La Troisième Continuation du Conte du Graal (review)

This volume is a welcome addition to the impressive list of medieval French works now available at an affordable price in bilingual (French) editions. Manessier's continuation of Chrétien's Conte du Graal — the third one to have been composed in the medieval period in verse, hence its being referred to as 'la Troisième Continuation' — brings the main storyline to a close, with a Perceval who completes his quest successfully and ends his life in saintly asceticism. Manessier's text follows seamlessly from that of the so-called 'Deuxième Continuation' attributed to Wauchier de Denain and dated 1205–1210. Wauchier's continuation of Chrétien's narrative is focused on the adventures of Perceval, who eventually finds his way back to the castle of Corbénic, asks the Fisher King the meaning of the wonders of the Grail procession, and manages to repair the broken sword, although imperfectly, thus showing that the hero has not yet attained perfection. Manessier picks up the thread quite literally, as the first sentence of his Continuation is syntactically incomplete without the last line of the 'Deuxième Partie', prompting Marie-Noëlle Toury to include in her text the last fourteen lines of Wauchier's work; the fact that Manessier's poem is a continuation dependent for its full meaning on his predecessor's narrative is also indicated by the line numbering, starting at 32,595 rather than line one. Toury's translation is both clear and accurate, with explicative footnotes signalling textual difficulties and, where necessary, referring back to events recounted in Chrétien or Wauchier. Manuscript variants are listed in an Appendix, as are the rubrics that appear in the extant manuscripts. Moreover, for those readers of the text wishing to focus more on the original medieval French, Toury has provided a useful glossary comprising most of the words likely to be unfamiliar to speakers of contemporary French. The volume ends with an index of proper nouns, including personal names, place names and names of religious feasts. The strength of this volume is that it makes the text accessible to a wide readership, yet at the same time provides the scholarly apparatus necessary for a more academic approach. This is true also of the introduction, which allies intellectual rigour (especially in the section presenting the manuscript tradition of the various verse continuations to Chrétien's Conte du Graal) and accessibility. The book as a whole has been scrupulously proof-read, and it is noteworthy that I only spotted four lines out of over 10,000 where the translation made me pause. Even then, it was merely a case of debating whether isolated words had been rendered by the 'mot juste'. In short, Toury has done sterling work. We can now consider putting Manessier on undergraduate syllabuses.