The Fabliaux: A New Verse Translation (review)

Bawdy, irreverent, and often obscene, the corpus of Old French fabliaux has long been the purview of medieval French scholars. With more than one hundred and fifty extant tales in multiple manuscripts, the fabliaux comprise a substantial body of medieval comic literature, but until now only a select few have been available to the wider public. Nathaniel Dubin’s new verse translation, with facing page Old French, redresses that lacuna and offers a scintillating selection of these riotous tales. This beautifully bound volume, complete with black-satin ribbon marker, offers unapologetic translations of the fabliaux, several of which appear here for the first time in English.

Introduced by noted French medievalist R. Howard Bloch, the volume explains the place and significance of the fabliaux in medieval society from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. The fabliaux cover everything from marriage to money lending, preaching to promiscuous priests, and chivalric klutzes to loquacious anatomy. As Bloch explains, these tales are mirrors of society. Both Bloch and Dubin categorize the fabliaux as a misogynist and highly conservative genre, though several critical studies in the last ten years have challenged aspects of that view. Dubin acknowledges the paradox that the fabliaux are rebellious despite their conservatism, but he does not expand on that premise. The fabliaux do, however, as Bloch asserts, provide a rare window into the domestic sphere of medieval life and inflect that glimpse with a certain realism.

In his note to the translations, Dubin clearly outlines his method and his editorial choices. His own edition of the manuscripts is based on the full critical transcription by Willem Noomen, the Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux. At times he disagreed with Noomen’s editorial choices and so made his own, and from that compilation crafted his unique translations. Compared to collections like Fabliaux Fair and Foul by John DuVal, as well as the much more critical translations DuVal produced with Raymond Eichmann from Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 837, Dubin’s translations are often fairly loose, but they are exceptionally funny, capturing the essence of the tales and preserving the humor and raunchy possibilities of linguistic play. He acknowledges that some of his decisions were made to please himself, and for artistry rather than for accuracy. As an example, he offers a verse from Le Foteor (The Fucker), which begins: “Qui fabloier velt, si fabloit, / mais que son dit n’en affebloit / por dire chose desresnable” (vv. 1–3), which he translates as “Let fabulists confabulate; / but tales too fabulous deflate / a fable’s worth and make it feeble” (839). It is not a strictly literal translation but the tongue twisting alliteration is charming.

The translations are, of course, the centerpiece of the collection; having produced nearly one thousand pages of poetry, Dubin can be forgiven for skimping a bit on the textual apparatus. Despite the complexity and textured nature of his translations, his explanations and limited analysis are somewhat one-dimensional. He skips over alternative readings of the fabliaux as parody to focus on the aspect of gritty realism. The explanatory notes are exceptionally brief and cover only references that may be obscure for modern audiences. There are very few secondary citations and the short bibliography at the end includes only three works from this century, barely scratching the surface of current fabliaux scholarship. Dubin does, however, include a very useful list of surviving fabliaux manuscripts, and a map locating the provenance of the extant texts.

The texts are separated into three groups: “The Social Fabric”, “The Comedy of Errors”, and “Sinning, Sex, and Saintliness”. The first section brings together fabliaux that give an overview of medieval life — creation stories, tales on the organization of society, the three social estates, women, family, and then, three final tales on the afterlife. The second deals with trickery and tricksters, upon whom the tables are often turned. The final set focuses on the Seven Deadly Sins, primarily lust and gluttony...