Le Roman de Thèbes (The Story of Thebes) trans. by John Smartt Coley (review)

I only wish to God that it were night, That night would last for ever and a day, And all these people here had gone away. REVIEWS (cf. MerTl762-64). Most often it is hard to see the point of the technique: A hard-up widow, getting on in age, Once on a time lived in a small cottage. (cf. NPT2821-22). It does not seem possible that one is intended to draw out the second syllable of cottage here to bring out the rhyme; but if not, what is achieved by eye rhyme on an unstressed syllable? I do not want to denigrate this translation, or its author. What has been done has been done conscientiously and worthily: the translations are careful and maintain a high level of accuracy, and there are times, especially in the comic tales, when one can take genuine pleasure in the translator's skill. My argument is simply that translation of Chaucer is not only unnecessary but undesirable, since it does, in the end, a disservice to Chaucer's poetry. DEREK PEARSALL University of York JOHN SMARTT COLEY, trans. Le Roman de Thebes (The Story ofThebes). Garland Library of Medieval Literature, vol. 44, Series B. New York and London: Garland, 1986. Pp. xliv, 240. $40.00. Along with the Roman de Troie and the Roman d'Eneas, the twelfth­ century French verse narrative known as the Roman de Thebes helped to convey the legends of classical antiquity to the later Middle Ages. Thebes begins with a brief retelling of the story of Oedipus and then focuses upon the dispute between the fated king's sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, who become embattled over the question of which of them should rule Thebes. As onewouldexpect, the poem reflects not only the ancient themeof a feud between brothers, but also various medieval preoccupations, including the nature of feudal loyalty and the conduct of love affairs. Chaucer may well have used Thebes (see, e.g., Trot/us and Criseyde, II.100) and the poem is important in its own right. Until the book under consideration here, no 203 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER modern English translation of the whole of Thebes seems to have been published. It must be said that Coley's decision to base his translation on the 1890 edition ofLeopold Constans (Le Roman de Thebes, Paris: SATF, 2 vols.) is disquieting. Constans, working according to the editorial conventions of his time, produced a reconstructed text that he regarded as capturing the lost "original" form ofthe poem. As Coley himselfdescribes it, Constans accomplished this goal "by selecting and bringing together (sometimes in different order) various passages and episodes from the various manuscripts and by adding, deleting, correcting, and changing lines on the basis ofhis conception of the twelfth-century original" (p. xviii). Constans' edition, therefore, is an editorial creation.Modern editors, workingnearly a century later and following the conventions of our own time, have shown an increasing preference for establishing a text according to one specific manuscript, achieving by this method an undeniable authority: such an edition is authenticated by its manuscriptforebear, despite whatever flaws that forebear might contain. (Even its mistakes are genuine, i.e., medieval, ones.) The Variorum Chaucer project, for instance, exemplifies this principle by choosing the Hengwrt manuscript as its basis for The Canter­ bury Tales, rather than trying to editorially reconstruct an "original" Chaucer text. Given this evolution of editorial expectations, one regrets Coley's re­ liance upon Constans-especially in view ofthe fact that a good modern edition of the oldest complete Thebes manuscript, MS C, was known to Coley (Le Roman de Thebes, ed. Guy Raynaud de Lage, Paris: CFMA, 1966-1967, 2 vols.).A partial edition ofthis manuscript was also known to him (A CriticalEdition ofthe "Roman de Thebes, "Lines 1-5394, ed. Dana PhelpsRipley, AnnArbor: University Microfilms, 1960).An explanation of Coley'schoice ofConstans may perhaps lie in the fact that, as he explains, the first half of his translation had been submitted as part of his Ph.D. requirements in 1965 (p. xlii). This would have taken place just before the edition by Raynaud de Lage appeared. It is understandable that in 1965 Coley was...