8 - Middle Dutch Translators’ Prologues as a Sidelight on English Practice

Summary

THE STORY OF the love between the pagan prince Floire and the Christian Blancheflor was one of the most popular narratives of the Middle Ages. Versions of the tale appear in all major European languages; however, the earliest surviving written version, and the one which seems to have been the most widely disseminated, was in French. The Old French Floire et Blancheflor (c. 1160–70) is the source of the Middle English Floris and Blancheflour (c. 1250); it would also appear to be the source for the Middle Dutch Floris ende Blancefloer, which also dates from the mid thirteenth century. Frustratingly, at least one folio is missing from the beginning of all four manuscripts of the English version, so there is no way of knowing whether the English translator acknowledged his French source in any way, or whether a translator's prologue was included. However, the Dutch version provides an 88-line prologue which reveals the name of the translator and his reasons for making the translation:

Men moet corten ende linghen

Die tale, sal mense te rime bringhen,

Ende te redenen die aventure.

Hets worden herde te sure

Van Assenede Diederike.

Dien seldijs danken ghemeenlike,

dat hijt uten Walsche heeft ghedicht

Ende verstandelike in Dietsche bericht

Den ghenen, diet Walsche niet en connen.

[One must shorten and lengthen the tale, if one is to put it into rhyme, and make it readable. It has become far too bitter for Diederik van Assenede. We should all thank him for having translated it from French into Dutch, correctly and intelligibly, for those who do not know French.]

Whether or not the English translator expressed similar thoughts in the opening lines to the now lost beginning of Floris and Blancheflour, the existence of a translator's prologue in the Middle Dutch translation of the story serves as a timely reminder that the translator's prologue, in the specific context of French > vernacular, was by no means a uniquely medieval English phenomenon. As we have seen earlier in this study, French was a privileged vernacular across much of western Europe, both because of its political power (by 1300, a high proportion of the ruling houses in Latin Europe were Frankish) and through the circulation of a number of popular, often highly regarded literary texts from the twelfth century onwards.