The Epic of the Cid, with Related Texts (review)

A new English translation of the Cantar de mio Cid could not have arrived in my life at a more opportune moment. After teaching the Song of Roland in an undergraduate course of medieval European literature in English translation, I decided that for next year I would choose the Cid. The original-language edition that I have always used in Spanish courses is that of Juan Carlos Conde. It includes the text established by Ramón Menéndez Pidal exactly one hundred years ago, along with necessary explicatory footnotes. Opposite the medieval text is a modern prose rendering by Alfonso Reyes from 1919 that is intended to assist readers with the difficult vocabulary of the original. Conde’s informative introduction is aimed at students and nonspecialists, and the appendix includes other medieval Castilian epic texts such as Roncesvalles, Mocedades de Rodrigo, and the Poema de Fernán González, along with various Cidian texts from the Estoria de España and the Spanish ballad tradition.

Upon opening Harney’s English-language edition, I was very pleased to find many of the same features as Conde’s volume. He chose to translate the Cantar de mio Cid as the “Epic of the Cid”, as opposed to “Poem” or “Song” because, as he states in the introduction, it is part of the epic tradition of “The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, or The Song of Roland” (xviii). The chansons de geste are part of an epic tradition that was either sung or recited, so either Song or Epic is certainly preferable to Poem, which implies a literary rather than an oral tradition. The prose translation is easily readable for an undergraduate in the United States, allowing the reader to focus on the plot rather than the difficult vocabulary or the rhyme scheme. On the other hand, the reader does not get the sense of enjoying a medieval text that was part of a Castilian oral tradition. Extensive footnotes are no longer necessary in order to explain the linguistic complexities, but there is still much background information that could have appropriately found its place in this section. Fortunately, the tripartite division into cantares is maintained, but the division by tiradas or laisses is no longer present. Many scholars, such as Matthew Bailey, have stated that we should question the division by laisses and eliminate the caesura in each line, since these characteristics are not present in the medieval manuscript. Most editors have accepted this division based on shifts in assonance. The caesura represents a pause that is also present in the Spanish ballad tradition, an undeniable descendent of the medieval epic tradition.

While a verse translation from a Romance language into modern English is always difficult to achieve, a noteworthy recent attempt has been made by Burton Raffel (Penguin, 2009) in a verse translation that maintains the tiradas without Menéndez Pidal’s headings and includes the original text on the opposite page. For this edition Raffel chose the title Song of the Cid. It is based on Colin Smith’s Spanish edition (1985), and includes endnotes instead of footnotes, which are likely to be overlooked since they are not indicated within the text by superscript. This new translation has replaced the earlier prose translation by Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry. They also included the original epic on the opposite page using Menéndez Pidal’s text, maintaining the division by laisses, and eliminating the headings for each of these. Paul Blackburn’s 1966 edition is a much more literal verse translation that does not include the original text or other useful information for students or scholars.

Although undergraduates will certainly find Harney’s text quite readable, it is a shame that they cannot see it in its original language with the division in tiradas. When we transform a text in such a way it is essential to...