Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Penguin Classics (1986), Paperback, 144 pages
Description
Marie de France (fl. late twelfth century) is the earliest known French woman poet and her lais - stories in verse based on Breton tales of chivalry and romance - are among the finest of the genre. Recounting the trials and tribulations of lovers, the lais inhabit a powerfully realized world where very real human protagonists act out their lives against fairy-tale elements of magical beings, potions and beasts. De France takes a subtle and complex view of courtly love, whether telling the story of the knight who betrays his fairy mistress or describing the noblewoman who embroiders her sad tale on the shroud for a nightingale killed by a jealous and suspicious husband.
User reviews
LibraryThing member anthonywillard
This is a collection of twelve short tales about the sad or happy love affairs of knights in shining armor and ladies in castles. They were written in poetry in Anglo-Norman (a dialect of Old French) in the mid-twelfth century by a woman called Marie of France. Marie as it turns out is a
Marie claims the Lais were based on Breton stories, though we do not have a corresponding collection in Breton, so it is hard to know how much she translated and how much she made up. But many of the themes are familiar. I generally find this type of literature tedious, but in Marie's case the brevity of each Lai forces the story to move along briskly, so they sustain interest. Also, Marie does not use the same plot twice. Each lay presents a different situation and different characters, motivations, emotions. She rings all the changes on her chosen genre to a fascinating degree. Some end happily, some sadly. Some of the protagonists are heroic or admirable, some not. Some include magical devices, some are totally naturalistic. In some the woman takes the lead, in some the man. So each tale is distinct and individual. The style is bright, crisp, and clean, with a fresh kind of observation of the world. There is refreshingly little moralizing. Though many of the affairs are illicit, she never blames or criticizes the participants, except sometimes for lack of loyalty. The characters are human, not symbolic stand-ins for abstract virtues or concepts. However, there is no character analysis, just observation and reporting. She takes her characters as she finds them.
The translation is in prose, elegant, clear, and simple. Three of the lais are given in an appendix in the original Anglo-Norman. They are written in short lines, rhyming in couplets. There is a scholarly introduction, which one would do well to skip or to postpone reading until after one has read the poems. Much of it would be incomprehensible without prior acquaintance with the lais. Also, though it is not as dry as dust, it is on the dry side. But it will answer any questions you might have about the poet, the origin and interpretation of the poetry, and other background.
This book presents a window on a medieval view of the world. It is the view of a privileged participant, and even so is somewhat a view of a storybook world. I found it intriguing and charming, and enjoyed the collection greatly. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in medieval culture or in important but neglected woman authors.
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significant figure in the literature of Medieval England, one of the best poets before Chaucer. She was very well known in the literary world of her day, which revolved around the court of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. She herself was of aristocratic background, born and brought up in northern France. She is thought to have moved to England as a result of her husband's job, so to speak, which was being a feudal lord. She was remarkably well educated and, in an age when court culture was almost exclusively French-speaking, took the trouble to learn the language of the people of her adopted country, Old English, well enough to translate a book of fables from it into Anglo-Norman verse. The Lais constitute one of her three major works, the others being the afore-mentioned collection of fables, and an account translated from Latin having something or other to do with St. Patrick and Purgatory. Marie claims the Lais were based on Breton stories, though we do not have a corresponding collection in Breton, so it is hard to know how much she translated and how much she made up. But many of the themes are familiar. I generally find this type of literature tedious, but in Marie's case the brevity of each Lai forces the story to move along briskly, so they sustain interest. Also, Marie does not use the same plot twice. Each lay presents a different situation and different characters, motivations, emotions. She rings all the changes on her chosen genre to a fascinating degree. Some end happily, some sadly. Some of the protagonists are heroic or admirable, some not. Some include magical devices, some are totally naturalistic. In some the woman takes the lead, in some the man. So each tale is distinct and individual. The style is bright, crisp, and clean, with a fresh kind of observation of the world. There is refreshingly little moralizing. Though many of the affairs are illicit, she never blames or criticizes the participants, except sometimes for lack of loyalty. The characters are human, not symbolic stand-ins for abstract virtues or concepts. However, there is no character analysis, just observation and reporting. She takes her characters as she finds them.
The translation is in prose, elegant, clear, and simple. Three of the lais are given in an appendix in the original Anglo-Norman. They are written in short lines, rhyming in couplets. There is a scholarly introduction, which one would do well to skip or to postpone reading until after one has read the poems. Much of it would be incomprehensible without prior acquaintance with the lais. Also, though it is not as dry as dust, it is on the dry side. But it will answer any questions you might have about the poet, the origin and interpretation of the poetry, and other background.
This book presents a window on a medieval view of the world. It is the view of a privileged participant, and even so is somewhat a view of a storybook world. I found it intriguing and charming, and enjoyed the collection greatly. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in medieval culture or in important but neglected woman authors.
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LibraryThing member veevoxvoom
Marie de France was a woman who lived in the twelfth century. She is one of the earliest female writers in English literature. Her collection of lais, written in the style of the pre-existing Breton lais, tell stories of knights and ladies, kings and queens, sorcery and love.
Each lai of Marie’s
Marie’s writing is clear and accessible. It doesn’t borrow flowery or obscure phrases, so it’s quite pleasant to follow along. That doesn’t mean it reads like an uneducated person wrote it, however. On the contrary. I found Marie’s lais to contain a lot of complex themes. Even the lais that on the outside read like straightforward fables contain hidden depths. If you don’t believe me, take a look at “Chevrefoil.” That lai turns the traditional theme of a woman so beautiful that several men fight for her on its head.
So for anyone who is interested in medieval literature and the courtly tradition, but doesn’t want to wade through difficult, pompous texts, this is a good place to start.
Each lai of Marie’s
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reads like a fairy tale or a bite-sized portion of Arthurian legend. Arthur does appear in one lai and there is another lai about Tristan and Isolde. But for the most part these are new stories about unknown figures that still take place in that extremely courtly environment we know from Arthurian legend. Courtly love abounds in these poems, as do other values of twelfth-century Britain.Marie’s writing is clear and accessible. It doesn’t borrow flowery or obscure phrases, so it’s quite pleasant to follow along. That doesn’t mean it reads like an uneducated person wrote it, however. On the contrary. I found Marie’s lais to contain a lot of complex themes. Even the lais that on the outside read like straightforward fables contain hidden depths. If you don’t believe me, take a look at “Chevrefoil.” That lai turns the traditional theme of a woman so beautiful that several men fight for her on its head.
So for anyone who is interested in medieval literature and the courtly tradition, but doesn’t want to wade through difficult, pompous texts, this is a good place to start.
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LibraryThing member AnnieMod
Marie de France is considered the first woman known to write francophone verse. Who she was is not really clear (it is not even clear if she is called Marie - even if her lais say so or that she was a woman really). But the current scholarship holds that she was a woman and has some ideas of who
But what is a lai? In the case of Marie, a lai is a short (for some version of short) narrative poem, written in eight-syllable verse. They are an old French form, known and popular before Marie and they are a cousin to the longer romances to come later (which are more collections of adventures than single works). Just like the romances, they deal with heroes and what happens to them although with them being much shorter, they are more stories of things happening to people than of people going on adventures. The shortest of these 12 poems is 118 lines; the longest is 1,184 lines.
The order of the collection is not always clear - there are a lot of partial manuscripts, the order in the surviving ones seems to be almost random so in a lot of cases the editors decide how to order them when they are published. The editors of the Penguin edition used the order of the Harley manuscript (which also contains the prologue) and made a decision to translate the poems in prose.
That may sound weird but it is not unusual - most of the narrative poems, from Antiquity to nowadays, had seen prose translations. And the translations actually read like tales so even if I would have preferred a verse translation (and I may decide to chase one of those at some point), I liked the flow of the stories. Plus when you do not need to try to keep the rhythm, you have more freedom in words and expressions choices that actually fit the poem you are translating.
The poems themselves were not what I expected. There are damsels in distress and heroes but... there are also a lot of people cheating on their spouses and thinking about cheating (and not always being punished about it, especially if the husband was much older than the bride). There is a tale about a werewolf. There was a lot of implied sex (including a maiden who got liked so much by a man that she got pregnant). There are a lot of happy ends and most of the people who do good things get awarded for them but that did not always happen. The heroes usually got the girl but not all of them got to keep her. As with most of the medieval writing I had ever seen, there were usually the moral lessons to be learned by the tales but some of them may not be what you would expect in the 12th century. But there are also tales which end up in a way you hoped they won't ("Les Deux Amants" for example).
I picked up the book because of two of the lais connected to the Arthurian myths: "Lanval" and "Chevrefoil".
"Chevrefoil", which happens to retell an episode of the Tristan and Iseult mythology and is the shortest of the 12 lais, was a bit underwhelming besides the lyrical part somewhere in the middle of it which used the honeysuckle and hazel symbiosis as a metaphor for the love between the two lovers and spent some time expanding on that (thus the title of the lai meaning "Honeysuckle").
"Lanval" went into a direction I did not expect it to go. The knight Lanval gets in love with a fairy lady and because of that he refuses the advances of King Arthur's queen thus getting her very angry at him. When she cannot produce his lover (because she had broken the promise never to mention her), he gets in a real trouble - until he gets taken to Avalon at the end. Apparently this story was very popular and got retold a lot so I suspect I will meet Lanval again while exploring the Arthurian myths development. The poem mentions the Round Table explicitly as well - showing that it had become part of the Arthurian myths by the time the lai was written.
But I am happy that I read all of them and I will probably be returning to them (in a different translation) - I am curious to see how these work in verse even if the prose translation was pretty good.
One more note on the edition: the introduction is very useful for putting things in context, giving you some pointers on what to look for in specific poems... and telling you how the lais end, even when the end is surprising. Which is fine if you know the stories but very annoying if you don't. But it is helpful as a guide before you read them so... I am not sure if I would say to leave it for the end or not - I wish the editors (who are also the translators and wrote the introduction) had split it into two parts - leaving the text analysis and the spoilers for the endings for for the end of the book. But that's a common problem with introductions.
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she may have been ranging from the French Henry II sister to the countess of Boulogne and Marie de Meulan. Based on her writing, she was born in France but spent a lot of time in England (which does not narrow the field of possibility as much as you would expect). Depending on how old a book about her is, you can see different claims about what she actually wrote - the lais collected here seem to always be considered hers but the Fables (translated or composed), "The Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick" and the newly tentatively attributed "The Life of Saint Audrey" had not always been connected to the author of the Lais. And I was thinking that we have a problem in our times with shared names of authors... But what is a lai? In the case of Marie, a lai is a short (for some version of short) narrative poem, written in eight-syllable verse. They are an old French form, known and popular before Marie and they are a cousin to the longer romances to come later (which are more collections of adventures than single works). Just like the romances, they deal with heroes and what happens to them although with them being much shorter, they are more stories of things happening to people than of people going on adventures. The shortest of these 12 poems is 118 lines; the longest is 1,184 lines.
The order of the collection is not always clear - there are a lot of partial manuscripts, the order in the surviving ones seems to be almost random so in a lot of cases the editors decide how to order them when they are published. The editors of the Penguin edition used the order of the Harley manuscript (which also contains the prologue) and made a decision to translate the poems in prose.
That may sound weird but it is not unusual - most of the narrative poems, from Antiquity to nowadays, had seen prose translations. And the translations actually read like tales so even if I would have preferred a verse translation (and I may decide to chase one of those at some point), I liked the flow of the stories. Plus when you do not need to try to keep the rhythm, you have more freedom in words and expressions choices that actually fit the poem you are translating.
The poems themselves were not what I expected. There are damsels in distress and heroes but... there are also a lot of people cheating on their spouses and thinking about cheating (and not always being punished about it, especially if the husband was much older than the bride). There is a tale about a werewolf. There was a lot of implied sex (including a maiden who got liked so much by a man that she got pregnant). There are a lot of happy ends and most of the people who do good things get awarded for them but that did not always happen. The heroes usually got the girl but not all of them got to keep her. As with most of the medieval writing I had ever seen, there were usually the moral lessons to be learned by the tales but some of them may not be what you would expect in the 12th century. But there are also tales which end up in a way you hoped they won't ("Les Deux Amants" for example).
I picked up the book because of two of the lais connected to the Arthurian myths: "Lanval" and "Chevrefoil".
"Chevrefoil", which happens to retell an episode of the Tristan and Iseult mythology and is the shortest of the 12 lais, was a bit underwhelming besides the lyrical part somewhere in the middle of it which used the honeysuckle and hazel symbiosis as a metaphor for the love between the two lovers and spent some time expanding on that (thus the title of the lai meaning "Honeysuckle").
"Lanval" went into a direction I did not expect it to go. The knight Lanval gets in love with a fairy lady and because of that he refuses the advances of King Arthur's queen thus getting her very angry at him. When she cannot produce his lover (because she had broken the promise never to mention her), he gets in a real trouble - until he gets taken to Avalon at the end. Apparently this story was very popular and got retold a lot so I suspect I will meet Lanval again while exploring the Arthurian myths development. The poem mentions the Round Table explicitly as well - showing that it had become part of the Arthurian myths by the time the lai was written.
But I am happy that I read all of them and I will probably be returning to them (in a different translation) - I am curious to see how these work in verse even if the prose translation was pretty good.
One more note on the edition: the introduction is very useful for putting things in context, giving you some pointers on what to look for in specific poems... and telling you how the lais end, even when the end is surprising. Which is fine if you know the stories but very annoying if you don't. But it is helpful as a guide before you read them so... I am not sure if I would say to leave it for the end or not - I wish the editors (who are also the translators and wrote the introduction) had split it into two parts - leaving the text analysis and the spoilers for the endings for for the end of the book. But that's a common problem with introductions.
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LibraryThing member ifjuly
read this over the course of a quiet evening alone with a glass of wine. wonderful. i love sensualists, even if they get religious. reminds me of that one pessoa heteronym, i forget his name, who spends all his poems singing out about how knowing what a blade of grass or a rock IS has nothing to do
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with words or meaning or anything but just being, and its being being near his own. people who sing about that are essential for me... Show Less
LibraryThing member ed.pendragon
The editor and translator of Marie's lais, leading scholars in the field of medieval French literature, have in the best tradition of Penguin Classics aimed to make their subject accessible to the general public. Translating a foreign text, especially a poetic text, is always full of difficulties,
The editor has provided an introduction which contains pretty much all you need to know (and pretty much all anybody knows) about who Marie might have been, the historical background, the literary context and so on. For such a slim volume there is much to engage the reader, whether their interest is in a genuine female voice of the 12th century, Arthurian legend, human psychology, folk tales or just good stories succinctly told.
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but luckily Marie's poems, simple in expression and apparently without artifice, speak as well in translation as in the original. For convenience the 1999 edition prints two of Marie's shorter lais in their original French, and anybody with even just a smattering of the language can follow the gist of the tales and see how accessible the translator has made them. A comparison with the pseudo-medieval version served up by Eugene Mason in the early 20th century is revealing for not only how tastes have changed but how many liberties were taken then with the text.The editor has provided an introduction which contains pretty much all you need to know (and pretty much all anybody knows) about who Marie might have been, the historical background, the literary context and so on. For such a slim volume there is much to engage the reader, whether their interest is in a genuine female voice of the 12th century, Arthurian legend, human psychology, folk tales or just good stories succinctly told.
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LibraryThing member baswood
The lais were short story poems written in old French, probably around 1170. They have been translated in this penguin edition by Glynn S Burgess and keith Busby into modern English prose.
There are twelve short tales here based on chivalry and courtly love and they are utterly charming. Bisclavret
Little is known about the author other than Marie was probably female and she wrote these stories for the English Court, which were all based on Breton (North West France) tales or troubadour songs.
There are twelve short tales here based on chivalry and courtly love and they are utterly charming. Bisclavret
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was my favourite story and possibly one of the earliest tales featuring a werewolfLittle is known about the author other than Marie was probably female and she wrote these stories for the English Court, which were all based on Breton (North West France) tales or troubadour songs.
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LibraryThing member veranasi
If you like fairy tales or weird pomo fiction, read this book. Neither pomo nor fairy tales, the Lais of Marie de France will satisfy you, especially if you are me. I'm going to read all of her works, I've decided. Marie is tons of fun.
LibraryThing member grheault
Marie de France... a woman writer 14th c. -- an automatic must read, and well worth it. Short stories about knights and ladies, evil queens and knavery, originally in a poetic format, easily as entertaining as Bocaccio's Decameron. Fun to read and to re-read.
Subjects
Awards
CCBC Choices (1989)
Language
Original language
French
Original publication date
1190 (circa)
Physical description
144 p.; 7.7 inches
ISBN
0140444769 / 9780140444766
Other editions
Lays of Marie de France and other French legends by Marie de France (Hardcover)