La Chanson de Roland is one of the first great poems of Modern Europe, yet people reading it sometimes ask, “Where is the poetry?” The language does not leap from one
metaphor to the next as in Beowulf. There are no extended similes such as those that delight readers of Homer, Virgil, or Milton; or of Dante, for instance, at the beginning the
Inferno when he describes the struggle to get back onto the right path:
And as a man who, gasping for breath,
has escaped the sea and wades to shore,
then turns back and stares at the perilous waves,
So too.…1
The few metaphors and similes that do occur are pretty conventional. There are some enchanting dream sequences and one lovely pictorial scene—the arrival of Charlemagne’s enemy, Baligant, on the shores of Spain; otherwise, the colorful description is mostly confined to battle gear and battle wounds. The syntax, too, is unadorned and straightforward, with few modifying clauses and phrases. Nothing like the grammatical complexity of the first sentence of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales occurs in La Chanson de Roland. The lines are composed of grammatical units and almost always pause at the end. But poetry there is, in the magic of the storytelling. Instead of poetic adornments, we have poetic compression. The author wastes no time with explanations, but leaves those to the characters, who themselves are not talkative. The story rushes bif, bam, bang, from one line to the next and from one verse-paragraph (or laisse) to the next, sometimes with horrifying violence.
Perhaps the most poetic consequence of this compression is the sense of immediacy. Readers (or listeners) are intimately with the protagonists of each new verse-paragraph. As I was
translating, I felt this intimacy so powerfully that whatever verse-paragraph I was working on impressed me as the most important to get right. The sense of immediacy occurs even with minor
characters. In laisse 193, two Syrian messengers from Emir Baligant ride to the court of King Marsille. These are “pagans,” enemies of Charlemagne and his Christian heroes.
We have no reason to care for them. Yet the compressed verse puts us into such intimate contact with them that we participate with them in their brief journey:
“Ride fast,” says Baligant, “don’t linger.”
Both messengers reply, “Yes, Sire, we will!”
One brother holds the glove, and one the stick.
They ride full speed to Saragossa. Quickly
They pass ten gates and gallop across four bridges
And through the streets where merchants make their livings.
Uphill they gallop through the pagan city,
Approach the palace and can hear within it
The noise of many pagans.… (2631–39)
The poem is composed of laisses, that is, paragraphs of decasyllabic verse ranging in length from five to thirty-four lines. The lines within each laisse should end with the same assonance, and the assonance of each consecutive laisse should differ from the one before it. Almost every laisse is its own episodic unity, and time expands and contracts with miraculous elasticity from laisse to laisse and even contradicts itself in laisses 164 and 165, where Turpin dies, and then Roland sees him alive again, still praying for his soul’s forgiveness; and in laisses 59 and 60, where Roland’s manner of speaking reveals two contradictory natures.
For the translator into English, the problem with assonance is that vowel sounds in English are not consistent. From the town north of Philadelphia where I grew up, all I had to do was cross the Delaware River into Trenton to hear a different ă sound in crab and castle. Translating Roland last year in Cambridge, England, a city populated by speakers of English from several countries and continents, I was all the more aware of English-language vowel inconsistency. Although I have striven for assonance among the last stressed syllables of lines in each laisse, given the diversity of pronunciations in our language, not every assonance will ring perfectly true to every reader. I take consolation in the fact that they don’t all ring true in the original, either, as transcribed in the twelfth-century Digby manuscript at Oxford. Some editors ascribe the occasional faulty assonance to scribal error, but if differences in Old French vowel pronunciation were as common as spelling differences, the author could not count on a widespread readership hearing all the assonances as he heard them. He could, however, count on his readers hearing most of them as his story gathered energy and propelled itself forward from laisse to laisse, sometimes martial in its rhythm, sometimes angry, sometimes elegiac, always poetic. I hope that in this translation into modern English, readers who do not hear the vowel sounds exactly as I do will hear enough that they will sense the poetry not only through the incidents of the story, but also through the sound.
The scribe of the Oxford Digby manuscript (O) marks the beginning of each new laisse with a single large, sometimes elegantly drawn red capital letter and ends a little more than half of
them with the three capital letters AOI. AOIs also end the opening lines of eight laisses. And there are seven divided laisses, where the AOI marks a meaningful place for
the laisse to end, but the assonance continues. The poem was recited or read aloud for an audience. No one knows whether the oral performer actually shouted those diphthonged AOIs, or
whether they are the scribe’s notations of some other aspect of the oral performance: the strumming of an instrument, the banging of wine cups on tables, prayerful amens, or dramatic
pauses in the recitation. Perhaps they are simply the scribe’s creative additions to the poem on the page. No editor or translator that I know of has left them out. The strange and
magical inexplicability of those three uppercase vowels is, or has become, part of the poetry, poetry that, in its own way, pervades the epic.
For this translation, I consulted the editions listed below. Although Jenkins sometimes seems too liberal in “correcting” the O manuscript with variant readings from other sources,
he conscientiously explains his decisions, some of which I adopted. His English-language glossary was very useful for this translation into English, as was the Whitehead/Hemming edition. Joseph
Bédier’s edition was useful to consult for its accompanying, somewhat free, prose translation into modern French. William Calin’s explanatory footnotes in French were very
helpful.
Bédier, Joseph. La Chanson de Roland. Paris: l’Edition d’Art, 1927. Dual language edition and prose translation into modern French.
Calin, William, ed. La Chanson de Roland. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1968.
Jenkins, T. A., ed. La Chanson de Roland. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1924. The Anglo-Norman spellings are edited out and replaced by “standard” Old French spellings.
Whitehead, Frederick. La Chanson de Roland. Revised with notes and introduction by D. T. Hemming. London: Gerard Duckworth (Bristol Classical Press), 1993.
1. Dante, Inferno, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2009), 5.