The Chronicle of Pseudo-Turpin: Book IV of the Liber Sancti Jacobi (Codex Calixtinus) by Kevin R. Poole (review)

Beyond its earliest-known copy, the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus. preserved in the cathedral archives of Compostela, more than 200 manuscripts of the Pseudo-Turpin. survive, copied across at least four centuries and translated into most all medieval European vernaculars. The reasons behind its inception and then redistribution are just as varied: to construct a legendary and miracle-laden account of Charlemagne's wars in the Iberian Peninsula, to advertise the great pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, to supply sermon writers with trenchant exempla, to transmit catechism, to source subjects for the visual arts (perhaps most famously in the Charlemagne Window at Chartres), and considerably more. The English translation under review unfortunately renders an often unreliable, dulled-down, and dismissive working-over of the obviously potent Latin original.

Space permits detailed examination of just one example, nevertheless illustrative of endemic problems.

From the seventeenth chapter:

In playing the zither there are three things: knowledge, strings and the hands. However, it is still one zither. In the same way, in God there are three—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—and it is still one God.

(pp. 44-45)

Sicut in cithara, dum sonat, tria sunt, ars scilicet, cordæ et manus, et una cithara est, sic in Deo tria sunt, pater et filius et spiritus sanctus, et unus est Deus.

(155.xxiii–xxv)¹

In the original, initial Sicut. ("Just as," "So as," "As"), sets up a single-sentence simile syntactically and rhetorically appropriate for demonstrating multiplicity in oneness. But the translation—in a form of rhetorical heresy, one might say—breaks one sentence into three. As in many other instances, this deconsecration of the original is exacerbated with a footnote convinced of the medieval author's ineptitude: "Roland's logic is fallacious: God is manifest in three forms that share the same essence—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; knowledge, strings and the hands exist independently of one another, do not share the same essence and taken together still do not form an instrument known as a zither." This remark (which, one might add, denies the eternal reality of the Trinity and commits the Modalist [or Sabellian] heresy), depends upon the isolation of "one zither" into a separate middle sentence, rather than the emphatic qualification dum sonat. ("while it sounds") that governs the single-sentence analogy in the original. To use the translator's own word, the analogy is to the playing. of the instrument, not to the instrument itself, at which point music becomes an apt and beautiful analogy for divine essence. Throughout, one will find similar examples of this near-diffident suppression of the vibrant phrase- and clause-level signification in the original, let alone its role as a reasonably sophisticated vehicle of Christian ministry.

Likewise, the section in the Introduction on "Islam and the Pseudo-Turpin," at pains to stress the work's participation in a defamatory and theologically inept "textual war on Islam" (p. xviii), pays little corresponding attention to a real-world pastoral "war" the original author seems to have known all too well and was attempting figurally to address: that against ignorance or confusion, amongst simple Christians—here ventriloquized by querulous non-Christians—about even the most basic articles of their Faith.

Students of medieval Latin may find the translation a useful control against which to measure their own, and, one can hope, more sensitive efforts. Pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago looking for editorial context regarding the very important devotional aspects of the original might feel more validated if they were to consult the substantial annotations to the detailed and otherwise more neutral English synopsis in H. M. Smyser's edition, freely available online.²