Erec by Hartmann Von Aue (review)

Cyril Edwards’ translation of Erec addresses a significant lacuna in Hartmann von Aue scholarship, providing scholars and students with a reliable text with which to study the very first German courtly romance. What sets Edwards’ edition apart from other translations into English, most notably those by Michael Resler (1987) and Kim Vivian (2001), is that it includes a reconstruction of the Middle High German text on each facing page. This represents an important step for Hartmann scholarship in the English-speaking world, giving access to the original text to a much wider audience, including scholars studying courtly romances in other languages, teachers in English-speaking courses, and students learning Middle High German.

There are many reasons to praise Edwards’ translation. As with his editions of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Hartmann’s Iwein, Edwards demonstrates his mastery of Middle High German. For example, when a Middle High German term is multivalent he carefully selects the best meaning to fit the passage in question, as with his translation of jehen as ‘to aver’ in the scene when the eighty widows in Brandigan make their case for taking leave from the castle. Jehen can mean, among other things, ‘to speak,’ ‘to tell,’ and ‘to promise,’ but Edwards’ choice correctly captures the legal tone that jehen expresses in a courtly context such as this one (9890–9897). Edwards also adeptly handles poetic passages, capturing, for example, the lyrical beauty of Hartmann’s description of Enite’s body: ‘Ir lîp schein durch ir salwe wât / alsam diu lilje, dâ si stât / under swarzen dornen wîz’ (336–338) [Her body shone through her sordid clothes, / white like the lily where it grows/among black thorns]. One can quibble now and then with Edwards’ choice of idioms. He awkwardly translates, for instance, ‘Er reit âne gewant / unde blôz sam ein hant’ (5458–5459) as ‘He rode without clothing/naked as a needle,’ when he simply could have adhered to the original text (‘He rode without clothing / and naked as a hand’). For the most part, though, Edwards creates a readable text that stays true to Hartmann’s tale. He also wisely renders his translation into contemporary English and does not recreate the rhymed couplets of Hartmann’s lyric, thus avoiding the mistake of giving the text an antiquated feel to make it seem medieval. In addition, his choice to use prose that corresponds line for line with the original text on the facing page makes it easy for the reader to locate any given passage in the medieval text and compare it with the English translation.

Edwards’ edition of Erec is innovative. He deals with the complicated transmission history of Erec in a productive way. Unlike many critical editions, Edwards does not follow the practice of nineteenth-century philologists of creating a standardized ‘classical Middle High German.’ Like most other critical editions, Edwards uses the most complete manuscript of Erec as his starting point: the text found in the sixteenth-century collection of tales commissioned by King Maximilian I, the Ambraser Book of Heroes (the A version). He then adapts the sixteenth-century language of A into Middle High German by using the Wolfenbüttel (W) fragments, something he clearly indicates in the margins of his edition wherever he favors version W over version A, and by drawing upon the Koblenz fragment and Hartmann’s Iwein B for vocabulary and orthography. This represents an important move, as these manuscripts contain a Middle High German that is much closer to what Hartmann most likely used when he composed Erec in about 1180. By using thirteenth-century texts as his basis for the reconstruction, Edwards still normalizes the medieval text, but he alters how the original text might have looked far less than his predecessors.

There are some issues with Edwards’ book, however, especially when it comes to aids for new readers of Erec. He does include useful tools...