expressions of love or praise can sometimes be repetitious, too, as can some of the descriptions of combat: thrillingly vivid though they often are, there is a finite number of ways of describing what happens when two knights joust. Passages such as these, it is probably fair to say, are compressed without too much pain.