Lanzelet by Ulrich Von Zatzikhoven (review)

Meyer’s Lanzelet joins several new editions and translations that have appeared within the last twenty years. Most significant for Meyer’s intended readership—scholars and students of medieval literature with limited knowledge of Middle High German (MHG) (xix)—are Thomas Kerth’s 2005 edition, which provided an accurate and highly readable update of Kenneth G.T. Webster’s 1951 English translation, and Florian Kragl’s 2006 MHG text and German translation, the long-awaited update of Karl A. Hahn’s 1845 critical edition. Meyer’s work, however, will appeal to any serious researcher without the relevant language skills by accompanying the MHG text with a line-by-line, side-by-side English translation. The format allows for efficient access to specific passages for study and bilingual citation. Meyer’s brief twelve-page introduction provides information about Ulrich and his sources—although most information remains speculative—the manuscripts, previous editions, and interpretive approaches, as well as a page on Meyer’s principles of edition and translation. Back matter includes notes, a bibliography, and an index of proper names.

Until Kragl, all scholarship used Hahn’s critical edition, which employed Lachmannian principles to reconstruct a text nearest a putative original. Despite the desire to introduce rigor and theory into editing and the hope to eliminate arbitrary and personal taste from the process, Hahn’s edition contains numerous printing errors and unnecessary interventions, lacks full documentation, and is cumbersome to use. A new edition was long overdue and Kragl’s text is thoroughly transparent and reliable. Abandoning hope of reconstructing an original text, however, Kragl provides a normalized diplomatic edition of MS W with side-by-side text from P in instances where the two manuscripts significantly differ and a footer with variants from all manuscripts, other editions, and commentators. Meyer follows Kragl in choosing a normalized W as her primary source, but she attempts to reconstruct a single text via an eclectic edition, substituting readings from P, emendations from previous editors, and new conjectures of her own, e.g. ir in 5667, where she finds W corrupted or incomplete. Unfortunately, an overall rationale guiding her editorial interventions in W is lacking or imprecise. Meyer explains passages with significant emendations in endnotes, where she at times cites decisions of earlier editors, at others what made better sense to her. On the other hand, Meyer’s principles regarding normalization are clear, although she seems not always to follow them. For example, she refrains from normalizing where W omits en- in negation, but adds it nevertheless in 2310, following Hahn. In comparison, readers of Kragl’s edition can become familiar with the peculiarities of each scribe and their interpretive personalities, may assess the scribes’ reliability for themselves, and must contend with the irretrievability of a single original text. Scholars using Meyer’s text must rely on the editor’s decisions in reconstructing a lost original and must seek alternate readings in the apparatus, where relevant.

Meyer provides little information about her principles of translation other than the implication that it is rigorously literal. In deference to her intended readers and despite grammatical constraints, Meyer seeks no more than a two-line discrepancy between original and translation, a goal that she indeed fulfills. The downside of circumscribing meaning units by a line of text, or even a word, rather than natural units, is that a translation can become odd and sacrifice what casual readers would expect of it, an easy read in constructions likely delivered by a native speaker. In some instances, this reviewer had to consult the MHG to comprehend the English meaning. As such, if one simply wishes to read a knightly tale, Kerth’s paragraph form and colloquial style will be more satisfying. Meyer’s line-by-line rendering facilitates research into Lanzelet.

Within these parameters, Meyer’s translation is generally reliable; overly interpretative renderings are rare. Words such as sælde, êre, wîgant, recke, degen, ritter...