Retelling
here may be a certain magic in the beginning of a project. In 1998, at a meeting of medievalists, I mentioned to Samuel Rosenberg my long-held desire to create a version in modern English of the story of Galehaut, the Lord of the Distant Isles. Saying this took some courage on my part since Professor Rosenberg had recently published, along with several other scholars, a complete, five-volume translation of the entire Lancelot-Graal, an anonymous early-thirteenth-century series of prose romances, including the Lancelot, concerning the rise and fall of the Arthurian kingdom. He himself had translated precisely that part of the cycle which interested me. Expecting him to follow the tendency of specialists to protect the letter of their texts, I was most happily surprised when he expressed unqualified enthusiasm for a retelling. We both felt that a great love story had been lost to the world, and ultimately he agreed to join me in trying to restore it.
Our first task was to separate the story of Galehaut's ill-fated love for Lancelot from the labyrinthine plot in which it is contained. This was also the first test of our collaboration, since there had to be mutual agreement about which aspects of the tale were essential, which less so, which calling for justifiable elaboration, and so on. Many remarkable characters, impressive speeches, magical episodes had to be excluded. Beyond those decisions lay the whole challenge of finding language that could bring the Galehaut story itself without distortion into the experience of present-day readers. Sometimes this was a matter of the translation of key phrases. When Lancelot sets out for his first knightly adventures, he goes to say farewell to the queen who responds with the conventional phrase "biaux doux amis," which he takes literally as an expression of genuine affection. "Dear friend" should accommodate both possibilities. This translation eliminates a redundancy in the French, biaux and doux both more or less meaning "dear," a change characteristic of a general difference between Old French prose and our English. Sometimes, however, we adopted certain stylistic devices characteristic of the Old French tale and incorporable into modern English narration, most notably the occasional use of "emergent discourse," in which a character's speech suddenly breaks into the narrator's prose with no hint of speech save quotation marks.
In general, our version of the tale eliminates redundancy in language, proliferation of incident and character, and the medieval author's very leisurely manner, natural in thirteenth-century French but unwieldy in modern English. It would, moreover, have been distracting in a narrative conceived to highlight the special, long-overlooked friendship of Lancelot and Galehaut. Underneath the profusion of the medieval tale there is a profoundly moving and important story that demanded to be brought to light for a whole new modern readership. We hope we have done it justice in Lancelot and the Lord of the Distant Isles.
- Patricia Terry
